CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
FREE WILL IN A PINBALL MACHINE [Sun, 7-4-21-]
A thought about freedom on this Independence Day: Democracy makes no sense without free will…
As things open up after the pandemic, we get to see vaccinated friends in person. So Quentin and Sue Ryder stopped by to visit us on their way home from a trip. Quentin was daughter Katie’s cross-country coach in high school, back in the 1970s, when there were no sports teams for girls. She was his first girl runner, the only girl on a 22 member team. He said, “I made the announcement for the first meeting, for kids to come out. There was Katie. I didn’t know what to do, but I thought, ‘Why not?’” She won a letter jacket.
That was in an era when Katherine Switzer tried to run the Boston Marathon and was literally, physically pulled off the course. “For her own safety,” they said, “for women’s bodies can’t take the rigors of long-distance running.”
All the coaches in Katie’s high school were men. They had coached only boys. Katie happened to get the one who did not say “No,” the only one who said, “Why not?”
It was a totally random meeting. Katie just happened to be at the right school, because the bishop had moved me there the previous year. Quentin just happened to be the coach of the sport she wanted to play.
It was also an act of total free will, both by Katie and Quentin.
People get so worked up about the randomness of life, how if we’d been a minute or two sooner, a town or two farther along, things would be different. Novelists like Kate Atkinson just can’t get over the randomness of life. [1] There is no free will, these people say. We are just round marbles in a pinball machine. Of course we are, but…
…that is not what free will is about, folks! Of course events are random. Yes, life is all chance. Up to a point…up to the point where we have to make decisions. Then we are controlled not by fate or God or biology or circumstances or political and economic forces, although they all put pressure on us, and shape us, in different ways. At that point, though, we have a choice, and at that juncture, like Robert Frost taking the road less traveled, that choice makes all the difference.
John Robert McFarland
“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” Jean Paul Sartre
1] Atkinson writes so
well, and is well worth reading, but, come on, Kate. You made the “choice” to
write about it.
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