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‘AND THERE’S ANOTHER ONE!’

Edward Probert, Canon Chancellor (Thursday 23rd September 2004)

From time to time perfectly ordinary events can begin to seem curiously charged, loaded with meaning, because they seem to form a pattern. Professional sportsmen and women occasionally go through periods of form or failure, without being conscious of doing anything differently. It’s commonplace to remark that accidents come in threes.

Since I came to Salisbury five months ago I seem to have had more encounters with old members of my university college than for the previous twenty years. The secretary at the Gatehouse office, with whom I briefly overlapped in April, had been there; in the Big School Room of the Cathedral School are portraits of two eighteenth century bishops who were both Masters of the College; the recently arrived Canon Treasurer is an old college friend; and two of the staff at Sarum College prove to be old members, too.

All of which is mildly interesting, but of no particular account: we aren’t, I think, dealing with a takeover reminiscent of the Midwich cuckoos or the Stepford wives. It’s simply a reminder of the place of coincidence in daily life. Such encounters may have been happening just as frequently ever since I left university, and I may have been unaware of them. Now I am taking note of them, making a pattern out of them.,br>
We humans seem to be comfortable with patterns, and so we create structures to tame the randomness in life. This accounts, among many other things, for the popularity of conspiracy theories and belief in alien encounters. And in religious terms, it also accounts in part for people’s discernment of the hand of God in ‘answers to prayer’, and the idea that things happen because God wants them to. It is possible that this reveals more about us than it does about God. We are the ones who need to see a purpose, who find it hard to live without a pattern.

Yet so much of the way things are is random, and patterns are often artificial, but mentally comfortable. Perhaps it is the trust required to live outside patterns of our own creation which God asks of us. True comfort is to be found in the dynamic relationship with the Lord of all life, not in the refuge of the limits of our own understanding.

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