What does it mean to believe in fate? Why bother with the ‘Christian Label’?
We Merchant Sailors live a hungry freelance existence. Your dream job comes up three or four times a year, but you are already engaged elsewhere and unable to take it. The guy with his bag packed, ready to go, is the one who wins the day. The rest of us fulfil the obligations already made. Preparing quietly for the next move, as the world around us moves on.
I have an ‘action bias’, as most seafarers do. Meaning, that if there is a situation in which I encounter the unknown, I will try to do something, anything, other than freeze. Most of the time at sea, this is the correct instinct. To panic or delay can result in disaster.
For example: See a radar target? Immediately track it, take a visual bearing, and assess for risk of collision. Smell smoke in the night? Don’t delay, wake everyone up and raise the alarm. Is everything quiet and the weather is calm? Clean up, chart your next course, and prepare for the next storm.
Being a proactive person is often characterised as an unequivocally desirable trait these days. The pages of Instagram, Facebook, and countless motivational books and ‘influencers’ promote relentless determined ‘vision’, ‘purpose’ and ’10 – ex– goal-setting’ as the only thing you should value. A prerequisite to happiness and meaning.
However, I am not of this breed. The smiling, lizard-like Californian ‘type-A’ adherent of toxic positivity is my least favourite human being. The kind who looks to people less fortunate than they are and sees only those who didn’t ‘make their vision big enough’. Or some other such nonsense.
No, I have seen many times how my bias toward action can cause suffering and pain.
An example was last Friday when a friend called me up and asked if I could step in and captain one of his ships for a week. I checked with my wife and agreed to do it. Thinking, it will be good experience to get another trip as Master under my belt, and we could use the money if I want some time off this year.
Initially, it seemed like I had made a fortuitous decision. While waiting at Edinburgh airport on the Sunday night, I bumped into a friend of mine from university who now lives in the Covid-Secure prison colony of New Zealand. He and I were such different personalities, but we always got along. We’ve always been popping in and out of each other’s lives at times you’d least expect it. We met in the Royal Navy Unit, we played paintball, we both worked for the same company after graduating, etc. I last met him in Brisbane a year before the Pandemic, and he later visited me in Scotland when he visited his parents with his firstborn child.
After two years of Pandemic restrictions, just bumping into a friend who lives in New Zealand, with his wife and two kids seemed absolutely preposterously coincidental. He said, ‘it was meant to be’. We hugged, and I played with the kids, and it was lovely. I smiled the whole way down to Lowestoft. Even though my flight to Norwich was delayed and it somehow took them 30 minutes to move my bag the 8 feet from the light aircraft to the luggage hall, and the taxi company swindled me out of an extra twenty quid.
It felt so good to see an old friend doing well with his life, despite all of the terribleness of the last two years. As someone who refused mRNA procedures (on the basis of having had covid and not dying), I never expected to see any of my friends from that side of the world again. It seemed so improbable, that it was only natural to reflect on such trite idioms as ‘everything happens for a reason’, and ‘it was meant to be’.
My first serious girlfriend used to sneer at me for such contemplations. Engaging in philosophical play-think can become embarrassing enough to inhibit free-thinking when a woman’s judgement comes into play. But I’m glad I’m rid of that one now anyway.
‘Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time…the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature’ – Jordan B Peterson
Rather like my earlier feelings about religion and libertarianism, it comes slowly to me that I cannot choose to believe in fate. Nor otherwise. Fate is an idea, embedded in the culture we live in like Oxygen is in the air we breathe.
The words in our vocabulary, like fate, Christian or Conservative are so imperfect. They leak, like a paper submarine, or a Pfizer vaccine, allowing such a wide interpretation of meanings that many have consigned them to redundancy. So why bother using words that so many people find contentious?
Questions like ‘why is this person in my life?’ can come to you about friends, colleagues, lovers, and mentors. Do they ever come to us about family, though? I haven’t experienced that. However, I have with this one friend, many a time. And I feel the same way about words like Christian. A kindred spirit makes for a good comparison and a good bellwether. But do we choose these people? What is a friend? What is fate? What is Being British, or Scottish, or Christian?
I joined my ship and took command only for the second time in my life. It is a tiny little boat. A bath toy, really, but I love it. She is wonderful fun to drive, and my two crew and four passengers have been an absolute delight. Hard-working, hard-bantering working-class sailor men. Each with an amazing life story, and a spirit to match.
But just as my first day of work was coming to an end, I heard from my wife that she had been in the emergency room all afternoon with my three-year-old son, who had fractured his wrist and was getting a cast put on for the second time. My wife was quite stressed out and would have much preferred if I’d still been at home on my originally scheduled leave.
My son cried the next day because he missed daddy. But when I phone home after a day on the water (servicing the wind farms offshore), he was so angry at me for not being there, he wouldn’t speak to me!
The other men on board all had stories of missed birthdays, graduations, weddings, holidays, etc.
By the end of the week, we had bonded. I’d heard the tales of shotgun weddings, missed opportunities and workplace injuries. The trials of being a child, and a parent.
One of the men received news that his 17-year-old son had been attacked and threatened with a knife, in a North-East town. We shared his distress. The area has experienced a spate of knife crime, with machete gangs going unchallenged by police. However, within 15 minutes a photograph of the attacker was obtained from social media and a few phone calls around his lifelong collection of council estate compatriots were made. This produced promises of a potential beating being arranged for the perpetrator, followed by a word with his auntie, informing her that if the young reprobate doesn’t wind his neck in asap he’ll be ‘taking a little boat trip that he won’t come back from’.
Money cannot buy loyalty like that. As rough and ready as can be, the people you meet on ships are living testimony to the human capacity to deal with the chaos and hardships of existence. They do what they can do.
I know the act of revenge is self-defeating. But the credible threat of violence may be the corrective rod that this hooligan needs. Is this revenge, or protection? Is it admirable to solve problems yourself, without appealing to the state? Is that acknowledging the knowledge and power to bring justice that resides in all of us? Or meat-headed sinful blood-lust, tribal selfishness, borne out of fear?
Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?”- Matthew 26:52-54
I don’t have those kinds of friends. I wonder, is my action bias going to guarantee my fate as a miserable absent father? Or will it make my family stronger in the long run?
I live in a medium-sized town, and I’ve only been there for four years. There is an old ‘village’ surrounded by post-war housing estates. I know my neighbours, but the ‘tribe’ is gone. I feel somewhat robbed of a community that never existed, but I feel should. Does everyone feel this way? I command no loyalty, and I offer none. Is that what I need? A village? A Tribe?
In an earlier article, I wrote a clumsy sentence about some of my family, and they read it. My dad phoned me up to correct me on the facts of a couple of things, that, I honestly didn’t know. And I’m glad he told me. I’ve since deleted them from my blog. However, the experience was good overall. I wrote clumsily because I had to write. I didn’t know my father would read it, but he did. He said he wasn’t angry, but that I had said incorrect things, and he put me right.
Did my action bias cause me to make a mistake? Was it a mistake? Or was it a necessary part of my journey, to allow me to know my father better? Is it a mistake I was destined to make? Or am I stumbling forward towards the truth because I am acting, and the inevitable result is forward momentum, albeit with hazards along the way?
Is the damage being done to those around me a necessary sacrifice, or a misguided attachment to a profession that is all I know? Just the sailor’s bias to have your bag packed and ready when the ship comes in and not a principled work ethic that makes its own opportunities.
He seems deeply worried that I now identify as a Christian. His concern is that if I believe in impossible things, literally, I will be hijacked by the cultish nature of organised religion. A valid concern, to be fair.
‘Why attach the label – Christian?’ he asks.
Is it a crutch? Is it delusion? Tribal instinct?
I don’t think it is a ‘label’. I think it is a description of what I am, and how I see the world. I may not literally believe in the resurrection and the sacrifice for our ‘original sin’, but I do find that less difficult to believe than the idea that the Nation-State can achieve anything ethical. Stranger things have happened than someone coming back to life.
But it is not the point. Why would I call myself something, that others will interpret in their own pre-conceived ways?
It is a battle-cry, for me. A commitment. Preparation for a fight, with myself and with others. An object rather than a label, designed to occupy territory in my heart, my mind, and my soul. An obligation to learn and to work. A decision to exclude other identities and ideas that I have deemed lesser than those taught by everyone’s favourite Rabbi.
The point is this: Whether ‘fate’ is a force that acts upon us or not, is something we can never separate from our experience as human beings on this earth. It is something we will never ‘know’. However, why take the chance of missing out on life’s journey through inaction? Maybe ‘fate’ is a personified spirit. A friend who shows up in our life from time to time, to inspire mischief or invite comparison and reflection. Maybe it is real, like an invisible leprechaun of life energy.
The idea of fate is an idea that is present in our culture because it answers something that we wonder about. It is a useful description of an element of our lives that we all experience. It is a way we can articulate something we all know to be real. You can call it fate, or call it coincidence, but the events that inspired your feeling remain unchanged based on your description of them.
So why do we minimise such events, instead of embracing the opportunity to ponder them as mystical and meaningful elements of our existence?
Social disapproval? Fear of changing our own minds? And what that might mean? What action will our reflection inspire? Is it merely a compulsive reaction, or something of true importance when our lives seem to interact with circumstances beyond our control?
I think what is important is to live life with all of these questions permanently unanswered. I like to live as if these things are both true and untrue, at the same time. Each possibility equally valid and invalid at once.
However, in a Daoist fashion, accepting that commitment is also necessary.
Only in this way can I live without losing my mind out of sheer mechanistic boredom and yet still prevent it from disintegrating into manic romanticism.
I must try to live as if everyone around me is the embodied representative of God and the spirit and truth, trying to teach me and tell me something. In that way, I can hope to learn from life. At the same time, I need to be aware that, that I am reading the tea leaves of life, and the world reflects back to me, what I project onto it. And so, there is no ‘answer’, only a process, that shapes our story.
I think it is worth keeping in mind that the words we use to describe such things are only words. Imperfect, and under-appreciated. Partial descriptions of a complex reality.
Applying this same principle to other areas is problematic though. Knowing this about something like fate calls us to think and judge for ourselves. This knowledge demands that we reject definitions imposed on us by others. To re-examine our youth and our teachers. For where and what have they brought us?
For example, when the church says that a Christian is someone who believes in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ was to absolve us of original sin, and nothing else will do, we need to have the fortitude to say, ‘what exactly do you mean, by that’? Insistence on literal interpretations of such things, that are so clearly loaded with metaphorical strength, is a denial of the human experience.
The map can describe reality, but it is only useful with directions that are relative to our individual journey.
We straddle uncertainty, by continual action, reaction, and reflection. To say that one person or organisation has complete authority and certainty beyond the process of the discovery of knowledge and reality is to say that that person or group of people are not human. It is an absurd claim that is abused all the time by those with the arrogance to claim authority over us. By the technocrats and the bureaucrats who claim to have perfect (or at least sufficient) knowledge and know with certainty, all things.
We can look at our own day to day lives and know for sure that people who claim such certainties cannot be taken seriously.
My action bias means that I view fate as a malleable metaphor, that is a useful tool for identifying opportunities. I think the idea that fate is fixed, is nihilistic, transcendentalism gone wrong and inspires only laziness. By deciding to be a Christian in my behaviour, I think I am rejecting transcendence and mysticism. I think it is accepting what I already am. It is deciding that there is no escape for me. And trusting that limitation is may not be pleasant, but is necessary.
In the same way that when I decide to go to sea and leave my family alone to fend for themselves, I am committing to the unknown. To a dangerous, existential, and difficult journey. For the unarticulated promise, of an unknown ‘better’.
