On Providence

Harvard is not the place most people go to find god (cue Love in a Trashcan by the Raveonettes). Per David Holland of Harvard Divinity School, many go to divinity school to unintentionally lose their faith. I never had any faith to lose. I was raised in the Theravada Buddhist tradition that Gananath Obeyesekere, raised in that tradition himself, has called “Protestant Buddhism,” which, despite Christianization in other facets, emphasizes no belief in god. I grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in a predominantly Christian country but would characterize the society immediately outside my household as essentially secular. Religiosity was the exception. My family was religious, but practicing what felt like a foreign tradition. I sat in a strange world juxtaposing karma with god and the two with science, choosing science over the karma of my parents and the god of literally just one single family down the street. Never did I think I would one day come to believe in all three—what a shift it’s been.

As a child, I was puzzled that my grandfather, a scholar and seemingly sensible economist and mathematician who had demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt a tight grip on reason and logic, believed in astrology and superstition. He was very religious, very Buddhist, and Buddhism made little sense to me. I experienced adversity as a child that was not ordinary but also not so extraordinary, in hindsight, and when I sought relief at the Vihara, or temple, I found none. Instead, I found the temple to be a place where I had to sit cross-legged through torturously long ceremonies spoken in languages I couldn’t parse. I mostly did not like going to the temple, except that when I was a child, the head monk, seeming to have a fondness for me, called me “Apple Boy” and would give me an apple from the alms basket every time my parents took me to the temple. I did like apples.

I thrived as an undergraduate at Claremont McKenna, slurping up every academic subject I could tap like a divine nectar. While at the time I might have gauged religion as the subject I was least interested in, it is worth noting that Claremont is renowned for religious studies and the Claremont School of Theology. And the single religious studies course I took, titled “Science and Religion” with an eccentric aging professor named Granville Henry who had a background in both math and religion and once prospected for gold, was one of my favorite undergraduate courses. By the confessions of later students, the professor kept and shared with future students one of my papers pithily arguing that Buddhism is predicated upon a belief in reincarnation, lest it imply one should simply off themself, as an example for future classes. I’m not sure that paper ought to have been an exemplar of anything, but that history perhaps foreshadowed my latent interest in religion that would not be realized until much later.

In my late 20s, I began to have strange experiences that seemed so improbable and divinely orchestrated that I questioned both my reality and my sanity. These events were few and far between until quite recently. During my first semester at Harvard I learned that such experiences, the perception of divine intervention in life, are precisely the definition of providence, which I had before understood just as the name of a place in Rhode Island. To make a long story short and purposefully exclude detail that might invite more skepticism than trust, the rate of these bizarre occurrences increased to a fever pitch such that just about a week prior to the submission of this project, I became completely convinced that god is real. This is a bizarre conclusion for someone who has identified as an atheist or agnostic, at one point an “optimistic nihilist,” for most of their life and was not raised in a religious tradition that believed in god. Yet, here I am. My intention is not to convince anyone who does not believe in god to believe in god. That was a very personal journey for me, and if any person had tried to convince me I would have rejected it. It was purely through my observation of my own life and what I perceived to be events of providence that I came to conclude beyond my own standard of reasonable doubt that there god is real, which I would not define as any particular god but rather a still amorphous higher power in the vein of that called upon by Alcoholics Anonymous.

I do not want my personal spiritual journey to distract from the mission of this work. But I must insist that humanity needs all the help it can get right now and that god would be a great ally. With or without god, we must do our part to navigate the rough seas we would be fools to not know are coming.