Sunday, April 27, 2003

• Wish

  My sister and I spent the weekend together, and it was not one of our better weekends.  I think part of the problem was that my sister wanted to talk about our father, and I couldn't manage it in the right way at all.  Every time I tried to continue a thread about him, it seemed to turn negative.  I have the hardest time thinking positive thoughts about him.

  So, we talked about other things, and that didn't go well, either.  I think my sister and I have "green grass" syndrome.  We both, to some degree, wish we had the other one's life.  I envy her exciting adventures as a single successful career woman, and she dreams of being married to a devoted, hard-working man will will be a supportive husband and father to her children, who she will be able to stay at home at raise herself.  Of course, neither of us are stupid - she would never want to do the kinds of things I did to get where I am, and I wouldn't want to go through what she did to get where she is.  We each have what we have earned for ourselves.  We don't really wish to be in the other's shoes, but it makes for a nice fantasy.

  I don't think wishes are a good thing.  I remember stories like "The Monkey's Paw" where a man gets three wishes and they all turn out badly.  This is a recurring theme in literature, the wishes that go bad.  I am embarrassed to report that my first exposure to this concept was a result of watching "I Dream of Jeannie".  It seemed to me that a woman who could do almost anything through magic would be able to get through at least one half hour without screwing up, but she never did.  It was easy to write it off as a consequence of being an archtypical dumb blonde (I hate that stereotype), but there is one episode that sticks in my mind to this day.  In it, the Major is considering wishing that he had the magical powers instead of Jeannie, and Jeannie tells him that he will need to be very careful with magic.  She says that if he wishes for a lake in one place, a desert will form in another.  If he wishes for wealth, then someone who earned and deserves the wealth they honestly acquired will find themsleves in poverty.  She tells him that the world is in balance, and that it is very difficult to do good in one place without doing harm in another.  It was a very profound concept for a mindless farce like that tv show.

  Whenever I think about wishes, I think about it in that way.  If I wish for a winning lottery ticket, who would be losing so that I could win?  If I wanted to be married to Tom Cruise, would I have to groom myself like Nicole Kidman?  Would I find myself cast aside after 10 years for a younger woman, even if I managed to keep myself gorgeous?  

  Really, there are only two kinds of things I (or most anyone else) could wish for.  The first type are things that I should be able to do for myself if I wanted them badly enough.  I know how to lose 30 pounds or improve my marriage or get a high-paying career, I just have not made the commitment to do what is necessary to achieve those goals.  If I could get things by wishing instead of working, would that be fair?  Do I want to live in a world that is that unfair, even if I am the beneficiary of that unfairness?

  The same standard applies for bigger ones, like world peace or a cure for cancer.  Peace is not a goal, it is a process.  It is a natural consequence of people getting along, and people don't do that naturally, they have to learn to do it.  They also have to be willing to learn to do it, and committed to the process.  If one wished for peace, they would be assubjugating the will of a lot of people to their own, whether they intended to or not.  It isn't a real peace unless everybody wants it on the same terms.  The same goes for a cure for a disease - this is a process, and to get an instant answer doesn't allow anyone to benefit from the intermediate developments.   These things haven't happened yet for a reason, and we need to be patient.

  The other type of wishes are the outrageous wishes, like getting to relive one's high school years, or being able to fly, or turning invisible.  These defy the natural laws God put into effect when he designed the universe, and to defy the very laws of nature would probably be the worst sin I can imagine.  It would be like telling God that the universe isn't good enough the way He made it, and that you can do better.

  So, I don't make wishes.  I either decide that I want something badly enough to earn it for myself, or I accept that it isn't going to happen.  Disguising wishes as prayers doesn't cut it, either.  I take a very dim view of people who pray like they are making wishes for God to magically grant.  I think they are sinning horribly, and they don't even realize it. 

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