I was on my way to speak in Chattanooga. And as I clung to the seat of the little airplane for reassurance, bouncing over the Great Smokey mountains, my mind for some reason slipped back to a breakfast which I'd had at Duke ten years ago, in the spring, when I was being hired for the job that I now hold. There was a student at breakfast, a law student, who asked me the question, "Now, what kind of minister do you plan to be at Duke?"

I remember the question, though all I could remember of the student was his first name, Porter. And why was I thinking of that question, and that student, and that breakfast now, since I had never, as far as I know, thought of it before and it had nothing to do with matters at hand?

Well, we landed in Chattanooga. I spoke that night to an auditorium full of people, and I returned to Durham. Three days later I got a note from Chattanooga, from a lawyer who said he was in the auditorium when I spoke, but he didn't get to see me afterwards. He wrote to thank me for my lecture. His name was Porter. He was that student, that long ago student, whom I had remembered.

Now, what was that? Some sort of glitch in the brain? Some sort of coincidence? Maybe. But maybe not.

You know, the odds against such an occurrence have just got to be astronomical. And yet, if we had the courage to talk about them, I expect that we would find they happen all the time. It's not interesting that such moments occur, for they certainly do, but what's interesting is what we make out of them - or refuse to make out of them.

Something about us is fearful to make too much out of them. I squirm as Buechner says of his dream and the tuft of blue wool, "Maybe my friend really did come to me in my dream and the thread was his sign to me that he had. Maybe it is true that by God's grace the dead are given back their lives again and that the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is not just a doctrine."

Well, maybe. But maybe not.

Maybe these moments - and I know you've had them - are coincidence. A fluke. A quirk. But then maybe they are playful intrusions into our so common-sensical patterns of thought - a blue thread on the carpet, a face and a voice plucked from my past - sent by heaven to disrupt us. A peek behind the curtain of exterior reality. A whisper of providence. A hint of transcendence. A suggestion that there is more to death than mere death, more to my past and present than a trip to Chattanooga.

Well, maybe we shouldn't make such a fuss over such moments. Maybe they mean nothing beyond certain glitches in the electrical throbs of the brain. Or maybe they mean everything, connect us with reality too deep, too real and wonderful that, if we were to look at it face-to-face, we would be incinerated by its glory. So all we get is a peek. Hints.

I would hate to see you make too much of such moments, bet too much of your life on that blue thread or a Chattanooga lawyer's note. For behind the curtain there may be only emptiness. The voice that you think you hear may be the wind and nothing more.

Of course, you are betting your life on something. And such moments may be far too momentary, fragile, ambiguous for you to stake a life upon. Most of us live by what we can hold and touch and chew, not on what can be dismissed as mere coincidence.

The lives derived thereby may be flat but at least they are unequivocal. And having bet our lives on the comfortingly unambiguous, something about us is annoyed, yes annoyed, when the mysterious vertical intersects with the sure and certain horizontal. We are aggravated that God may be a tease.

After all, "A coincidence can be God's way of remaining anonymous, or it can be just a coincidence," Frederick Buechner writes. A dream may be no more than wishful thinking or it may be a privileged peek into the inner-workings of what's really going on in the world.

Maybe God really does come out to meet us, but maybe it's always on God's terms, not our terms. Maybe God flirts, loves to tease us toward a reality that we - with our facts and figures, empiricism and suburban common sense - routinely walk past without a twitch of curiosity. As one of the students in my freshman seminar once said, "Maybe modern people have so many psychological problems because psychology is the only language we have left to talk about ourselves." Maybe we're all like the kid who wore earphones so long, volume turned all the way up, that the heavy metal music rendered his eardrums impervious to Debussy or a whisper.

Maybe we don't see God much because we've lost the capacity to look. So messages that come to us from the other side are reflexively dismissed as "coincidence" and a divine voice is heard only as a consequence of indigestion.

Sometimes, something is there, but maybe we can't see it. Maybe our eyes are dulled, our vision is unformed, uninstructed, undisciplined to look with appropriate curiosity and intelligence. What would it take to see?

If what's there is God, well then we shouldn't expect to see it too clearly. It couldn't be God if we couldn't explain it some other way, for God is large, thick, ambiguous if God be God.

It was December, Judea, a little out of the way town called Bethlehem, and a stable, and a newborn baby cries out in the night. Emmanuel. God with us.

There were some who believed. But the majority said it had to be some kind of coincidence, with the star and all of that.

Well maybe. But maybe not.

Lydia Talbot: Will, in your message earlier, you discerned the difference between receptivity, openness, to the transcendence of Divine Mystery in our lives, and those who may be preoccupied with a literal interpretation. What is that about in the nineties these days, and how do students at Duke University think about questions like Divine Mystery and transcendence?

William Willimon: Well, Lydia, I think we modern people like to think of ourselves as people who have made progress, who know more about the world maybe than our ancestors did. We are the beneficiaries of science and research, etc. A lot of us, though, are starting to think that maybe the modern world has not grown, but it has shrunk in the sense that it's as if we know more and more about less and less. Our world is cut up into smaller pieces, and we focus on that, but maybe through science and technology, maybe there's a lot of stuff we're missing. And some are calling for a kind of post-modern consciousness which is open to a wider expanse of reality.

C. S. Lewis noted many years ago how modern people immediately, say, dismiss miracles, and the basis for our dismissal is, well, they can't happen. "Well, why?" "Well, they've never happened to me." And Lewis notes that there is a huge amount that goes on in the world that has never happened to me personally. But, alas, in the modern world too often my limited experience becomes a test for everything, and so, I think I would appeal to a broader consciousness.

One thing I like about students is that they tend to be sort of curious, and they're particularly curious about the weird, and so if something is kind of weird, they want to hear about it. They're opened to thinking about it. I think that's intellectually and spiritually marvelous.

Talbot:  You refer to C. S. Lewis. I think it's in his book on prayer, Letters to Malcolm, that he states, "God is everywhere. The world is crowded with God, but the real labor is to remember to attend and, in fact, to come awake." And, isn't this what you're touching on, that people can't see God because you say, "They don't have the capacity to look."

Willimon:  Yes. I had an illustration of an analogy for this, I think, a few months ago. I took a walk in the woods, North Carolina mountains, with a friend of mine who is sort of an amateur naturalist. And the woods were beautiful to me, and I was enjoying walking along, and he would periodically stop, and he'd say, "Oh look, there's a little green snake over here, I think." I'd look over there; I didn't see anything. And he said, "I bet under this log..." He pulled up the log. Sure enough, there was a little green snake under it, or he would say, "Look at this marvelous seed pod here, and this is a so-and-so, and this is doing so-and-so." And I was struck how much more he saw. He was disciplined to see more; he had spent more of his life being attentive to these matters, and I think sometimes in our own walk, not down some mountain path, but just say, through the streets of Chicago, we're conditioned to close out a lot of reality.

Talbot:  You know, I must ask you -- we've talked about the spiritual dimension of the transcendence and one's faith - there are those conservatives who criticize your church, the United Methodist Church, for spending too much time on a liberal agenda of social action, and not enough time on spiritual matters, and they would ask you, "What has happened to the more disciplined life of bible reading and prayer and morality?" What do you say to them?

Willimon:  Well, I would say some of the criticism is correct. We have been guilty of not attending enough to the spiritual matters in some way. The thing that interests me even as you were saying that was, I know, I think that was a charge, you know, when I was younger. It always seemed like it was the liberal main-line denominations who were always engaged in political-social questions. Now it appears to be the more conservative fundamentalist churches that are so engaged in political questions. I don't know what to make out of that except I might say to some of those churches, gosh, my church at times, I think, did neglect some spiritual, biblical, theological concerns in our kind of activism.

Christians, spiritually, are called to care about the world, to care about those from the world who has been difficult to witness to them, that this is God's world and that God is on the side of healing and wholeness. And, one interesting thing in our modern life is these sort of switches where, in fact, I said one time to Jerry Falwell, in fact, as we were talking about these matter when he visited our campus, the only thing I have against him, sometimes he sounds sort of like a Methodist, and that he's always talking about politics and our need to take over Congress and everything. And I think that as kind of main-line person, Protestant person, I've sort found myself becoming much more interested in the kind of theological, spiritual, biblical concerns.

Talbot:  Are you saying the prophetic church is becoming more spiritual these day?

Willimon:  Yes. I think it is, and sometimes to be more spiritual is to be prophetic. As we said, in this sort of modern world, there is a prophetic critique going on about what technology has done to us, what it has taken away from us. I find, for instance, college students with whom I work, a great sort of openness for different ways of living simpler lifestyles. They've seen their parents, perhaps, caught up in the rat race economically and wonder how much was lost that way, and that can be a prophetic critique as well.

Talbot:  But at the same time, is there a neglect of the real justice issues?

Willimon:  Yes. We have infinite ways of neglecting spiritual matters and justice matters. I think one of the nice things about Jesus was, it's hard to draw that line in His own thought. I mean when he was healing people, He was being spiritual, but He was also showing a sign of justice. I do think in America today there has been a kind of lamentable retreat from kind of concern or confidence that we really could change the world for better, into a kind of tending our own little spiritual guard, and I find that lamentable, but maybe I find it lamentable because I'm a Methodist.

Talbot:  I recently heard it described that justice is not just a gentle wave lapping the shore, but a giant tidal wave that cannot be stemmed, but let me...

Willimon:  Let justice roll down like water.

Talbot:  Let me get back to the campus in the moment that we have left. You have written an extensive report on Duke University's treatment of students and how they're being dealt with in the 90's, and each year that goes by, you're getting one year older. How do you manage to stay in touch with the needs and wants of students?

Willimon:  Well, I enjoy talking to them. One nice thing about students is they will often tell you what they think. I think as we get older we become a little bit more guarded about that. I find them infinitely curious. It's fun to be around people going through important moments in their lives that remind you of yours. And also it gives one a little taste of what the world may look like in the future, and I think the world may look good in the future as these students take their place in areas of responsibility and change the world for the better.

Talbot:  You told me earlier when you were hired for the job as Chaplain at Duke that they wanted two things - patience and humor. Those still in the job description?

Willimon: Oh, one needs that when dealing with young adults. Last Easter I remember this young adult came in to read the scripture for the service, and he was talking about it and he said, "I'm glad I made it. I was in New York City just a few hours ago." And I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah, we went up there for the weekend and I drove back last night." And I said, "When's the last time you've been asleep?" He said, "About two days ago." And I said, "That is irresponsible to come in this service and read the scripture here like that." And he said, "I look better than you do." You know, so it takes patience sometimes dealing with youth.