The Book in the Mirror.
God Wants You to Read This PART 2
When I was a child and I loved looking into the mirror, not at myself, but beyond me. I was awed by the details inside the looking glass, the toilet, a towel rack where a sad towel hangs down like it was overused. What would it be like, I wondered, if I could go through the glass and enter into the bizarro world. One time I had a book with me while I was looking and noticed –to my great surprise–that even the letters were reversed, and the words looked like an ancient language. Everything in the mirror world is in reverse! If I turned on the sink, would the water run down the drain the other way? In the real world, I was a weak boy, bad at sports, not very popular. Maybe in that other world I was strong and confident and Lisa Langford was my girlfriend! But what if time was reversed in the mirror world as well? Instead of getting older, becoming a teenager and then a man, I’d get younger, keep shrinking from seven to five to a toddler to a baby to a bump in a belly?
Sometimes I carried my mother‘s hand mirror around the house, looking at furniture and windows inside of that tiny circle, as if I were glimpsing another universe from this side of the veil! When I held the mirror up to my face, I saw the other, more confident me, and he’d tell me things like,[1] Don’t be such a wimp! Be strong! Obviously I was pretending, and I knew that what I imagined wasn’t true, but like a lot of seven-year old kids I spent a lot of free time imagining there were other worlds side by side with ours. Years later, when I became a Christian as a young man, I didn’t need to pretend I could see into other worlds. Truth was hidden everywhere, and I could enter the world of the angels, I could get glimpses.
Even though I didn’t know it had a name, I started practicing bibliomancy, seeking guidance by randomly selecting a passage from the Bible. There was a hidden reality that could take randomness and use it to reinforce its structural imperatives. Ok, that reeks academese, so let’s put it this way:
God can speak through random acts, such as opening the pages of the Bible.
Christians, consciously or not, practice the occult, which simply means the hidden, in the form of Bibliomancy. They pick up the Bible, randomly open it, and read the first passage they see. More often than not, we are stunned by what we read, amazed because it has everything to do with what we’re experiencing at the moment. It’s exactly what we need to hear! God wanted us to read that passage. This phenomenon was proof of the divine, solid evidence that God was with me.
Only later did I come to understand that divination systems are some of the ways that human physiology encodes our evolutionary imperatives. We find what we seek, because we seek survival and flourishing. Our bodies and brains interact with the landscape in such a way that if we seek a goal, if we have a question or an overriding obsession –even if we are looking for an answer or something hidden– we will find it. We can see meaning in rocks, in trees, in the way birds land and fly around a plaza as we’re sitting there, thinking, observing, being in the moment. How many philosophers and scientists have stared at a colony of ants, watching the traffic go this way and that seeing them lug chunks of booty larger than their bodies, and then they think about the hidden patterns in social behavior, leading them to theories and ideas that ultimately turn out to be an effective way to structure our understanding of our world and civilizations. And if our consciousness can use such random detail to give us meaning, how much more can we uncover when we focus our cognition within a literal rectangle, a book? Thought and feeling come together and make a decision.
If you try bibliomancy, more often than not –depending on your imaginative capabilities– you will find a passage that will blow you away by its seeming serendipity.
It’s how our brains work.
But the key factor is that you need to . . . –wait for it – have faith. Without faith it will mean nothing to open up the Bible at a random page and read the first thing you see. Many people might roll their eyes at the idea of Bibliomancy, and they would read the random passage with irony. Intelligent people are especially prone to this behavior, because they revere pessimism as the Holy Spirit of intelligence. But too much pessimism and irony makes you intellectually numb. Or put another way: Pessimism cannot replace faith and get the same results. If I have faith that what I read applies to the questions that I have, whether it’s about my past, my present, or my future, it will resonate an answer. This is how tarot cards work. This is how augury works– divination by observing the patterns and the behaviors of birds. This is why I use the seemingly arrogant title of this essay, “God Wants You to Read This.”
Really?
How arrogant!
God doesn’t care if you read this or not. But if you had faith that God wanted you to read this essay for a particular reason, you will likely find that reason. It will reinforce your desires. This is true with any book, not just the Bible. Randomly grab a book off your shelf.
Try it now. Think of a question about your life, something about the future, maybe something that will happen tomorrow or the next day. If you’re a writer, think about a writing issue, like what should you do with your character in the novel you’re writing, or what you should work on next? Try it.
Ask a question and grab a random book (but come back because I’m not done with you yet!). The question shouldn’t be too specific, like, Where did I leave my keys? Ask a general question about your life, or even a big decision you’re thinking about. Don’t ask yes or no questions, but open ended ones, like, What would it be like if I were to quit my stinking job and open up a little shop in downtown Fresno?
Open it and read the first line you see. Use your imagination to make connections.
Did you find an interesting answer?
Write about it in the comments.
[1] Even today, my wife teases me every time I look in the mirror because I make what she calls my mirror face. I can’t help it. It’s a physical reaction. I stand in front of a mirror and I get a facial expression that to some might say, Oh. Who is that fetching fella in the mirror? I can’t really explain it, pursed lips, direct gaze with my forehead slanting down. It’s kind of like the blue steel look in Zoolander.