"Want to make God laugh? Tell Him your plan."

There are many things to recommend "Homeland" which I find to be the best thing on television since "The Wire."

But the element which intrigues and impresses me the most is the realistic portrayal of how complex each of us is; how motivated by a variety of things that matter for a variety of reasons; how inconsistent and unpredictable. And how unpredictable and inconsistent acts affect the other players, and their responses affect yet other players, and so on, until the original scheme is no longer relevant and the new schemes continue to change.

Among other things, this is a reminder of how unlikely conspiracies are. The explanation of confounding events by reference to a conspiracy theory is comforting, in situations where comfort is desperately needed; I am as temptable by this as anyone else.

But when we face the realities of human behavior --- the complexity, the inconsistency, the unpredictability --- it becomes extremely difficult to find any conspiracy theory credible.

One person can have a plan. Two people may be able to form a conspiracy; maybe even three; although even then the odds against efficiency, effectiveness, and secrecy are very high. And more than three is no longer a conspiracy; it's a convention.

So what can be learned from this dramatic portrayal? Several things occur, but to me the most important one is that control is a fantasy, a self-serving and comforting delusion. There are many about us whose lives are governed by this fantasy. We take humor from references to "control freaks" or "Type A personalities." But their lives are not happy, much less humorous, for the pursuit of control is never-ending and always frustrating because it is always out of reach. Such people are frantic and anxious and miserable and the people who orbit their lives aren't much better off.

So if control is impossible, what is the alternative? Chaos? That is certainly one logical possibility. And for people who are seeking control it is not just a logical possibility. Psychologically, it feels like an inevitability. This is terrorism but not the kind created by suicide-bomber fanatics. It's a terrorism that we visit on ourselves.

I must be in control or chaos will ensue. But I can't be control. But I must be in control. A truly awful state of being.

I don't believe that control and chaos are the only alternatives. The third way, and I think the best way, is to do the best one can and then to have faith that things will happen the way they are supposed to happen.

Sometimes it feels that the loving thing to do is to control others for their own good. This is almost never true. Or, to put it another way, it is only in the most extreme circumstances where it is true. Otherwise, the loving thing is to trust.

The characters in "Homeland" are like real people. Despite all the attempts to conspire and control, the individuals involved keep doing the inconsistent and unpredictable thing.

The philosopher Alisdair Macintyre once wrote of our time that it is "a new dark age" and that what we need is "another, doubtless very different, St. Benedict." In the Rule, Benedict emphasizes the line from Psalm 34, Verse 14: "Seek after peace and pursue it."

None of us has to be the new and different Benedict in order to practice one of the most efficacious ways of seeking after peace --- we can give up trying to control.