Why Don't Worse Things Happen to Us?

Plus a Gardening Triumph

A Near Miss

About eleven years ago, I was driving back to Winchester from my grandfather’s house in north-east London. It was evening time and it was dark. I was not particularly tired but perhaps I had a sense of anticipation that I wanted to get home quite quickly. I was at a roundabout and I took one of the exits. I failed to see a set of traffic lights at the side of the road. I don’t know how I know this but I think that the traffic lights had some of those slats on the them which dims or focuses the light so that drivers going past with them on the side don’t get dazzled. In any case I didn’t see them. And I was driving reasonably quickly but not above the speed limit.

Something happened extremely quickly, so quickly that I only realised what it was after it had happened. I have a memory of an image and a feeling of the car moving swiftly to one side but no memory of a conscious decision made on my part and no memory of carrying out an action myself. What had happened what that I had gone through a red light and a woman was crossing the road with a pram. There were two lanes and I was in the left-hand side one. She was directly in front of me and I was going towards her at perhaps twenty miles an hour, perhaps quicker. I had turned the steering wheel very quickly and swerved into the right-hand side lane, avoiding her and her pram completely. By the time I realised what had happened I was back in the left-hand side lane and there was a car on my right with people in it who were looking at me and gesticulating angrily. One of them got his phone and started calling someone, presumably the police.

Something saved me that evening. I could have killed a woman and her child, a baby presumably. But I didn’t. I didn’t even have any kind of crash. There could have been a car in the right-hand side lane. The woman could have been half-way between the two lanes. But none of that happened. There was a free lane to my right that was ready and waiting for me to swerve into so that she and I and her child and whatever cars were on the road would be safe.

If I had hit her my life would have changed significantly. I may have killed a woman and her child. Would I be ordained now? Probably not. Would I have been able to have any credible Christian ministry? I’m not sure. I would have been wracked with guilt and sorrow and my young life would have been forever tarnished by what I had done.

But that didn’t happen. And the important part of the story is that it wasn’t me who saved myself. Or, if it was me, it wasn’t my conscious mind because I didn’t make the decision to swerve. It was too fast. I did see the woman but it was only after it had happened that my mind processed the image. Something saved me and her and the child.

Why don’t worse things happen to us?

I apologise for talking again about M. Scott Peck but I am really finding The Road Less Travelled to be quite life-changing. I can’t wholeheartedly agree with everything he says but much of it is astonishing. The fourth section is maybe the most mind-blowing. In that section, Peck talks about a phenomenon that he calls “grace”. If I were to try and translate this into theological terms I might call it “common grace” but the way he talks about it is different (very, very different) to the ways I’ve heard it articulated in any theological setting.

His basic idea is that there is a benign force in the universe that is protecting us and helping us in various ways. He relates this to his practice as a psychiatrist, saying that there are so many patients that he sees that should be far more messed up than they are but that, somehow, they seem to be better than they should be and they are capable of recovering. This is apparently true for physical illnesses as well. Our bodies are filled with bacteria and cancer cells and fats and clots and acids and we should be far more unwell than we are.

It is hardly remarkable that we sicken and die; what is truly remarkable is that we don’t usually sicken very often and we don’t die very quickly…There is a force, the mechanism of which we do not fully understand, that seems to operate routinely in most people to protect and encourage their physical health even under the most adverse conditions.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled, p.227-228

He then goes on to say that being health-prone is not the only phenomenon of this type but that we are also resistant to various types of disasters like accidents. Our lives are full of near misses, ‘patterns of repeated narrowly averted disasters…accidents that almost happened that (are) many times greater than the number of accidents that actually did happen’ (ibid., p.229).

That, of course, made me think about that near miss I had. But I put it together with the next set of observations he makes, which are about the unconscious. As I understand it, Peck’s thesis is that the unconscious (in contradiction to the negative view of it put forward by Freud) is actually some kind of loving force within us that knows things about us and about the world and that is trying to help us. If we learn to pay attention to it, we can learn things and receive guidance that we couldn’t otherwise. We might think of this force as God, of course, and this would be totally congruent with a Christian view of the immanence and transcendence of God to creation.

I think my unconscious saved me from running that woman and her child over. It felt like a moment of grace at the time, and I have looked back on it at several points since and shuddered at the implications of my not swerving as quickly as I did.

Whether or not we pay attention to what our unconscious is saying is largely up to us. We can resist the grace that our unconscious is trying to offer to us and continue to live in a conscious world which is more maladjusted than it should be. People who “repress” their unconscious are often those who live life on a superficial level and who struggle to access deeper emotions and thoughts within themselves. They are often stuck in some kind of personality disorder of major flaw or life-situation which might be able to change were they to get in touch with that deeper part of themselves. But, of course, the unconscious offers risk and danger as well as growth and life. It can be speaking to us of something very painful that we simply cannot face up to. And so we repress it and continue to live on the level of superficial consciousness.

How dreams try and help us

Dreams are a phenomenon of the unconscious. They are able to tell us things about the world in a symbolically profound and articulate fashion. Like a poet or playwright of the highest order, they conjure up images that are meant to help us to understand. This happened to me in a dream I had this week.