Synchronicity

wasn't just the name of a great Police album. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it: "Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related." Psychoanalyst Carl Jung injected the term into popular discourse.

It generally includes two types of phenomena:

1) When two connected events pop up in different places at the same time
2) When you think of an idea or event, just before or while it appears in the outside world

Jung hypothesized not that one event causes the other, but that they are linked "acausally," outside of space and time.

Of course, this concept creates enough questions. What's the difference between a synchronicity, which is presumably meaningful, and a "mere coincidence," which is presumably not meaningful? Well, it's all in the eye of the beholder -- the one attributing the meaning.

Also, I can't help but wonder: Does synchronicity happen to everyone at pretty much the same rate? If you notice an increase in synchronicities in your life, is it because they really are increasing, or is it simply because you started paying closer attention?

All I know is that in the past few years I've been noticing a lot more in my life. I have even been taking note of them (more carefully at some times than at others). I encounter at least two or three per day that really make me take notice. Some of them are pretty weak, but others are incredible, as if the result of meticulous planning. They can also be quite amusing.

Here are some examples, perhaps weaker ones because they involve the passage of a week or so between the two events. But anyway, they're interesting.

WHILE DRIVING LAST WEEK, I decided to do more than to merely not be a jerk behind the wheel; more, even, than just remaining calm and cool while maniac drivers did everything possible to push me over the edge.

I decided I would make a conscious effort, whenever on the road, to show extreme consideration to at least one person, for no other reason than to be kind.

For example, I'd slow down to let other drivers turn out in front of me instead of just whizzing past. Or if someone wanted to pass, I'd slow down and let him pass (instead of speeding up, as I'm sometimes tempted to do). I figured that perhaps just doing that one good deed would so shock and dumbfound the recipient that he wouldn't be able to help passing on the good deed to someone else -- and on the chain reaction would go, as I made my stealthy getaway. Talk about a mind virus!

What if everyone would do just one senseless act of kindness to one stranger every day? How different would this world be? (It certainly works in the other direction: negative acts certainly create human chain reactions of their own.)

This got me thinking of the movie Pay it Forward, a movie which an acquaintance had urged me to rent, and which dealt with the very same idea of changing the world one kind act at a time -- paying people forward, in unearned acts of kindness, as opposed to paying people back for doing you a favor.

So that was last week. Now, yesterday -- essentially a week later -- I heard the new Faith Networks was out. The lead article, by Joan Osborn, begins: "In 2000 a movie hit the box office that was both inspiring and sad. It was called Pay it Forward ..."

We should pay it forward too, Joan wrote, sowing the seeds of peace.

Interesting.

I continued reading FN. The next article, by Ron Dart, was titled "Church Music -- Blessing or Burden?" That too was interesting since a couple of days before I had also started working on this post, in which I discuss the ways in which church music is too often a heavy burden.

Now, I might not see eye to eye with Ron about which hymns are the best, but it's interesting that our respective articles agreed in several respects. We agree that there are good old hymns and bad old hymns. We both praise the music of Bach.

Ron wrote that worship music is meant to "inject feeling into knowledge ... We must somehow get beyond the intellect. ... Music ....says things that can be said no other way." While I wrote that "worship is all about emotion!" and that "song is communication."

Ron wrote: "Worship seeks to honor God, not man. It is a short step in a music ministry from participation to performance. We live in a performance-oriented culture. It is plain to see that the churches have not been unaffected by this. It is easy for those who worship in music to emulate those who get the greatest applause." I wrote that the CoG tradition of applauding after special music "praises the performer, not the Eternal, and renders the performance mere
entertainment rather than worship."

ANOTHER EXAMPLE that might fit under "synchronicity": Last Sabbath, at the Christian Renewal Conference, someone asked me: "Hey, how's Jim Rector doing these days? You keep in touch with him?"

Ashamedly, I answered: "Um, no, not really. I was on his list. He hasn't sent out a tape for about a year. He was being treated for cancer. I e-mailed Rita a few months ago and she said he was still hanging in there. I've been praying for them. That's about all I know."

The next night, on a Church of God forum, I joined a discussion related to women and ministry, in which I supported the right of women to serve equally with men.

The day after that, in the mail comes an unsolicited and unexpected -- but still welcome -- package from . . . Jim Rector. It was the last thing I'd expected.

As it happens, one of the three lengthy articles in the package is a comprehensive study on the right of women to serve equally with men in the church.

Interesting.

Jim's article, by the way, is excellent and probably a more complete and sweeping look at the subject than you have ever been presented in a COG context. It's not yet up on the Cornerstone site but may appear soon; if not, you can always request the hard copy, and send a donation. More importantly, pray for Jim, because according to his site, he is still being treated for cancer.

* * *

RIGHT NOW I'M READING Inventing God, a novel by Nicholas Mosely. I regret to say I can't highly recommend it: it focuses too much on philosophical ideas and too little on character development; the author's idiosyncracies are very distracting from the story; there's too much touting of "alternative lifestyles"; and the ending is a dud. But the buildup to the ending, anyway, is fascinating, full of action and tension: it has to do with a cast of characters from disparate places and backgrounds who are led, by a series of synchronicities, to embark on a spiritual quest which ultimately draws many of them down the same paths and into each other's lives.

Do you ever see or feel that happening in your life? I sure do, and I wish I could introduce you to the motley cast of characters who've assembled in mine.

There's one particular character who I always run into at the particular university library where I sit right now. Talking to her is like talking to myself: it seems we have the same life, the same struggles -- much the same characters in our family, even. We're both without cars (although I borrow my sister's sometimes), and we both have to walk about two miles (plus a short train ride for me) to get here.

I "ran into" her today before even reaching the campus, as we were both stepping off the train. The campus was a half mile away, down a trail between fields of corn and soybeans, through a prairie preserve, and past a pond. We walked in the 90-degree heat and talked nonstop about our lives and fortunes and, of course, about faith and the Bible. Once seated inside we kept talking for another half hour or so.

As it turned out, she ended up inspiring me to not be dragged down by the negative or apathetic attitudes of family and friends -- to go for my dreams, to invest the talents I've been given instead of those others wish I'd been given. She too is about to take an entrepreneurial leap of faith to take her business to the next level and move out of her disapproving, critical mother's house. She admitted to me she was scared to take this leap of faith. Then it was my turn to encourage her.

The funny thing is, I've met several other friends like her, people with whom I share extraordinary similarities. One such friend, a girl, even remarked that we were "twins." (We would sometimes amuse onlookers by inadvertently speaking or laughing in perfect unison -- as if we'd rehearsed -- only we hadn't.) Another, a guy, said, "we seem to be living parallel existences." I met both of these friends at the Feast of Tabernacles a few years back. Human synchronicity, you could call it.

I guess when you think about it, it's unremarkable that birds of a feather would flock together. But it's remarkable that, despite the tremendous diversity of us birds in this world, there are still ones out there with whom you'll share such uncanny similarities.

Folks like this tend to come and go from my life, which is precisely why I don't try to make more of these friendships than is warranted. Perhaps they are just way stations, or signposts to help point me in the right direction. They often seem to be mirrors strategically placed to help me see things about myself; I suppose I serve the same purpose for them. (Yet another one of my twins -- another female -- told me that she stopped talking to me after a date because she saw so much of herself in me, "both good and bad." It freaked her out.)

And perhaps the Author of our lives has more in store for us. Perhaps we're coming into one another's storylines for a reason and will all end up converging somewhere down the road. One of the thrilling things about the Way is that, while we know the ending, we don't know which way the plot will twist next.