Sylvia, Kurt and me
A meander through the nature of belief and unbelief.
For an atheist skeptic like me, hearing that Sylvia Browne died wasn’t cause for happiness, exactly. But I certainly couldn’t even muster a “how sad.” And when it was soon reported that she had predicted her death at 88, only to die at 77, I have to admit to a snicker, at least in my head.
Sylvia Browne was, if you believed her, a psychic. She said she had the ability to predict the future, and also to divine the fate of missing people. She was on a talk show once a week, and did countless media appearances. Some of those appearances ended up with what for most people would be deep embarrassments, as at least twice she told parents of missing children that their children were dead, only to have the missing people later be discovered alive. Her standard response was that “only God is right 100% of the time.”
But, to paraphrase Shakespeare, I come neither to bury nor to praise Sylvia Browne, or the packs of high and low-rent psychics who claim supernatural abilities. I want to think a little bit here about why so many people believe this, and why so many others (like me) don’t, and how to reconcile the two.
I lost my faith in the supernatural the day of my brother’s funeral. He had died a suicide, gone far too soon at 19. I was far too young to have to deal with all of this at 13. Of course, there’s no right age to deal with the seismic event that a suicide is within a family. But I digress.
After the funeral, the minister who had conducted the service came across the street (we lived across the street from the “protestant” funeral home in my town, and coincidentally next door to her church) to my family’s house for the reception. There’s always a reception after a funeral, with sandwiches and squares and pots of tea and hams being delivered and the house crowded with family and friends and the people closest to the tragedy in some kind of stunned shock state that leaves them mostly anesthetized to what’s happening around them.
At some point, the minister came to my parents and me. She spoke (mostly to my parents, I think) to us and explained that my brother, their son, was “with the angels in Heaven now.” That easy willingness to ignore the doctrine which supposedly formed the bedrock of her faith in favour of a trite expression of comfort burned in me, and although I was in no position to express my anger at the time, I can remember the intensity of the feeling that she had just lied, that she had done it openly.
It felt like the first crack in a wall of what had been, until that time, a fairly childlike acceptance of the basic ideas of Christianity: there’s a God, he had a Son, he was crucified, we’re supposed to not sin, we should treat others the way we want to be treated. That crack gaped open as I grew up, began to read, especially mythology, and became an adult. By now, whatever faith that had been held back by a dam of theology has long since been absorbed into the soil, the dam long since collapsed.
But … psychics and the supernatural. Where does the ability to believe come in? I’ve lived a great deal of my life in my head. I’m pretty book smart. And while I can be amazed by a magic illusion, be thrilled by Life of Pi’s CGI tiger, be enthralled in Stephen King’s Dark Tower world where magic and technology live side by side and sometimes war, be awestruck by a night sky in the country — none of that moves me closer to being able to believe that when someone reads my palm they get an insight into my soul, that a deck of cards can foretell my future.
I’ve tried. The closest I’ve come is in the area of UFOs. The closest I’ve come to a UFO was a red light in the night sky that I saw in my childhood. I had a vision of my grandfather once, after his death, climbing the stairs in our house. I dreamed of my brother, but he didn’t say anything prophetic, didn’t say anything meaningful.
The capability of belief in what is beyond my senses didn’t end that day when I was 13; it began to end. And it stopped ending when I lost it. I’ve had difficult times since then. I’ve been desperate, faced with health crises, wishing I could ask a God for help, and never finding the words. So I’ve gone through those crises dealing with them on my own.
So what’s this have to do with Sylvia Browne? Here’s the deal. I know that whatever ability I had to “believe” is gone. Could it come back some day, make me into a Buddhist or a Christian or a crystal healer? Possibly; the reliability of my predictions is far lower than that claimed by Ms. Browne (but never objectively verified, I should note).
I suppose there are two types of believers in the world: people who believe in what they grew up with (possibly with some minor variations), and people who choose a new belief to guide them. I used to live in Halifax, where one branch of Tibetan Buddhism is headquartered. There were so many former Jews in that church that they referred to themselves as Jewddhists.
There’s something that feels complacent about growing up X, staying X, and dying X to me. The mere fact that your parents were Presbyterians doesn’t impute any extra “rightness” to Presbyterianism; it’s just a quirk of fate, not much different than being born in February and being an Aquarius.
I suppose in some ways, you could argue that I fall in the second group; that I chose unbelief as my new guiding philosophy. It seems to me that anyone who chooses a new way to believe, a new set of guidelines for their life, has likely put some work into it, and I tend to respect those decisions, even if I don’t share the belief itself.
The people I feel saddest for are the people who appear to have suspended their logic in search of a belief, who have allowed ideas to be given them without any critical examination. Back in the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger published When Prophecy Fails, his research into a doomsday cult that had to deal with the fact that space aliens didn’t come down and take them away, and the disturbing fact that many of the cult members became even MORE passionate believers after the prophecy failed.
Essentially, we need to match up our experiences with the outside world, and when something like a failed prediction comes along, we need to construct a narrative (even if it’s one that doesn’t match objective reality) to make the world conform to our belief.
Perhaps that’s what makes for the difference between believers and non-believers. I see things all the time that don’t make sense to me. And I just let that wash over me. The world seems beautiful, crazy, annoying, awful, troubled, and transcendent all at the same time. I’ve given up on the idea that it could be anything else.
It seems to me that people who believe want to be able to explain that stuff. But I know that I can’t, and it can’t be. So rather than get one of Sylvia Browne’s fellow psychics to construct a frame of explanation for me, I think I’m going to go with what Kurt Vonnegut told the graduates of Syracuse University in 1994:
“I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any ‘Good Old Days,’ there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, ‘Don’t look at me. I just got here myself.’”
