Letter #102: A Tapestry of Trumpery

Some providence is extra providential.

O Wise One,

So, for the folks at home keeping track of the scoreboard: that’s a “big yes” on divine intention and an “answer not found” on divine intervention. We can’t describe in any meaningful way what it would look like for God to reach into the timeline and “add” an event that “wasn’t there” “before.” But we can be sure, as you say, that whatever happens is threaded into “an unimaginable tapestry in which all that ever was and ever will be ever is.” Turns out what can be is not, in fact, unburdened by what has been.

It does seem, though, like some points on the tapestry make it particularly clear to us how precise the workmanship is. Maybe everything is technically essential, and maybe if we could take the grandest possible view of things we’d see that no moment could ever possibly be other than it is. But from our perspective there seem to be pressure points where, if even the slightest thing were different by so much as a micrometer, we’d be hosed.

That’s why the cosmologists got so spooked when it turned out that if you sprinkled the universe with even a dash less gravity, we’d all just be a fine spray of quark dust. Maybe the recipe for nonna’s special knishes is no less carefully calibrated than the balance of charges in a Hydrogen atom. But it sure feels like if you mess with one of them you just get indigestion, whereas if you mess with the other you get the bombing of Hiroshima.

This is important for our orange friend, since if he’s going to go around asking what God wants of him he’s going to need some starting points to work from. And the experience of life from his perspective is going to one of those starting points. It has to be, and God knows it has to be. Which means it’s a safe bet he wove the tapestry so that our experience of it is meaningful.

In other words: I doubt it’s lost on God that from where we’re sitting, Trump’s current survival stats look particularly near-run and hard-bought. Some of the letters written on the sky are too large for our eye to take in, but others are just the right size for us to read.

And that means matters of divine intention are also matters of human interpretation. In the days of Jesus a literal voice came out of the sky and literally declared God’s glory. I doubt it stuttered. Hard to see how God could have gotten more specific, but some people still just said, “eh, it was thunder.” They didn’t know to listen for a voice—maybe they were determined not to—so they didn’t hear it.

I take from this that you can always give a natural explanation for improbable things. But it might not be the best one, or the one with the information you need.

Love,
Spencer