What was once lost is now found – and hardly for the first time I should say. After a week on the lam, my wallet resurfaced – from beneath a mound of knick-knacks in a compartment of my wife’s car. The discovery triggered not so much a sigh of relief as it did a bemused déjà vu, for this wallet is the most errant of my possessions – as well as the most loyal. It always returns.~
It has left me at airports, on planes, in restaurants and for more than one bartender – though it sits by my side even now. Kind strangers who had apprehended the runaway have on numerous occasions seen fit to reunite us – often before I realized the imp had escaped. As I left for work one morning, I spied the rascal on the city street near my car, where it had opted to spend the night.
~
If I believed in patron saints, most dear to me would be St. Anthony, who I'm told specializes in lost things. And though I’m no longer prone to believe in miracles either, my wallet’s eternal return does strike me as just shy of supernatural, enough for me to place a modicum of faith in its talismanic qualities – and to allow that some phenomena may defy rational explanation.
~
Skeptics would argue that without such faith, I would be less careless and lose my wallet less often – or that when it did flee, I would search for it more earnestly and locate it more quickly. It’s an irrefutable point, but still, there is something comforting, if not consoling, about affirming, or even feigning, belief in the whimsical or fantastic – be it a magic wallet, a healing relic, or a virgin birth for that matter.
~
But why? Maybe believing is a function of sloth - unlike painstakingly retracing my steps, faithfully awaiting my wallet’s homecoming is a walk in the park. Perhaps I was nurtured to believe in miracles – by parents who in my youth managed to orchestrate a few. Or, maybe our species evolved to believe, with natural selection somehow favoring those with a penchant for the transcendental.
~
If so, modern science now explains many of the phenomena our less informed ancestors once deemed supernatural, leaving less room for miracles to maneuver. Regardless, after millennia of seeing our world through supernatural lenses, the impulse to do so may be coded into our collective DNA, compelling us to divine miracles in nooks and naves alike.
~
For skeptics of the metaphysical, perhaps entertaining a space for it is a way to preserve for ourselves a cubby of hope in a cosmos we suspect may be indifferent to our eternal interests. Why ever we hanker, it seems only when certitude in our supernatural brand supplants faith do we trade in our cubbies for cudgels, with predictably bruising results.
It has left me at airports, on planes, in restaurants and for more than one bartender – though it sits by my side even now. Kind strangers who had apprehended the runaway have on numerous occasions seen fit to reunite us – often before I realized the imp had escaped. As I left for work one morning, I spied the rascal on the city street near my car, where it had opted to spend the night.
~
If I believed in patron saints, most dear to me would be St. Anthony, who I'm told specializes in lost things. And though I’m no longer prone to believe in miracles either, my wallet’s eternal return does strike me as just shy of supernatural, enough for me to place a modicum of faith in its talismanic qualities – and to allow that some phenomena may defy rational explanation.
~
Skeptics would argue that without such faith, I would be less careless and lose my wallet less often – or that when it did flee, I would search for it more earnestly and locate it more quickly. It’s an irrefutable point, but still, there is something comforting, if not consoling, about affirming, or even feigning, belief in the whimsical or fantastic – be it a magic wallet, a healing relic, or a virgin birth for that matter.
~
But why? Maybe believing is a function of sloth - unlike painstakingly retracing my steps, faithfully awaiting my wallet’s homecoming is a walk in the park. Perhaps I was nurtured to believe in miracles – by parents who in my youth managed to orchestrate a few. Or, maybe our species evolved to believe, with natural selection somehow favoring those with a penchant for the transcendental.
~
If so, modern science now explains many of the phenomena our less informed ancestors once deemed supernatural, leaving less room for miracles to maneuver. Regardless, after millennia of seeing our world through supernatural lenses, the impulse to do so may be coded into our collective DNA, compelling us to divine miracles in nooks and naves alike.
~
For skeptics of the metaphysical, perhaps entertaining a space for it is a way to preserve for ourselves a cubby of hope in a cosmos we suspect may be indifferent to our eternal interests. Why ever we hanker, it seems only when certitude in our supernatural brand supplants faith do we trade in our cubbies for cudgels, with predictably bruising results.
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