A woman once shared this story in one of my classes:

She had been raised in a religious home and had been a regular churchgoer. However, during her years at university her interest and practice in religion had progressively slipped so that by the time of her graduation she no longer attended church or prayed much. This indifference to prayer and church-going continued for several years after her graduation. Her story focused on how that changed.

One day, nearly four years after having given up all practice of prayer and churchgoing, she flew to Colorado to visit her sister and to do some skiing. She arrived on a Saturday evening and the next morning, Sunday, her sister invited her to come to church with her. She politely refused and went skiing instead.

On her first run down the slope, she hit a tree and broke her leg. Sporting a huge cast, she was released from hospital the following Saturday. The next morning, her sister again asked her to come to church with her. This time (“there wasn’t much else to do”) she accepted. As chance would have it, it was Good Shepherd Sunday and as chance (again) would have it, there happened to be a priest visiting from Israel. He could not see her sitting near the back with her leg in cast, and yet he began his homily this way:

“There’s a custom among shepherds in Israel that existed at the time of Jesus and is still sometimes practiced today that highlights a hidden aspect of a good shepherd. Sometimes a shepherd senses that a young lamb is going to be a congenital stray, forever drifting away from the flock. What the shepherd does then is deliberately break one of its legs so that he has to carry it until its leg is healed. By that time, the lamb becomes so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again.”

“I may be dense!” concluded this woman, “but, given my broken leg and all this chance coincidence, hearing this awoke something inside me. Fifteen years have passed since then and I have prayed and gone to church regularly ever since!”

James Mackey once suggested that divine providence is “a conspiracy of accidents through which God speaks.” What this woman experienced that Sunday was precisely the language of God, divine providence, God speaking to her through a conspiracy of accidents.

Today the concept of divine providence tends to be ignored or misunderstood. Some Christians identify it with an unhealthy fatalism (“If God wants my child to live he will not let it die. We won’t take the medical procedure”). Others connect it to an unhealthy theology of God (“God sent AIDS into the world as a punishment for our sexual promiscuity! God sends us natural and personal disasters to bring us back to true values!”)

But these are false concepts of God and of God’s providence. God does not start fires, or floods, or wars, or AIDS, or anything else of this nature to smarten us up and bring us back to true values. Nature, chance, human freedom, and human sin bring these things to pass.

However, to say that God does not initiate or cause these things is not the same thing as saying that God does not speak through them. God speaks through chance events, both disastrous and advantageous. Past generations, like my parents’ generation, more easily understood this.

For example, my parents were farmers. For them, like for Abraham and Sarah of old, there were no mere accidents; in everything there was always providence and the finger of God. If they had a good crop, God was blessing them. If they had a poor crop, well, they concluded that God wanted them to live on less for a while for some good reason. And they would always in the deep parts of their minds and hearts try to discern that reason.

When Jesus invites us to “read the signs of the times”, he is not suggesting an intellectual exercise wherein we try to articulate for ourselves how the cultural, political, social, and religious movements are shaping our times. That could indeed be a good thing, but that’s not what Jesus is inviting us to do. Rather he is inviting us to look at the events in our personal lives and in the life of the world and, as a deep form of prayer, try to discern what the finger of God is writing through those events.

In the conspiracy of accidents that make up our ordinary lives, the finger of God is writing. John of the Cross says that “the language of God is the experience God writes into our lives.”  As a form of prayer, we need to look at the conspiracy of accidents in our lives and ask ourselves: “What is God saying to us in all of this?”

And hopefully it won’t take a broken leg for us to get the message.