Ruminations on Contingency
[“Contingency. Meaning subject to chance, not absolute. Meaning uncertain, as reality, right down to the molecular level, is uncertain. As all of human life is uncertain. . . .God is given over to matter, the ultimate Uncertainty Principle. . . .what a relief it can be to befriend contingency, to meet God right here in the havoc of chance, to feel enduring love like a stroke of pure luck” (“Sorrow’s Flower,” Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014, 16-17, EA).]
O Lover,
As as child I repeatedly wondered what it would be like not to be. Beneath the answer that filled me with dread (“nothing”), there was lurking the precarity, occasionally the terror, of a state based entirely on random chance, on total arbitrariness, on mere luck. Amid graduate studies I would gain a word for this vulnerability: contingency. However, the abstract and cerebral aura of this term never excised its existential claw from my innards: I was, apparently, but need not have been; I was ontologically unnecessary rather than absolute. That I was could not be attributed to my agency, the stratagem of another party, or blind ontological caprice. Alas, I was but a cosmic toss of the dice, the concretion of pure and (seemingly) arbitrary chance. To be contingent was to have been, in the terminology of Heidegger, “delivered over,” indeed, “thrown into being,” when the opposite state could just as well have been. And finally, rather than mere hazard, prospect, or possibility, contingency itself was not subject to contingency, but was rather a horizonless and exceptionless ocean in which all creatures were awash. Tellingly, the fevered certitudes brandished in such a sea were themselves mocked by contingency.
You, on the other hand, could neither not have been nor be subject to chance. Unlike all creatures, You were no more beset by the vagaries of contingency than by the temptation to absolutize us via fiat. You were, it seems, ontologically necessary, and both amid and beyond the realm of this and that. Thus understood, to inquire whether You were or were not was oxymoronic, for You could not either not have been or may not be. You were not subject to contingency; Your freedom was not trivialized by chance or caprice; Your acts could not but unfailingly flow out of who You are.
But what then hath my contingency-riddledness to do with its non-hold on You, my precariousness with Your absoluteness? Enter Incarnátio! In the essay “Sorrow’s Flower” Christian Wiman writes that for the community of Jesus, the Christ is contingency, a declaration which grows on me. Stated otherwise, in Your intrinsic propensity to Self-disclose, Self-materialize, Self-enflesh (Incarnátio) You are submitting Yourself to all the vagaries of contingency in which we finites swim. How can I, one contingency-bound, describe my euphoria at repeatedly stumbling upon You, the Center who holds? Or in the words of Wiman: “[W]hat a relief it can be to befriend contingency, to meet God right here in the havoc of chance, to feel enduring love like a stroke of pure luck [!]” For me, viewing the Christ as contingency embodied, concretized, tabernacled further enriches images like solidarity, identification or even Immanuel (“[You] with us”).
Finally, in addition to companioning all of us amid our “havoc of chance,” You are relentlessly drawing us into Your Divine Life in which, in the words of the Epistle of James, there is no “variation or shifting shadow” (1:17). So in the macro beyond which there is no greater, is not even contingency itself ligatured by Your Love, tethered in fealty to You who are Reality Itself? And if so, is not even the ubiquity of flux being deified in Your transformational “new heaven and new earth” (Apoc 21:1)?
