Thoughts like this flit in and out of my mind on walks, for example, during lockdown in April when it’s raining and too cold to row, as it was on April 25, 2020 during a walk I took in lieu of anything better to do after a day of writing and interviews with Nader in Tehran and Frodi on the Faroe Islands.

Walking west across the LaSalle Street bridge over the rain-swollen St. Joseph river, I saw a black woman cross the all but empty street and head toward me carrying a bag with what looked like all of her worldly possessions. Half expecting her to ask me for money I reached for my wallet, but she had other things on her mind. 

“Do you have a phone?” she asked.

“No, sorry. I don’t.” I answered.

I may be the only person above the age of seven in South Bend, Indiana who doesn’t own a cell phone.

“I need to call my mother.”

“Sorry,” I said, preparing to step around her and walk on.

“I need to say good-bye,” she continued, “because I’m gonna kill myself.”

At this point she threw down her bag along with a set of keys and a crumpled up dollar bill, hopped over the railing and stood on the ledge of the bridge, with the mighty St. Joseph River surging beneath her feet about 50 feet below where she was standing. 

In between repeatedly asking me if I had a cell phone, she told me a number of times that she wanted to die because no one loved her.

“My children don’t love me. My momma don’t love me. Nobody loves me,” she sobbed.

At that point I said, “God has a plan for your life.” I described that plan in detail in Logos Rising, as when I quoted Dante as saying that Gravity is Love and that Love holds the universe together, but it wasn’t clear that that was what she needed to hear at a moment when gravity was going to drag her to her death the moment she stepped off the ledge.

For the next ten or 15 minutes, we argued about the meaning of that plan, for the most part face to face on opposite sides of the concrete railing which was created to keep people from falling into the river. She could have jumped into the river as soon as she hopped over the railing, but she didn’t because, well, taking your life is a big step and if the old white guy was willing to talk, she was willing to justify her actions by ranting about her unhappiness. 

At a certain point, she decided that enough had been said. She turned around and faced the river half bent over, arms behind her back like a swimmer ready for the start of a race. Her shirt pulled up; her cheap polyester pants drooped down revealing the top of her stretch-mark scarred black butt and I thought at the moment of dropping the umbrella I was holding and grabbing the waist band of her pants and trying to drag her over the railing back onto the sidewalk.

Instead, I repeated what I had said a few minutes before. “God has a plan for your life, and it’s not throwing yourself into the river.”  At this point, she turned around, and looked at me with a face which was a twisted mask of anger, frustration and despair. She grabbed my umbrella and started shaking it, yanking me toward the river, as I yanked her back.

“You don’t know me, white man,” she shouted, and when she did I could see all of the gaps in her mouth where teeth should have been. Judging from the absence of lines on her face, I could tell that she wasn’t old, but she wasn’t young anymore either, and she certainly was unhappy. At this point, the hood on her sweat shirt fell back from covering her head, revealing processed hair with streaks of gray. I could smell alcohol on her breath.

The woman who was screaming at me was a total stranger, but I was familiar with her story. Bad culture led to bad outcomes. I remembered restraining Tyqueesha when I was a substitute teacher in Philadelphia, trying to prevent her from kicking another girl in the head, holding her shoulders as screamed at me, “Get your hands off me, you white motherf**ker,” as she scratched and bit my hands.

I remembered interviewing Caroline Peoples, who was serving seven consecutive life sentences at the woman’s prison in Dwight, Illinois for murdering as many men, telling me that all of her fellow inmates had been sexually abused as children.

I remembered Gloria Hardy’s story of how her father had sexually abused her after moving the family from Mississippi into the Robert Taylor homes on the South Side of Chicago. I remember walking the streets of the South Side of Chicago with Ivori Hardy, the child Gloria adopted from a crack whore who was going to abort her, after I learned that she was pregnant, trying to come up with a plan for her life, and failing to get her to implement that plan. Trying to get back in contact with Gloria, I stumbled across Ivori’s mug shot on the web. The last time I saw Ivori in person I put my arms around her and said, “I wish I had a magic wand that could make all of your problems go away, but I don’t.” The will is free, but the consequences which flow from our actions are inexorable.

“You don’t know me,” the woman shouted frantically. “I want to talk to my momma. I want to say good-bye.”

At this point a car-load of black teenagers pulled over and stopped on the bridge. Since every black teenager in South Bend owns a cell phone, the idea of calling momma was suddenly back in play.  

“What’s your mother’s phone number?” I asked, and after relaying it to the teenager sitting in the back passenger seat, we all waited for the call to go through so that she could say good-bye to momma before she threw herself into the river.  

“No, man,” the black kid said when someone answered. “This is for real. She standing on the bridge. She gonna throw herself into the river.”

“Can you put her mother on speaker phone?” I asked. The black kid obliged, but neither I nor the woman on the ledge could understand what was being said. 

“What’s your mother’s name?”  I asked. 

“LaVerne,” she said. 

“What’s your name?”

“Tanya,” she said. 

Realizing that momma wasn’t on the line, Tanya walked east on the ledge until she came to a parapet, which placed her now around three feet away from the sidewalk, which is to say, too far away to grab.

At this point, the first cop arrived. Approaching her cautiously, keeping his distance, he asked her what she needed.

“I can get you a place to say,” he said.

“I ain’t homeless,” she replied sullenly. And then as if realizing that the cop had distracted her from why she was there, she began sobbing, bent over again, but this time with her back to river and her head on the concrete parapet, saying “I want to die. No one loves me” over and over again. 

As she continued sobbing, the rain started falling harder, and more cop cars and an ambulance arrived. By now there were about five cops standing near the railing, all of them out of reach, incapable of grabbing her from her perch on what must have been an increasingly slippery ledge which was also narrower that the one she had stood on originally. The police chatter continued; Tanya continued sobbing. 

Sensing that we had reached an impasse, I prayed the Memorare. 

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection was left unaided. Inspired by that confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, to thee I come, before thee I stand sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions but in thy mercy hear and answer me and get Tanya to climb back onto the sidewalk.

When I finished, Tanya looked up and then walked around the parapet and back to the wider ledge, and at this point the cops grabbed her and hauled her over the railing and back onto the sidewalk.  

So if you ask me, I will say that it was my prayer that got her back, but you’re free to believe that or not. Just as you’re free to believe that God has a plan for your life or not. No one can force you to accept that fact, but just to think through the concept of God’s plan and unpack it a bit, I would have to say that if had left the house to go on that walk five minutes sooner or later, I would not have encountered that woman, and no one would have been on the bridge to talk to her for the 10 or 15 minutes it took to keep her from jumping before the cops arrived or say the prayer that moved her from behind the parapet and allowed the cops to grab her. But I’m going to make an even bolder claim. I am going to claim that from all eternity God had determined that Tanya and I would come together on that bridge over the St. Joseph River on that spring evening, and that the outcome of that encounter depended at the same time entirely on that woman’s free will and my own. She freely crossed the street to talk to me; she freely got onto the ledge, and at the last moment, she freely got back off the ledge and is alive today because she didn’t give into despair. And why didn’t she give in to despair? Because the grace of God is part of God’s immutable plan, just as much as the prayer I prayed which unleashed that grace in her heart was also part of God’s plan. My free will was part of the plan, every bit as much as hers was, even if we were predetermined from all eternity to meet on that bridge on that rainy April evening. I could have brushed her aside out of fear or indifference after our first encounter, but I didn’t because the will is free. God could have prevented her from hopping onto the ledge, but He didn’t do that either, because He created the will to be free, even free to do evil.

So it’s true. She could have jumped but she didn’t because that was God’s plan, which was both predetermined and based on the free will of the two actors in that little drama in the same way that all of human history is a plan based on exactly the same mix of God’s power and our free collaboration with that power. Logos is Rising. God has a plan for your life.