Cancer Journal #31 April 28

 Magical thinking is defined as making a connection between two unrelated events where there's neither a causal link or even a correlation.  It's like thinking that Mason Crosby of the Green Bay Packers missed the field goal because you got up to go to the bathroom.  Actually it is more often a projection as in your deciding you'd better not go to the bathroom because if you do, Mason Crosby will miss the field goal.

The author Joan Didion wrote a memoir about the last year of her husband's life entitled, The Year of Magical Thinking.  He had terminal cancer with no expectation of survival.  She describes what she called her magical thinking efforts to prevent the inevitable.  These included both wishing with great intensity and also following a pattern of virtuous behavior of her own devising.  Hmm.  Change the terms around and it sounds something like what I would do.

I don't know if those wishes were directed at anything in particular.  I'm certainly familiar with wishes/prayers flung out into the universe,  a kind of stand in for infinity which I suppose would reflect an aspect of God.  I'm more specific directing my prayer to the one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.  Is that unpleasantly doctrinaire?  Sorry.  As for wishing with intensity, it's not really that that I would do although the appearance might be similar.  I would seek to enter the flow of the Spirit into a place where the current is swift.  Not much self effort there, at least once you get there.

As far as doing things just right, it's certainly my aim to be as a sheep in the flock, tuned in to where ever the shepherd is heading, not some goat following my own inclinations.  Truth be told, I'm often more like the goat but being as the sheep just works better.  I don't know that my purpose is to increase the likelihood of an answered prayer though.  It's just better to follow the shepherd.

Anyway, is my praying for God to intervene with my cancer a kind of magical thinking?  Certainly a materialist would find it so.  In preparing for this blog entry, I looked up "magical thinking" in Wikipedia.  Either there or maybe a click away from there, it showed a group of rough hewn men, rural homely fellows who tilled marginal land or maybe worked in an Alabama steel mill, gathered around a little girl, laying hands on her and all in varying degrees of active prayer.  Actually, I would have enjoyed myself there but it was not intended as a positive portrayal.  Beyond that, I found nothing saying that prayer was a form of magical thinking.  It holds too esteemed a place in our national culture for that to be explicitly stated.  Nothing bad is ever said about prayer unless it has been offered as the sole response to a mass shooting.  That doesn't mean that it is actually accepted as effective though.  Any suggestion of effectiveness can be chalked up to the placebo effect.

And it's all complicated by the fact that an awful lot of prayer probably is just magical thinking.  I'm on thin ice here.  I dare not decide whether a poorly thrown dart by a bad dart thrower does or doesn't count.  God's lovely grace is so vastly better than my informed assessments.  Still, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of magical thinking prayer out there.  Let me say though that just because there are plenty of white and green rhinestone necklaces is no proof that there's no such thing as a diamond and emerald one.  And it has surely happened, I don't know how often, that when they were cleaning out all of grandma's stuff, they dropped off her beautiful diamond and emerald necklace at the Salvation Army.

So anyway, is my prayer simply magical thinking?  If you say it is, I'm not going to get all huffy and, hands on my hips, say, "It most certainly is not!"  It's a legitimate question and one I must be willing to consider.  My reasons for being satisfied that it is not are ineffable, nothing that can be laid out in a syllogism.  You want better than that?  I can't give it to you.