“Fortunes were like clay”

My last post on choice and chance provoked a thoughtful discussion on my Street Prophets diary, where people from different faith traditions shared their responses.

Before leaving the choice/chance topic for a bit, I want to share with you a passage from My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult. I picked up this book last weekend and zoomed through it. Jumping into a book and emerging hours (or days) later on the other side is one of my favorite things in life. Not every book allows for this kind of total immersion in the characters’ lives, but this one does. So if you are looking for a story to escape into, pick up My Sister’s Keeper.

The passage below is narrated by a Brian, a middle-aged man looking back on the early years of his marriage, and remembering when he and his wife visited a “fortune-teller.”

She put her knobby hands on Sara’s face to read her bones, and said that she saw three babies and a long life, but that it wouldn’t be good enough. What’s that supposed to mean? Sara asked, incensed, and Madame Agnes explained that fortunes were like clay, and could be reshaped at any time. But you could only remake your own future, not anyone else’s, and for some people that just wasn’t good enough.

She put her hand on my face and said only one thing: Save yourself.

(Picoult, 2004, pgs. 258-259).