The Leap To Faith

A friend, a life long mentor, sent me her copy of Thornton Wilders The Bridge of San Luis Rey about a week before I was to make a trip to San Diego, California. The pages of the book were amber stained by age, but the story was as fresh as if newly written. I pondered what coincidence of events, what grand plan or accident, caused her to bring me to the Bridge of San Luis Rey exactly then, at that time in my life. The book describes the catastrophe of a collapsed bridge and the efforts of a Franciscan monk to catalogue the lives of the victims in hopes of comprehending Gods plan for such events. The dilemma of the faithful, as the Franciscan Brother Juniper, is the impossibility of proving that God exists and that we live and die by plan. In antithesis, secular scientists similarly are unable to prove that we live and die by accident. During a leisurely afternoon while in San Diego, I deliberately steered to the south of the city and willfully crossed the thirty-four year old Del Coronado Bridge. No towers or cables suspend this bridge. It stands seemingly (when viewed from a distance) on spindly legs that lift it to a vertical clearance of more than 200 feet above the waters surface at peak height within its twomile arch that loops out over San Diego Bay. The largest ships in the world routinely navigate beneath the arch without colliding with any of the spindly legs supporting the span. By the thousands daily, people cross in their cars, buses and trucks. I, too, drove my little rented car across, then back again. I crossed again and back the second time, per chancing that no terrorist had stuffed a vehicle with sufficient explosive to bring the whole structure down, abruptly ending several hundred lives, including mine. Catastrophe didnt happen. Why? Survivors of calamities awaken to contemplate the why of their being spared. Most of the rest of us scurry about busily living lives as insignificant as the ants about to be crushed beneath the knees of an orphan child at play in a sandbox. Why do I concern myself with whether or not I am significant? If there is a grand plan then my concerns are groundless, for by definition a

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The Leap To Faith

grand plan places each of us properly in our respective part. If I am only an accident, then my concerns are equally groundless, for the cause from which I am an effect need not be known to me. Who cannot but doubt that a grand plan exists when a majority of the world believes that not one Frenchmans life be risked to save 500 thousand Bosnians, nor to save 2 million Rwandans, nor 7 million Jews, nor 20 million Russians? Who cannot be doubtful that any just plan exists when free women of the world march in the streets and burn flags to secure a right, at whim, to kill their unborn, yet ignore the pleas from millions of their gender who remain brutalized by tyrannous regimes. Ive crossed many bridges in my fleeting life and a few, indeed, have collapsed beneath me. A couple of times I almost died. As an eight-year old boy, perched precariously atop a folded-up rollaway bed, I tumbled backward from my perch. Why did the back of my head glance off the wall to land relatively unharmed in a narrow gap between the sharp, hardwood edges of the storage chest behind the bed and the heavy iron grate of the heat duct in the floor? Why was my neck not broken nor my skull crushed? Not quite fifteen in the spring of 1956 I stood on a bank of the flood swollen Grand River in Michigan, fascinated by the surging water and completely unaware of the erosive undercutting beneath me. A moment after I turned and walked away, I looked back at a sudden gushing sound in time to see the bank collapse into the rivers swirling depths. Why did I turn away when I did? As a thirty-something traveling salesman on an Iowa two-lane highway, I trailed behind another car that trailed behind a semi-truck in the snowy flurry of a dark December day. Unthinkingly I followed the other car out into the opposing traffic lane to pass the semi-truck. The other car pulled over in front of the semi and left me on my own to face, not a hundred feet away, another truck, oncoming head-on toward me at a speed equal to my own. I remember a quick counter-clockwise twist of the steering wheel and my Chevy sedan airborne over the drifts of snow at the left shoulder of the highway. A couple of bounces, missing two trees and a utility pole, the car all along remaining upright, I glided to an easy stop on a level spot just off the road. I paused a minute, raced the engine once to confirm that it still ran, pulled back up onto the highway and continued on my way. Dare-devil drivers might practice their whole lives to perform such a maneuver. Why did it come upon me to do such a thing exactly right at

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precisely the needed moment? Certainly it was not a skill in which I had been trained nor likely could ever execute again. From several brushes with potential disaster Ive seemingly emerged unscathed. Are these escapes part of some master plan? Surely as an intelligent being, could I not by reasoning decipher the plan by which is mapped all the miraculous happenings that I experience? Ill never know with scientific certainty, for the complexity of empirical observations needed for assertion are beyond the combined capacity of all the computers in the world to calculate. Brother Juniper could not do so though he spent most of his remaining life in the endeavor. (What if Brother Juniper had such tools to employ?) Like the Friar, I continued searching. An a-hah here and an oh-yes there, but always the answer, the master design of all eluded me. Still I asked and asked, and asked again. Among the multitude in suspended animation within the fog of ever-present uncertainty, there are a few who jump into action. Some leap upward or forward, some drop backward or down. Some fall to calamity and some soar to phenomenal new discovery. I cant prove, but I do suspect by intuition that somehow to all who move there comes a spiritual presence, which encourages them to take the leap. Without a leap I found I couldnt fly. And, whether to my doom or to unprecedented height, for a moment or for an age, once I stepped beyond the beam, I ever after chose the inimitable flavor of the feel of flight. Jumping off a bridge, with a parachute, a bungee cord or imagined angels wings, is not an act I could ever find the courage to do. However, I can take at least a little leap, a single step upward followed by another, to cross a bridge that provides a view from unprecedented height, the bridge of faith that spans the chasm of darkness and dreaded death. I can say, I believe.

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