George Takei did it wrong.

Please! if you're going to bother making a written argument (or written inflammatory statements?) then 1.) think and 2.) proofread.

We all think that some of the George Takei Facebook posts are funny. I personally found this one very amusing to the point of LOLing. But if he, or whoever made this, is trying to show support for gay marriage then perhaps he needs an editor.

I admit the original quote is witty. But then the "graphic designer", through conscious or subconscious sabotage, added a seemingly innocent set of quotation marks and became my inspiration for all future posts. I agree with George. Rather than using the misnomer, gay marriage, as if it's an actual type of marriage, I will from now on refer to it as "marriage" to make it clear that I'm not referring to sacramental marriage. Thanks George!

I can't blame the second post on George but the logic is obviously flawed. First of all, clearly this post is not meant to provide a well-reasoned statement.  I think a more likely motive is to make all religious people seem irrational and of the opinion that everyone in the world, regardless of their personal beliefs, should be required to follow the teachings of fill-in-the-blank religion. Maybe the implication is that such people claim all sin should be illegal, in which case we should all get ready for our incarceration! But we could make equally reasonable FB flair that says: CLAIMING THAT SOMEONE ELSE MISSING MASS ON A HOLY DAY OF OBLIGATION IS AGAINST YOUR RELIGION IS LIKE BEING ANGRY AT SOMEONE FOR EATING A DONUT BECAUSE YOU'RE ON A DIET. Hahaha, that one's funny too!!! We could teach the catechism this way!

But even if my thinking were muddled enough to mistakenly claim that someone else's marriage is against my religion, a simple statement does not imply anger. Unless we're talking about a specific angry person, then claiming that someone else's marriage is against your religion is not like being angry at someone for eating a doughnut because you're on a diet. If I, a Catholic, say that gay marriage (oops, I mean "marriage") is against Islam is that a display of anger? Probably not. So a more logical statement would be CLAIMING THAT SOMEONE ELSE'S MARRIAGE IS AGAINST YOUR RELIGION IS LIKE CLAIMING THAT DOUGHNUTS ARE AGAINST THE ATKIN'S DIET.

Sadly, we seem to have forgotten that it's possible to disagree without anger or hatred.

And I'm not an expert theologian, but I don't know about marriage and civil ceremonies being against any religion. The post is mistakenly equating marriage with homosexual sex. So if we correct that mistake we're left with:

CLAIMING THAT HOMOSEXUAL SEX IS AGAINST YOUR RELIGION IS LIKE CLAIMING THAT DOUGHNUTS ARE AGAINST THE ATKIN'S DIET.

But wait wait wait.... I know we've all heard the cliche "that's against my religion!" but it makes no sense in this situation. Communism is against my religion, if I'm living under a Communist regime and can't lawfully practice my religion. But is being a sinner against my religion? You see.... at least in my Church, we have this thing called Confession through which you can receive something called absolution. But this sacrament is only available to sinners... so I'm gonna say no. So in order to make any sense of this thing we have to change it to:

CLAIMING THAT YOUR RELIGION TEACHES THAT HOMOSEXUAL SEX IS A SIN IS LIKE CLAIMING THAT THE ATKIN'S DIET DOES NOT ALLOW EATING DOUGHNUTS.

Well yes. I can certainly agree with that.

I think we should try to remember that noting the existence of religious bigotry and homophobia is not an argument supporting gay marriage, just like being grossed out by gay sex is not an argument against it. It says nothing about the actual issue, which is the fundamental question, "what is marriage?" and "how should it be legislated?" 

Must we continue to dehumanize each other by insisting that every person opposed to gay marriage is a homophobe? I'm not saying that homophobes don't exist. But I do believe that it's possible to disagree with a person without being afraid of their view. Let's say my husband wants to paint our house blue but I think that all houses should be painted white and I feel that our Home Owner's Association should uphold their rule that all houses in the community will be painted white. Does that make me a chromophobe?

So, for the sake of my own sanity, I'm going to help these people out a little bit. The following are some actual arguments. I don't agree with them, but at least they address the actual issue of marriage legislation and the definition of marriage. Of course they should still be backed up with thinking and proofreading.

1.) Romantic love, sexual attraction, and economic interdependence are each, on their own, sufficient conditions for marriage.

2.) Morals are relative so any legislation must be based on something else.

So George, here are Calvin and Hobbes doing it right:

Aurora: A New Witness to God

(Aurora Borealis, Frederic Edwin Church, 1865 at Smithsonian Art)

First saw the Northern Lights. My eye was caught by beams of light and dark very like the crown of horny rays the sun makes behind a cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I saw that these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating thrown out from the earthline. Then I saw soft pulses of light one after another rise and pass upwards arched in shape but waveringly and with the arch broken. They seemed to float, not following the warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do but free though concentrical with it. This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journal Excerpt September 24, 1870

Convo with my sexually active Imaginary Friend.

On Friday a couple of real life friends and I went to the Rally for Religious Liberty in Baltimore. (Let's all take this moment to laugh about Eddie Izzard's plan for a Reason Rally. "HAHAHAHAHA!!! That's right, you sheep!! Only a STUPID IDIOT could believe in God. Baaaaaaaa!!!" Atheists are so funny.) It got me thinking--without the use of reason, of course, because I threw that out with my conversion--about the HHS mandate and why I think it's such a bad thing. The following is the conversation I had with my sexually active Imaginary Friend (IF) who so generously offered her undivided attention.

IF: so after reading your last post it seems like you think that everything you and your church think is a sin should be illegal, right?

Me: no, no, no, that's not what I meant at all! I don't think sodomy or oral sex or masturbation or anything like that should be illegal. If every sin were against the law, sooner or later we'd all be in jail.

IF: then why are you so upset about the HHS mandate? You don't think the use of contraceptives should be illegal?

Me: no! even Pope John Paul 2 acknowledged that some women have medical reasons to take what we refer to as the birth control pill for hormone therapy. There is nothing wrong with using a drug for serious medical reasons. And although the Church says that using condoms or undergoing voluntary non-medical sterilization is wrong, nobody is trying to make these things illegal. The Pope might not think you should be having sex in the first place, but nobody thinks you should be thrown in jail for it.

Me: things get more complicated when we talk about using the birth control pill for contraceptive reasons because studies show that it can work as an abortifacient, which means conception may have taken place but the egg was then flushed from the woman's system, making birth control pills similar to the morning after pill. If you believe that life starts at conception then you see this as an abortion and the killing of a baby. But regardless of when you think life begins, it's clear that terminating a pregnancy even at the earliest moment quenches the potential life that began to exist at the moment of conception.

Me: But the point is that nobody should be forced to help another person do something immoral.

IF: but, what if we think you're being dumb in saying that women shouldn't use contraceptives? Why should we have to go along with it?

Me: well, what if? What if I think it's dumb that Judaism doesn't allow people to eat pork products. What if the government were to mandate that all cafeterias must sell pork? And refuse to make an exception for Jewish organizations that employ non-Jews or even serve non-Jews?

IF: but the Obama administration made an accommodation!

Me: the accommodation allowed the organizations to fund the unconscionable services indirectly rather than directly by forcing insurance companies to pay for the service. That's still unconscionable. What if we told our Jewish friends from the above example that they would have to provide pork in their cafeteria but they could contract out to a non-Jewish company? That's more insulting than it is a reasonable solution.

IF: but what about all the non-Catholics working for Catholic organizations?

Me: as one of my friends said, "would you accept a job with PETA and expect them to hand out free hamburgers?"

IF: but come on, we're not talking about pork and hamburgers here. We're talking about women's health. That's more serious.

Me: It is a matter of women's health! Birth control pills are actually dangerous to a woman's health, from side effects that I've experienced firsthand including rampant UTIs and deterioration of vision and increased blood pressure to more serious effects including blood clots and cancer, not to mention the fact that many women have a hard time regaining fertility after long term use. But that's beside the point.

Me: as a woman there are many things that are more important to me than being able to have consequenceless sex. Like being able to see! For example, the government could choose to mandate that I have access to free contact lenses. That would be awesome. And nobody thinks wearing contact lenses is immoral. If we can't cover everything, why insist on covering something that some people feel is immoral?

IF: yeah, but you don't need contact lenses. You could just wear your glasses. Women need contraceptives.

Me: I can see better with my contacts than with my glasses! And besides, women can use Natural Family Planning which, admittedly, requires some level of self control but has been shown to be as effective as the pill--and has no side effects!!

IF: but Obama says that the money women spend on contraceptives is money that could be spent on groceries or rent.

Me: So Obama feels that poor women are so addicted to sex that they would rather be evicted or stop eating than abstain from sexual relations? I find that offensive. And is it really that hard to find cheap or free contraceptives without this mandate? Surely it's not only in academia where we're having free condoms thrown at us from every direction? I was under the impression that women can get free birth control and morning after pills from clinics like Obama's beloved Planned Parenthood.

IF: I don't see why you're making such a big deal out of this. It's hardly going to effect anybody.

Me: It's a huge deal! As soon as the government forces one group, not matter how small, to do something that they believe is morally wrong then we can never use that argument against unjust laws. At the Rally for Religious Liberty, Ambassador Alan Keyes gave the example of pre-Civil War laws requiring anyone who has knowledge of the whereabouts of an escaped slave to take action to return that slave to his or her owner. People disobeyed that law for the same reason that many organizations will disobey the mandate, because following it violated their consciences. It's not just a Catholic problem. Many Protestant Pastors and Rabbis participated in the rallies. This is the sort of precedent that should make even a secular atheist nervous. And that is why the case of HHS vs. Florida will be heard by the Supreme Court this week.

IF: Well. My birth control pills are more important to me than your conscience.

Me: Sigh. You and Obama have made that abundantly clear.

Do words have meaning?

The gloating of liberal Marylanders over Governor O'Malley's epic cave to political pressure regarding gay marriage has forced me to turn the brain back on for some thinking.

A while back I watched a documentary called For the Bible Tells Me So, which questioned whether or not the Bible says anything about committed homosexual relationships. The conclusion was either no or probably not. However, I've since graduated from amateur documentary-level theology to the "I would believe anything this man ever said even though I don't have to" theology of Blessed John Paul II. His seductively beautiful Theology of the Body paints the picture of the human family with father, mother and child as the image of the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit. Essentially, the love between the Father and the Son and between the father and the mother is so intense that it is procreative and personified by the Spirit and the child respectively.

Thus Christian theology insists that the link between human sexuality and fertility should not be severed as it has been by the use of birth control and by homosexual relationships. From the image of the Trinity comes the definition of the Sacrament of Marriage. So it should be obvious why a Catholic would say that the proposed gay marriage is a radical redefinition of marriage in that it no longer has anything to do with procreation. I know! Such intolerant bigotry to insist that words have meaning. By the way, when I use the term Catholic here, I mean someone who believes what the Church teaches, rather than those who claim to be devout Catholics and yet apparently don't believe the moral and theological teachings.

Now I know that the push for gay marriage comes from a place of love. But rather than providing a means of acknowledging a loving relationship between adults, which by itself doesn't constitute marriage, the goal of gay marriage is to legitimize gay relationships. Often when women feel that we are being denied the respect we deserve in a male-dominated environment, we strive to be one of the guys. But we soon face the consequences of jamming ourselves into a male mold rather than insisting our femininity be recognized and respected. Today, it seems we feel that jamming gay people into the straight person mold will somehow make homosexuality more palatable. On the one hand, same sex couples are being told to embrace their homosexuality, while on the other hand they are being told that they need to be more like heterosexual couples in order for their union to be acceptable. Unfortunately, there will be sad consequences because such an approach does not respect the dignity of same sex attracted persons and further degrades the integrity of the family. As someone who was raised by my mother and grandmother, I can tell you that two moms will never make a dad.

If marriage is to be founded solely on feelings of love between two individuals and, in particular, on sexual love, then limiting the redefinition of marriage to gays is a great hypocrisy. If gay marriage is okay then why not polygamy? And why can't I marry my brother like the monarchs used to? When incest exists between two consenting adults should it be contractualized through marriage? I cannot think of a reason for supporting gay marriage that would not also apply to a happy, incestuous couple. And, based on the current logic, if anyone thinks that brother and sister shouldn't be married then he or she is apparently an intolerant bigot, because it's their civil right! Might Cardinal O'Brien be right in saying that we experience "intolerance behind the mask of tolerance"?

The redefinition of marriage strips the word of any definitive meaning. Maybe we feel that it's okay to redefine marriage because we no longer feel that heterosexual marriage has meaning. Maybe we feel that it's just an optional civil contract between two cohabiting adults. In which case, shouldn't we reclaim the true definition of marriage rather than continue the process of rendering it meaningless?

Saturday with MC Sisters, Jeremy and FrC.

Last Saturday I went to the Missionaries of Charity (MC) house in Baltimore (they're the Mother Teresa nuns*) to meet my friend Jeremy before heading to the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen (CMOQ). Jeremy suggested I come to the MC morning mass and help make breakfast, so I got up at 4:30 to make it in time for the 6:30 mass. The building is in a not-so-good part of town but I figured any murderers would be sleeping in on Saturday like everybody else.

Probably because of their vow of poverty, the chapel is decorated more like a dorm room than a typical chapel, with sparkly curtains and clip-outs. There were a few old pews and some chairs for guests and the Sisters kneel on the floor. I was last in the Communion line and got to make an awkward scene when the priest ran out of communion wafers and we all waited while he got another from the tabernacle. This was the first time I took communion directly on my tongue. Usually I take it in my hand. I opened my mouth like I do at the doctor's office, hoping I didn't have bad breath or any spittle in there, and waited while one of the Sisters held some mirrored plate thingy under my chin. This is a safeguard to catch Jesus in case the priest and I somehow manage to flip the consecrated host out of my mouth, which is not outside of the realm of possibility with me. But fortunately it landed on my tongue and stayed there.

It turns out that two girls regularly volunteer to make breakfast on Saturdays so I was out of a job. Instead I chatted with some of the guys who live there. The sisters board and care for sick, poor people with nowhere else to go. One of the guys was telling me about the bedridden African American resident named Barry White and he got a kick out of the fact that, "I have a friend who's a white girl and her name is Carrie Black!" Later I got put to work sweeping and mopping floors. Before we left, the head Sister gave me some awesome Mother Teresa prayer cards.

After driving in circles and spending 20 minutes for what should have been a 5 minute trip to buy the nuns some ginger, we spent a couple of hours at a sandwich shop talking about catholicky things and probably drawing all kinds of attention. I especially wondered what that guy must be thinking who interrupted our conversation to get some napkins. Knowing my conversations with Jeremy it was probably about the Holy Spirit and/or demons.

Eventually we made it to CMOQ which is an amazingly beautiful cathedral with statues of various saints. We knelt in front of St. John Vianney and prayed for about an hour, asking him to pray for various intentions for the church and priests. We asked so much of poor John Vianney that we decided we should perform a penance and both thought that giving up coffee might be good. This is something that I needed to give up anyway. I'll be giving about a zillion presentations within the next two months and misguided people are always trying to help by finding me a laser pointer, which makes it impossible to hide the nervous trembling. I don't need to go supplementing that with coffee jitters! Jeremy suggested no-coffee Tuesdays and Fridays, the days that people traditionally meditate on the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary, but I figured I should be able to live without coffee. We'll see how that works next time I have to sit through an hour-long seminar talk.

On the way in to CMOQ, I had rashly proclaimed that there must be a pelican icon somewhere in this church and felt very smug when Jeremy found it. This is a popular image in Christian art based on a legend that the mother pelican will pierce her chest with her beak to feed her babies blood during times of famine. Halfway through our time there, someone came in for organ practice so our prayers were drowned out by ridiculously loud, repetitious organ music to the point that Jeremy said "how can he practice for so long?" and we decided it was our cue to leave.

After CMOQ, I called FrC. Amazingly he had a couple of hours available which is unheard of so, since he's one of my favorite people in the world, I stopped by to visit. We decided this was a good time to enroll me in the Brown Scapular Confraternity, but first I waited in the church while FrC ran off to get a jacket because he was convinced I was too cold. He came out with a huge black leather jacket that fit me pretty much how one of my jackets would fit a baby. My hands were completely lost in the sleeves. I hope the Virgin Mary liked my new look! Then FrC made what could have been a five minute formality into a half hour beautiful and prayerful ceremony which almost made me cry several times. When we were done he hugged me and said he's so proud of me so, of course, as soon as I left I totally cried in the privacy of my own car. Sigh, so much for my stoic exterior!

*Note: Consecrated women who are not fully-cloistered monastics are referred to as Religious Sisters rather than nuns, but most people are more familiar with the term nun.

Sexual Catechesis with Sarah.

So I have fallen in love with a sixty-something-year-old priest. Relax people. I'm not talking about a scandalous love. I just mean that he's one of my favorite people in the world right now. Really I happen to have nonsexual crushes on several priests, but there's only the one with whom I have an actual relationship. He runs the prison ministry that I joined a while back. This guy has recently been given greater responsibilities at a local parish (their pastor is near retirement) which has put him in contact with a lot of young people. Apparently, the current sexual climate is quite shocking to someone who has lived in the cave of prison chaplaincy for the last several decades. So I have spent several hours filling him in on what is 'normal' among today's youth. These discussions have highlighted how counter-cultural, and almost wholly misunderstood, the Catholic teachings really are. So here it is, for the record, Sarah's sexual catechism.

And to anyone who finds it boring: Amuse yourself by imagining me explaining to this poor man why couples look at him like he has five heads when he suggests that periods of voluntary sexual abstinence can strengthen a marriage.

We can start with recognizing that Christians believe that humans are made in God's image. Part of why Christians believe in a triune God is the theology that God is Love and that love requires both a giver and a receiver and, therefore, more than one person. So the giver and the receiver are called the Father and the Son (labels that help us lowly humans understand the relationship between them). Then taking it one step further, the love that exists between them is tangible enough to be personified in the Holy Spirit. Christians believe that God's love is creative. God created humans to receive and respond to His love--something that makes no sense unless He also gave humans free will. This is one way that humans are made in the image of God, in having the ability to love.

But why did God create humans in his image? As St. Peter Chrysologus said, "He has made you in his image that you might in your person make the invisible creator present on earth." Pope John Paul 2's Theology of the Body is so important because it reminds us that the sexual teachings of the Church stem from theology rather than bigotry and conservatism, although there may be no lack of poorly catechized Catholics who believe the teachings for bigoted reasons. In his Theology of the Body, rather than simply proclaiming that homosexual and premarital sexual relationships are disordered and evil, John Paul 2 explains how christian theology calls us all to be reflections of the divinity. The Catholic Church teaches that this manifests in one of two ways: through the celibate as a reflection of Christ or the family as a reflection of the Holy Trinity. Anything else fails at making 'the invisible creator present on earth'.

A Reflection of Christ: Priests and Religious (nuns and monks), who make vows of celibacy, strive to make the invisible Christ visible by 'crucifying' their sexual urges and forgoing the option of having a family in order to live a life of complete service to others. It's meant to be a life of complete sacrifice. This is one of the reasons Roman Catholic Priests don't get married anymore, because they can't make a complete sacrifice while also adequately supporting a family. The ideal Priest gives his life in complete service to the Church, relinquishing any worldly attachments.

In the words of the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen, "Unlike anyone else, Our Lord came on earth, not to live, but to die. Death for our redemption was the goal of His sojourn here, the gold that he was seeking. He was, therefore, not primarily a teacher, but a Savior. Was not Christ the Priest a Victim? He never offered anything except Himself. So we have a mutilated concept of our priesthood, if we envisage it apart from making ourselves victims in the prolongation of His Incarnation."

A Reflection of the Holy Trinity: Catholic family theology is oversimplified when it is expressed simply as go forth and multiply, a la every sperm is sacred. That sort of oversimplification is what leads to hot-and-bothered proclamations that Catholic sexual teachings constitute an archaic insistence that the only purpose of sex is to fulfill the marital duty of having as many babies as possible before menopause sets in.

The bigger picture is that the family is meant to reflect the divinity of the Holy Trinity. Human procreation is a reflection of the creative love of God. As we say in the Mass, from the Nicene Creed, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son. So proper sexual love is creative, i.e. regular heterosexual sex. Fertility can't be held back and contained but needs an outlet, and the proper outlet is procreation. Putting a cork in the bottle to try and stopper the procreative element of human sexual love by using contraception or birth control is unnatural and dangerous, and also not a reflection of the divinity. Properly, this creative sexual love is permissible only within the stability of a sacramental marriage.

The sexual act is meant to bring two partners into closer communion with God and each other, in other words the two become one flesh, and therefore should always be a holy act that is free from lust and raunchiness or even detached boredom or a sense of duty. In fact, spouses are not meant to participate in obligatory, joyless sex. Jesus said that he who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his heart. That means that a person can even commit adultery with his/her spouse by allowing lust to enter into their relationship. Note that it is possible to have passion without lust. Lust in a relationship detracts from the dignity of one or both partners.

Therefore, heterosexual couples are not given a get-out-of-celibacy-free card which permits any form of sexual debauchery so long as it occurs within a marriage. The sanctity of marriage demands that all sexual acts are sacramental in nature. This is really difficult to live up to. Marriage isn't the easy and fun path that you take if you're not good enough for celibacy. Marriage and celibacy are different but both extremely difficult ways of making the invisible creator present on earth.

What about a regular non-married Catholic who hasn't taken an actual vow of celibacy? Oh yeah! Like me. What about me? Single people are expected to master our bodies and protect our purity and love others in a nonsexual way. If one takes ownership of sexuality and refuses to be ruled by it, it is possible--gasp!--to live without sex. And in light of the above theology, it's the only way.

So these are the teachings. Does this mean that an unmarried Catholic, regardless of sexual orientation, will never have sexual relations? Obviously not. But should an unmarried Catholic try to live a life of chastity? Absolutely! As GK Chesterton said: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” If one does not have the courage and fortitude to strive for the ideal, then why bother?

So it seems that at one end of the spectrum we have the Catholic ideal of sex as a sacramental act of inherent nobility. And at the other end we have sex as merely an animalistic physical urge--no more serious than a desire to eat junk food--that is so trivial that we find no fault in a man pleasuring himself with a vacuum cleaner. When given a choice between "Honey got a booty like pow, pow, pow; honey got some boobies like wow, oh, wow" and "Stern as death is love, relentless as the nether world is devotion; its flames are a blazing fire" I pick the latter.

Coincidentally wondering about Divine Providence.

So on the way to Dunkin Donuts today I remembered a friend mentioning A Prayer for Owen Meany, with regard to Divine Providence, when I last saw her. I had also recently been thinking of that book in the same context. A divinely providential conversation about Divine Providence? Well. I don't know about that. I think this is a Tootsie Pop situation of "The world may never know."

Spoiler Alert: A Prayer for Owen Meany I admit that I don't remember the details of the book so well. Some of the following might be a little wrong, and I always thought that the whole virgin-birth-of-Owen-Meany thing was pretty messed up. But the book is a great example of Divine Providence because you see the God factors, for example, the small size and high-pitched voice which end up fitting perfectly into God's plan, and the things Owen feels driven to do, like learning how to swim so well. Then there are the gifts that Owen cultivated through his own free choice, like learning to speak Chinese. All of these factors come together in Owen's miraculous saving of the Chinese children which ends up costing his life.

Divine Providence is sometimes hard to wrap a Catholic head around since we're all suppose to have free will. How do we both have free will and participate in Divine Providence and fulfilling God's Will? This is the idea of the constantly working God who is always and everywhere. Obviously sometimes we do bad things and can imagine God tweaking future circumstances so that everything still works out. We can also imagine God tweaking circumstances around us to coax us into making a certain decision. The decision was still made freely but is in accordance with God's Will. Discernment is the practice of asking God's opinion and willfully trying to figure out which decisions are the best in His eyes. We can still then go and do something different, although perhaps we shouldn't. But often we're left to our own devices. Someone decides to study Chinese instead of Spanish. Who would think such a decision would play a role in Divine Providence? But the constantly working God might use the fact that he/she chose to take Chinese to fit this individual's piece into the perfect position in God's puzzle.

People say that this universe is so uniquely perfect for supporting life that there must be some sort of intelligent creator. I've read the counter argument that this world wasn't 'created' because there's really an infinite number of universes and we just happen to be in the one that supports life. Then there's the idea of alternate dimensions (like that tv show Sliders) where another Sarah is living a completely different life. Actually, an infinite number of Sarahs are living all of the possible combinations of lives. Well, in reality, God sees the infinite number of possible lives I could live. At every moment, the free choice I make narrows down the number of possible ways my life can play out. I guess infinity can't be narrowed down, but rather some options would be eliminated. Then the constantly working God tweaks the parameters he has control over, which includes everything but the human free will which is His irrevocable gift to humanity. At each particular instant in time, God works everything toward my eventual salvation. It's like a gigantic feedback loop where God provides the input parameters. He lets us do whatever we're going to do and then tweaks the next set of inputs in response to our actions. Very much like the PID controller in instrument electronics which provides a present input based on the past, present, and estimated future errors of the system.

To every other person who has ever lived, God has given His full attention and dedication to his/her salvation. Good thing there are an infinite number of possibilities because this is obviously an infinitely complex system beyond human understanding. The Christian's job is to keep trusting even when things don't seem to make sense and everything seems to be going wrong--even when there is so much injustice in the world that the only hope for some people is a Just Judge who works everything out on the timescale of eternity. If you believe that God is Love then it's like Thomas Merton says in the YouTube video Merton Renunciation contemplation 9 9 09, "Love is love. And you let it be love. That's all."

In our own lives we sometimes sense inklings of Divine Providence at work. The question is always, is a coincidence just a coincidence? I used to scoff at the insistence that there's no such thing as coincidence and still catch myself thinking "Get a grip!" when people describe some mundane thing ("Wow! We both wore red shirts today!") as evidence of Divine Providence. But sometimes something especially coincidental, like my trip to Mount Carmel, gives me pause. If I let myself, I just might find myself thinking, "It is the Lord."

The following as an awe inspiring story of one woman's experience of Divine Providence:

Divine Providence or Coincidence