My Mom, a Deck of Cards, and God

By Benjamin M. Adams on September 1, 2017        @BenAdamsO_O

True story.

When I was 12, my parents rented a house on a lake for two weeks during the summer. My brother and sister had a great vacation. I was bored most of the time. My only joy was spending two hours in the car, on most nights, listening to the Yankees on the radio. It was nothing short of miraculous to me that I could get NYC radio reception from New Hampshire. One evening, shortly after dinner, my mom called me into the living room. She was sitting on the couch next to my dad. I instantly knew something was up. My mom was holding a deck of cards while my dad held a paper and pencil. An empty chair faced them, with a small table in between. They beckoned me to the chair. I sat. My mom said something like “lets play a game,” but it was understood by the three of us that this was no game. They were preparing to do some whacky test on me.  At least I thought the test was on me. In retrospect, I’m not so sure.  

My mom spread the cards face down on the table, trying to make sure that it was a perfect line of fifty two evenly spaced cards.  She then told me to pick the Jack of Clubs or whatever card it was. I don’t remember which, but it was a specific card. Since they were all face down, I probably gave her a bemused look. In response, she simply said “just try your best, but really concentrate.”

So I concentrated while I looked at the line of identical cards, and eventually one seemed right so I picked it up and gave it to her, without looking.  She had told me not to look. My dad took the card and held on to it.  He had written down the card she requested. We repeated this process four more times, and each time I honed in on a card and picked it. By now, I could feel that I was really trying, whatever that meant. When we had done five cards, my mom took them from my dad.  He laid the paper down in front of me.  She flipped the cards over, in order, so that I could see them, and I was amazed to learn that I had picked all five of the cards which she had requested.

The odds of that occurring by chance are 1 in 311,875,200 [52*51*50*49*48] — well beyond the possibility that this was a fluke of some sort. The story does not end here, however.  What had taken place was a bit too mysterious for my dad, and I don’t think he was entirely ready to deal with it. He was a very open-minded person when it came to metaphysics, but he had just experienced the paranormal in a way that seemed to shock his adult mind. I guessed that it gave him a feeling of being a bit out of control.  After I picked the first five, my parents agreed that I should pick five for my dad.  So he gave a specific card, and I set about to ‘find’ it.  As I said before, I think he was a bit freaked out, so he kept talking in an attempt to break my concentration.  He was successful in this, and on the first pick I knew I had missed because my mom glared at my dad and told him not to try and stop me from getting the right card, but to help me get it.  In sequence, he gave four more cards and I picked each one of them correctly.  

Once more, my mom gave five cards, and in this third round I picked all five correctly. At that point, she had told me ten times to try and locate one card out of forty or fifty cards face down and all ten times I had picked the correct card.  Including my dad, I had picked fourteen out of fifteen cards.  A friend  who went to MIT once told me that the odds for that occurring ‘by chance’ are approximately one in 127,395,380,000,000,000,000,000.  For you numbers buffs, that figure happens to be one hundred and twenty-seven sextillion, three hundred and ninety-five quintillion, three hundred and eighty quadrillion to one.

That number may or may not be wrong—- but reasonable people will agree that there is no ‘scientific’ explanation for what took place.  I do remember the process by which I was able to focus on the correct card.  I would look at the cards and after a brief moment, my eyes would be drawn to a certain area and then to a group of three or four cards, and finally to one card in particular.  Then I would pick that card.  I was seeing without my eyes.  At least once, I separated cards which had been stuck together — knowing the card I wanted was stuck underneath a card — taking the one which had been underneath.  In this instance, I had found the right card even when the card was not in sight.  

When we stopped after the third round, I felt overwhelmingly exhausted.  I recollect feeling drained in a way that I had never felt before.  I went up to my room and passed out until the next morning.

Its been over 35 years since that evening, and I’ve never discussed these events with my dad. About ten years after it happened, I did broach the subject with my mom. She did not say, “Son, I have all the secrets of the universe. Why did you wait so long to ask?” Instead, true to her agnostic form, she basically just shrugged it off. I asked her if the phenomenon had been the result of her psychic ability or the result of mine, but she wouldn’t even commit an answer there. She said that it was obviously the two of us working together.  I wondered if she had functioned as the medium even when dad was asking for the cards.

I hardly ever tell this story because I don’t like to talk about God. Talking about God is weird and frustrating because God is something supernatural and divine and language is something human and mundane. Paradoxically, the moment you talk about God, you are no longer talking about God. I am certainly not opposed to God, but I am opposed to mental constructs of God. So I don’t talk much about that evening, and I don’t talk much about God. I do think about that evening, however, and I do think about God.