Predestination Revisited

When I clean out my spam folder in Gmail, just to make sure nothing real has ended up there, I end up, as I’ve noted before, with a link to a recipe for something on the order of spam fajitas or spam veggie pita pockets. But when I re-clicked on Inbox the other day, the link it left me with was for “Online Pastor Degrees.” WTF?

The “About these ads” link informs me that “Gmail can now instantaneously serve ads based on another recent message on the same page of your inbox, helping make the ads more relevant to you.” As it happens, I had recently exchanged some email with my mother’s pastor regarding a problem he’d been helping her with. Nothing in the message had anything to do with the church, and Gmail assures me that “no humans read your email in order to target advertisements or related information.” Nevertheless, it obviously glommed onto his church-based email address and leapt to its own conclusions regarding what might interest me: a whole page devoted to the pursuit of online religion degrees.

Boy, is Gmail ever barking up the wrong tree.

Forty years ago I gave some serious thought to entering the ministry, but I finally had to admit to myself that it was as much a potential draft dodge as anything. Considering how my head changed since then, I can see that it would have been a mistake – unless of course switching sides is acceptable. Do churches make trades like ball clubs? If so, I could have gone from Presbyterian to Unitarian and hidden out there as a Taoist agnostic.

Nowadays I tell people that I was raised in the Presbyterian Church but was predestined to leave it. (Okay, it’s an in-joke.) Only a dyed-in-the-Scottish-wool Calvinist would say my leaving the fold was “preordained”; I prefer to think of it as “awakening.” But what about that link popping up on my Gmail page? A message from God that it’s not too late? A toss of the digital I Ching? A spin of some cyber-prayer wheel? No, it’s all just cause and effect – and a good indication of how predestination works these days.