"Nothing Is Ever As It Seems"

I was not quite 11 when Sonny went down.  Muhammad towered over him in his white trunks and red gloves, his muscular right arm bulging and his face contorted as he screamed at Sonny to get up and fight.  But, was the scene really what it seemed? Had Sonny Liston really been knocked out in the first round of his rematch with Muhammad Ali? Had the Mafia demanded Liston lose? Was Liston fearful of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X now that Cassius Clay had become a convert and taken on his new name and identity? Fifty years later the controversy continues: what really happened in Ali-Liston II? There is an iconic photograph of the moment, one of the most famous sports photographs in history which carries for me the image of what I have quite recently come to realize as an adult, “Nothing is ever as it seems.”

I wonder if this is how we ought to look at all of life.  What if the truth lies hidden in a story behind the photographs of life’s story? I wonder if there is always another story behind the scene we see which explains what really happened. It doesn’t have to be sinister. It could even be something wonderful.  What if the fact that two people who meet randomly, say in grade school, and fall in love and get married, what if it wasn’t random? What if it isn’t as it seemed, and there was some “force” in the universe which brought them to the same grade school class. Would you be upset to know that it was all a part of a grand design we cannot see? What if the decision you made to move, to change jobs, to adopt the child, to have the baby, was part of a “behind the scenes” plan of Another? How does that make you feel? Does it make you happy or angry to hear that, perhaps, “nothing is ever as it seems”? What if there is a story behind the story which would explain it once and for all, but, well, no one is telling us that story. Yet.

What if the same applies to death? What if the truth is not the body in the box or the ashes in the urn? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if death is not what it seems because, well, nothing is ever what is seems? Believing that to be true is what I think, at least partly, faith is about. Faith is believing that there is some better explanation, some higher answer, some redemptive purpose to our living and our dying.

Faith is believing that nothing is ever as it seems.

(Written in memory of my father, Walter, with whom I spent many a Saturday night in my childhood watching Saturday night fights, and of whom, I am sure even now, it is not as it seems.)