ArcaMax

Q: I have a God wink to tell you about. Our oldest son was killed by a drunk driver when he was 20 years old and a passenger in another car.

When he was much younger, he asked me to give him dollar bills for some change he had on hand, and I said fine. He then gave me $3 in pennies and I gave him three $1 bills. It became a running joke in the family, and he would gave me pennies for bills every now and then. Sometime later, my boss and two other employees took me out to lunch at an Asian restaurant. After lunch we all had fortune cookies, and I was the last person to take a cookie. Everyone read their fortune cookie, and they were the typical type of message. I then read mine and it said, "pennies from heaven will be coming your way.” I was lost for words at first and told my coworkers about my son giving pennies. I had no change in my pockets that day, but when I was getting in my car to drive home a penny was in the driver’s seat. It seems like whenever I am thinking about my son, or feeling down in the dumps that day, I find a penny in strange places where I know there was not a penny in that location before. His pennies always cheer me up, and I really believe they are pennies from heaven. – (From D in Madison, CT)

A: There are two elements of my favorite God winks in this lovely email from D. The first is that ordinary events can be the most convincing God winks because of the way that ordinariness occurs.

Pennies are the humblest coins and so they perfectly fit the humility of most communications from our dead loved ones. The second element of this God wink that I love is its connection to fortune cookies. It is easy to disregard fortune cookies because the fortunes they predict are usually very general and non-specific but almost always positive. Even so, there is a kind of friendly superstition connected to fortune cookies that I along with D and millions of others who have just finished their chicken chow mein happily endorse.

Like all other superstitions which have no rational basis for belief, fortune cookies succeed more as a cookie than as a fortune. And yet I dare you to open the cookie and not read the fortune.

A solicitation God wink letter…

Q: My grandmother was kind and fun, and really cool for an 85-year-old lady. I loved her dearly. She died in 1985, and I was devastated. I had friends over to my apartment about two months later. My friends left somewhere around 11 p.m. I washed up, got into bed, and then my grandmother visited me in the scariest way possible. When I finally figured out that the ghost was my grandmother, I told her that she could visit again, but not in the dark and not while I was alone (because I'm a chicken). My grandmother visited me once more – in daylight at her grave. It's an amazing story, but it's not the story that I'm reaching for.

My grandmother was very religious. She read the Bible and said prayers, went to church, and participated every week. She was very kind and generous. She exposed me and my siblings to prayer, to church, and to acts of kindness. She lived two blocks from her church in Queens, and she was involved, and loved. Our mother started to decline many years later, and then our father got sick too. Our mother was the first to go, and our father died two weeks later. This was in 2019, and both parents died in our family home. On the morning of our father's passing, a piece of mail arrived addressed to our grandmother. It was a contribution request from her church. This letter arrived 34 years after my grandmother died, and we truly believe that she arranged this ... to let us know that she took her son home to heaven. I still have the letter (of course). – (From D in East Meadow, Long Island)

A: First, you must call your grandmother’s church and tell them to try to send out solicitation letters within 34 years. My real interest is in the ghostly apparitions you only mention in passing. I am very interested in the connection of ghosts with God winks. Ghosts are such spooky and yet seemingly real beings. They raise the issue that our souls are not invisible. And yet the fact that they seem to appear most often when we are drowsy or falling asleep leaves open the possibility that they are the stuff of dreams, not our visible world.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)

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