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This is the second and final part of an essay chronicling my experience with the Merciful God. I encourage you to read the first part here, to get the full story. The first part covers my upbringing in Brazil and my initial experience with the divine through my senses. This second and final part narrates how faith and reason led me to the one Truth. As a diamond forged in fire, my faith was strengthened and my mind exposed to a knowledge that still leaves me in awe.
Carpe Diem was my motto. In my young naiveté, I married an atheist who shared my passion for traveling, so we could travel around the world till death do us part.
At first, his lack of spirituality was not a problem, but things changed after we had children. They always do. Although we had vowed to raise our kids in the Catholic faith, he became hostile when I started passing on my faith to our kids. To me, bedtime prayer was an opportunity to teach them gratitude, but to him, it was an instrument of brainwashing aimed at turning our kids into extremist, science deniers.
Things deteriorated over the years, as his silent treatment and emotional withholding increased whenever I challenged his opinions and decisions. My beliefs, concerns, and needs were simply dismissed or not acknowledged. Feeling isolated and hopeless, I would give in to avoid conflict.
As a Christian, I'd made a vow, so divorce was not an option in my mind. However, despite my efforts to keep my marriage, it was like some greater force was conducting the play. I will spare you the boring and sad details, but one day, I found myself shoved to the ground in the middle of the street. A bystander who witnessed the incident called the police, and, as I watched him being taken away in the police car, all I could see were my little ones' frightened faces. At that moment, I knew my marriage could no longer be saved, but still I tried, believing a miracle would happen. That evening was the start of a long and difficult divorce battle and an extraordinary journey back to God. The miracle did happen, but not how I expected and with results I could never have imagined.
A couple of days after that incident, I found myself at an attorney's office signing a five-thousand-dollar retainer agreement. I didn't have that kind of money nor any idea how to get it, but I knew I needed a lawyer to help me navigate the family court system. So I did what I was taught as a child - I got on my knees and prayed. I was scared and alone, having to care for two young kids and not knowing which direction to go. After years of being a stay-at-home mom, I had just recently started a part-time gig as a freelancer at a startup company. The money from the gig barely covered the rent.
A few days after I signed the retainer agreement, my manager called me in for a meeting to let me know that the company wanted to hire me as a full-time employee with a pay increase retroactive to the beginning of the year. The next thing I knew, I was handed a check in the exact amount of five thousand dollars. I was astonished! I kept my life very private and had not shared what happened with anyone in the company. The offer came completely out of the blue. Before that meeting, there had been no talks or indications that they wanted to hire me as a full-time employee.
One could say this was a mere coincidence. Ok, so you prayed for money and then you got the money - just a stroke of luck, no big deal. However, this was only the first of a series of coincidences that happened in my life. Over the years, there were so many that I came to call those "Godincidences". You can choose to believe in "luck" or "providence". Both require the same degree of faith.
I started experiencing the power of prayer. Suddenly, I found myself as the sole breadwinner of two young kids, restarting my career in my 40s while navigating a dysfunctional family court system. Not knowing what to do, I would often pray and cry, altogether at the same time. The more I prayed, the more Godincidences and signs would abound. It was like I had been pushed to the passenger seat and someone else was behind the wheel saying "Enough, you took the wrong turn, so let's get back on track".
Divorcing a narcissist is not an easy task. They will drag the process as much as they can to punish you and will use the family court system as a stage to project their distorted reality and satisfy their need for adulation. All I wanted was to break free and start a new life, but I kept being dragged down in what seemed like an endless nightmare. In the middle of all of that, I lost my job after the startup I worked for failed to secure funding. By then, my faith was a bit stronger and the little prayer 'Jesus, I trust in You' had become my mantra.
As the months passed and the bills piled up, I came across Mother Teresa of Calcutta's book ‘Total Surrender’ in which she beautifully notes that "Total surrender to God must come in small details as it comes in big details. It's nothing but that single word, 'Yes I accept whatever you give, and I give whatever you take.' "1 Wow, that sounded so hard and scary and yet so simple! I wanted to achieve that level of trust and faith Mother Teresa had shown in her life, so I decided to make a daily commitment to surrender to His will. The following 8 months after I lost my job felt like an eternity with me on survival mode to put food on the table. And then, just when the time was right, I got an offer for a manager position at a global tech company, with a way better salary and benefits. And although the divorce battle was still on, the tide was turning in my favor. My faith had been tested and I came out stronger, like a diamond forged on fire.
I felt God's love and power in my life. My soul had touched the divine, through my intuition and senses, but my brain was still trying to put the puzzle together. I still needed to understand by a process of logic what was happening in my life and who that powerful Being was. Catholicism professes that what we believe in faith and what we discover by reason are not only compatible but also mutually beneficial. God is the source of both faith and reason, and there is no contradiction in God. Both faith and reason lead us to the one Truth who is God.
Knowing me well, God put another great book on my path. In ‘New Proofs for the Existence of God’, Robert J. Spitzer examines the considerable evidence for a supernatural intelligence and creation that has come to light from contemporary physics and philosophy. It's a heavy and splendid book that covers big-bang cosmology, string theory, quantum physics, and the ontology of time to craft a series of convincing philosophical arguments for theism.
Among many great insights, what caught my attention in Spitzer's book was the extreme improbability of our anthropic universe. Not only does our universe have all the conditions and constants necessary to support life, but these constants have the exact right values for life to exist. As Spitzer explains, "slightly variations in the actual values of our universal constants would have given rise to a universe incapable of sustaining any life form."2
In his book, Spitzer cites Roger Penrose, a famous British mathematician and a close friend of Stephen Hawking, who calculated the probability of the initial entropy conditions of the Big Bang that allowed the universe to sustain life. According to Penrose, the odds against such an occurrence were on the order of 10 to the power of 10123 to 1. It is hard to imagine what this number means. A unit of quantity equal to 10123 means 1 followed by 123 zeros, which is more than the total number of atoms believed to exist in the whole universe (estimated to be between 1079 to 1082). But Penrose's number is vastly more than that: it is 1 followed by 10123 zeros. In probability theory, odds of less than 1 in 1050 equals "zero probability”. Penrose's number is more than trillion trillion trillion times less than that, which tells us that the "accidental" or "coincidental" creation of our universe is extremely unlikely.3
To explain the extreme improbability of our anthropic universe, Spitzer uses the analogy of a monkey typing out Hamlet (without any recourse to the play) by randomly tipping on the keys of a typewriter. "If one were to come into a room where such a monkey has been typing randomly for a month, and were to discover twelve sheets of perfect Shakespearean prose, one could reasonably and responsibly believe that someone intelligent (and possessing a fine knowledge of Shakespeare) had snuck into the room and helped the monkey. Alternatively, one might believe that the monkey had a random struck of luck that allowed a conspiracy of coincidences unimaginably remote to occur by pure chance. In one case, one believes in an intellect that one did not see. In the other case, one believes that an unbelievably improbable occurrence took place by pure chance."4 As Robert Spitzer brilliantly puts it, belief is inescapable.
I'd come full circle. I journeyed far away only to be brought back to my Catholic faith through excruciating personal experience and logical reasoning. I'd finally come to understand the meaning of the verse 'Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; you are Mine.'5 If there is such Being, who calls me by name and has the power to create such a vast, awe-inspiring, and fine-tuned universe, why would I be anxious about my earthly problems? Letting go of my desires and fears brought a sense of peace and calm I had never experienced before. The burden became easy to carry. And then, 8 years after that initial incident, and when I least expected it, I got a divorce decree from the state of California and a marriage annulment by the Catholic Church's Tribunal. I was finally free, just to realize that I had always been free!
My journey was long and painful, but worth every bit, as it brought me closer to God and the Truth. As a diamond forged in fire, my faith had been strengthened and my mind exposed to a knowledge that still leaves me in awe.
Mother Teresa (1990). Total Surrender: Mother Teresa (2nd ed.). Servant.
Spitzer, R. J. (2014). New Proofs for the Existence of Good (p. 65). Eerdmans Publishing.
Spitzer, R. J. (2014). New Proofs for the Existence of Good (p. 57-67). Eerdmans Publishing.
Spitzer, R. J. (2014). New Proofs for the Existence of Good (p. 65-66) Eerdmans Publishing.
Isaiah 43:1