Is the Universe Fundamentally Friendly? 7-24-9

Is the Universe Fundamentally Friendly?

It depends on who you ask. If you were to ask John Nash, the laureate who won the 1994 Nobel Prize in mathematics, during much of his life he would have told you it was not. He spent years tormented by the unrelenting demons of schizophrenia. He believed that every magazine and newspaper was embedded with secret codes from the Russian spy apparatus to its minions placed in North America; certain their goal was to detonate atomic weapons in America. His brilliant mind was distorted by things that were simply not true. A major key for him regaining a useful life was to learn what was real and what was false. He learned to manage his ‘filtered’ thinking and see many things for what they really were. He eventually gained liberation into a useful life that earned him the highest academic honor in the world.

It is easy to say the universe is a friendly place when everything is going our way. This really is no proof of anything. Sometimes things just go our way, admittedly a bit of a stochastic view of life. When someone can say that God has a good plan for his life despite it including a man-made detour through hell, then it would seem such a person has good reason to believe in the ultimate goodness of the universe and its creator. Such was the case with Zbigniew Drecki, a survivor of five and a half brutal years in Nazi death camps. Despite suffering unspeakable loss, tragedy, and torture he was able to filter his thinking in reverse and keep faith and hope alive that Someone benevolent really was in charge, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It gave him the strength to survive. “Auschwitz gave me a complete answer … I became certain that the human power did not exist on earth, that could rob me of my life without the sanction of the Creator. In this hell I always felt protected and guarded by Him.” Drecki found a profound source of benevolent protection, friendliness that could not be taken from him, even in hell. “The panic feeling of fear completely disappeared.”

We may not be called to do hard time in a death camp or go through the tribulation of catastrophic illness, but this kind of trust in the Creator can protect us from a thousand self-made torments in our own minds. It can blunt the trauma of finding a note on the kitchen table from our soon-to-be ex-spouse. It can oblate the sense of freefall that occurs when our boss said our services are no longer needed - immediately. In the ordinary lives that most of us live, we have the choice of believing that God is or He isn’t; that He is everything or He is nothing. What we decide will have all-encompassing implications on whether we view the universe as friendly or not.

In the daily ground of our lives, if observant, we can find many bits of evidence of a friendly universe that can be of inestimable value for those times when a super-nova of chaos detonates in our lives. Collecting this evidence of a gracious universe and a benevolent creator who holds our affairs in His hands can be substantial deposits in our spiritual banks that can spell the difference between overcoming calamity and experiencing serenity and peace or imploding into utter despair and dysphoria.

I recently had the experience of experiencing chaos in the form of a medical emergency while in a distant land. It was necessary for me to have surgery immediately upon my arrival home. What made this a non-frightening scenario for me was a peppering of evidence that I was not alone and that I did not have to depend on my own resources. I did not have to be in charge. I could trust a higher power to take care of my affairs.

I came home late Monday night and on Tuesday morning was able to make a phone call and be seen by a specialist within a couple of hours. There are not many places in the world where that would have been possible. I was scheduled for treatment the following day at a facility walking distance from my house. The surgery was done successfully and my bill was $30, less than the tariff for a single dinner in London. I was granted access to highly skilled people doing very good work at a minimal price. Even the transatlantic airplane journey home was made in an upgraded seat in a premium cabin at no extra cost.

The first several days home found me presented with a variety of splendid meals. I had three repasts of pasta and shrimp with superb side dishes. I also had a couple of meals of fine chicken salad with a variety of tasty side dishes. Another friend fed me just about everything in her house and did a month’s worth of toxic dirty laundry for me. My large refrigerator is filled with fruit and other fine foods I did not pay for. Even the $2000 refrigerator itself was given to me by a good friend last year.

While being fed and fatted, a neighbor cut my grass with his tractor. Another hauled me to treatment. Another brought to the house a fine cheese cake with fruit topping. Others gave me splendid books to read. Another brought me a humorous T-shirt. Dozen’s of e-mail wished me well.

We become what we think. Our personal world’s become what we believe them to be. We have the often-counter productive ability to collect evidence, good or bad, to ‘prove’ our perceptions to be correct. Most psychotherapeutic techniques and many recovery strategies are built on this reality. These techniques are designed to help people weed through the pollution of false thinking and discolored perceptions and come to a grounded clear view of the world and themselves. Perhaps, this is why we are given powerful imperatives in scripture to be careful about what we dwell on in our minds.

The apostle Paul gives one of the most straightforward of these. “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these.” It’s up to us. If we use this one imperative to measure what we load into our minds, we will find that much of what we take in via film, our computer screens, the printed page, the sung word, words of gossip at the fence post or the water cooler, or the evening news on our plasma flat screens is going to give us a decidedly unfriendly and threatening view of the universe.

For years I have warned a number of my closest friends to be wary of what they are taking in via constant exposure to the media and other negative sources. Many of these people are now on a variety of psychotropic drugs, primarily anti-depressants and tranquilizers of various sorts. Most struggle greatly with anxiety and most have forgotten what it to sleep through the night and wake rested. A number now struggle to keep up with the daily demands of life. For many waking itself is a tortured challenge. There is a better way.

The Creator of the universe sent his son with a simple message. “I came that they might have life, and might have it abundantly.” He meant for us to know the world is a friendly place, despite evidence to the contrary. It’s up to us to choose what our world view is going to be. Drecki found a friendly Creator and peace in Auschwitz. The rest of us ought to be able to do likewise.