Yesterday, a Religious Experience . . .

An odd feeling came over me yesterday evening as I set out from my home to drive to the liquor store for a sixpack of Fuller's London Pride and then to Ledo's for takeout pizza. I had just been napping and I felt a certain post-sleep detachment from everything around me. It occurred to me that all the things I was seeing — the other cars, the stores, the traffic signals, the people — were sort of like on-screen objects in an elaborate computer game.

I don't know if you have played any of the massively multiplayer online computer games like EverQuest or World of Warcraft, but they have become so sophisticated that what you see on the screen is very much like a slice of life. Items that really have nothing to do with the game itself, such as flocks of birds and sunsets, just appear. So when I saw a flock of birds winging against a stunning sunset, and especially when a low-flying helicopter vectored out of the sunset toward my position on U.S. Rte. 40 W., I thought, "These are like things in a computer game. They don't absolutely have to be here ... but they're here!"

And then I thought, "Just as the on-screen details of World of Warcraft are there only because the author of the game put them there, the 'on-screen details' of real life are there only because God put them there. None of this rich panoply of highly improbable stuff that I'm noticing right now, right at this minute, could possibly be here without a Creator God."

"Couldn't my friends who don't believe in God see that?" I asked myself. "Couldn't they see the whole marvelous world as not having to exist at all? As irreducibly contingent, and not in any way necessary?"

The word "thrownness" came to my mind. It seemed to me as if I had been thrown into a world which itself had been thrown into existence for the sheer love of the game.

Which suggested that God is not at heart as judgmental as he is often cracked up to be. The helicopter I saw was probably a police unit looking for an evildoer who had run away into Patapsco State Park, as often happens in these parts of Baltimore County. But the suspect, the police, the 'copter, and I were all part of the same vast tapestry, the same marvelous milieu, the same sublime scenario.

I thought, "My intuition that God is not all that judgmental would astound my friends who know me as a good Catholic." But I thought, "We humans don't know everything. We try to form a coherent picture of God ... but at the end of the day that picture pales in the face of the pure 'thrownness' of creation."

I realized I was having a religious experience. It was one of awe, and it brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes which I'd not like to have to explain to my not-so-spiritual friends. And it was one that I hope to capture and memorialize through the "thrownness" of this particular blog post!