skip to main |
skip to sidebar
“For when the heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass. ”
Joseph Campbell
"Maybe these are miracles. Maybe we don't have any experience with miracles so we're slow to recognize them."
From the Movie Grand Canyon
Not everyone is immediately aware of the power of synchronicity in their lives. I was having this conversation with my friend recently, who seemed a little stuck in her life and was having a hard time seeing where her own path was going. We talked a little more, and she acknowledged that there was one powerful event in her life that seemed to indicate some grander sense of design. This story truly knocked me out, and it really helped me better understand how the rhythm of synchronicity can exist for generations before truly clarifying itself properly.
In short, her father wanted her mother to have some company, and introduced her to a couple he had met while working in the National Guard. Over the years her mother stayed close with this family, and cut to generations later a member of this family had a daughter who is addicted to Heroin. A sad story made even sadder when my friend found out that she had a baby that she couldn’t take care of.
My friend was outraged. She wanted badly to have more children, but because of some health issues it simply wasn’t possible. Like many women who are given this news, she felt some anger towards women who have babies so easily and then seem to have very little interest in taking care of them. So an idea began to crystallize in her head, adoption. She would offer to adopt this child and give her a life her mother was clearly incapable of providing.
But none of this was in the cards. My friend returned home and slowly resigned herself to the fact that this was a child whose fate was out of her hands. Two years passed, and eventually she went back to her life. Then she heard something that devastated her. This woman had become pregnant again, but was no closer to beating her drug habit and providing any kind of safe environment for a child.
So my friend had her dark night of the soul. Once again an unwanted baby was somehow coming into the world, when she herself would do anything to have another one but couldn’t. In desperation she made a call, once again offering to adopt this child and provide a safe and caring home.
But time passed, and as the months went by my friend again resigned herself to the idea that this child’s fate was out of her control. Then, inexplicably, she had a dream. In her words,
“I was pregnant and gave birth to a baby, she wasn’t breathing so I had to give her CPR. This brought her instantly back to life. She hugged me and thanked me for saving her life. She told me without me she would have died. She told me her name was Zoey.”
The next morning she got a call. The woman had decided that my friend and her husband would make good parents and that she would like them to adopt her baby. She informed my friend that it was a girl. One month later my friend traveled to a drug treatment center to pick up her new little baby girl. Her name was Zoey.
There are so many amazing examples of synchronicity in this story it boggled my mind. What are the butterfly effects of a child being raised in a loving and safe home versus being raised by someone addicted to Heroin? How many lives will this little girl touch because of this story? How about the lives those people then go on to touch? Each life truly touches so many others. To me the implications of this are tremendous…
In the quote at the beginning of this entry there is a line from the movie Grand Canyon. In this scene a woman is trying to present the idea to her husband that all of the extraordinary things that have happened in their lives were miracles, and he responds “I'm getting a terrific headache.”
“No, you're not,” she replies
“I’m not”
“I'll tell you why I reject your headache”
“ Please”
“ Because it's inappropriate. If I am right and these events are miracles......then it is an inappropriate response to get a headache in the presence of a miracle.
This exchange kind of explains my response to people who doubt that this kind of thing happens in their lives. We get mired in our ruts, our self-pity, our gripes, complaints, and everyday drudgery, when really these amazing miracles are happening all around us. Somehow we just miss them though…Work, bills, chores, and whatever else eats up so much of our precious time.. But really, if we can cut through the fog and take a long, deep breath of each present moment, we may find there are wonderful opportunities to observe these things. That’s why I try and introduce myself to at least a few new strangers every day of my life. What do you have to lose? This person may not even give you a second glance, but on the other hand they may alter your world in some significant and meaningful way. I am convinced lightening can strike however. I’ve lived it, I’ve seen it, and I certainly saw a great deal of it in my friend’s wonderful story.
“The Road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.“
William Blake
A couple of months ago I reconnected with a good friend from a few years ago. At the time we were both working in a bar in a downtown Chicago. It was like working in a war zone at times, and the stories we accumulated over those years were truly priceless.
I first met this guy on an elevator when I bumped into him when was applying for a job. That was almost ten years ago now but I still remember it well. He was 21 at the time, and we went through more than our share of passages as we tore through these years together.
Eventually he became a cop and I became a therapist. At the time nobody who knew either one of us would likely have predicted that, but life takes unpredictable turns. The point is we put that part of our lives to bed, knowing that we had a pretty wild run that we emerged from miraculously still alive and kicking.
A couple of years passed, and he found me online. It’s always nice to catch up with old friends, but it’s something I’ve been terribly lax about. Anyway we went out for drinks a couple of times, and he told me he was getting married. I was in for a shock however when he asked me if I would consider getting ordained online and performing and writing the wedding ceremony.
To back up for a second I was not only not religious, but so hedonistic for so many years I thought I would start on fire if I stepped into a church. Even still I was intrigued, and accepted the assignment with great gusto.
So I set about writing the ceremony. Which I have included here-
Hello everyone and welcome…..We are here today to celebrate the union of Emily and Kevin ….It’s a sacred day a wedding day…..And these two may only have 2 or 3 more of them in their entire lives…So let’s everyone try and pay attention please.
I never would have guessed when I bumped into this guy in an elevator 10 years ago that I would be performing his wedding ceremony….At the time I would have placed odds we would have met back up in jail….But here we are….He a cop and me a priest…Well an internet priest anyway……My license expires in a half hour so lets get this show on the road…
In all seriousness…….We are here today because two people solved life’s most perplexing mystery and fell in love…I take that back…..Not two people…Three actually…Any conversation about these two has to include their beautiful daughter Nola, who I know Kevin has fallen in love with as well…….I’ve never seen him so happy and so filled with a sense of purpose, and I know that having these two ladies in his life is the best thing that ever happened to him….
When I’m not faking being a priest I work as a marriage counselor…I see a lot of couples that have lost their way…And often a big part of what they’ve lost is their senses of humor….I can’t imagine that ever happening to these two…..They are two of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and after spending a little time with Nola it’s clear that there will soon be a third class clown in the family……Jean Houston said “At the height of laughter the universe is thrown into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.” My guess is that laughter will be the lifeblood of this family’s interactions, and that they will grow and thrive as they laugh their way through life together…
I know for these two, there is no job they take more seriously than being parents, and I can’t imagine Nola being in finer hands as she makes her way through life….So Nola, to paraphrase another high priest like myself named Bob Dylan,
May the good lord be with you
Down every road you roam
And may sunshine and happiness
Surround you when you’re far from home
And may you grow to be proud
Dignified and true
And do unto others
As you’d have done to you
Be courageous and be brave
And in my heart you’ll always stay
Forever young, forever young
Try and remember these words as you grow older….But on the other hand bear in mind that their may be times you’re the only adult in the house…..I’ve seen your dad whine when the White Sox lose…
So although this is a wonderful day and a happy time, I would be remiss in my duties to suggest marriage is easy. As many of you here know, it may be the hardest yet most rewarding thing a person can ever do. Ruth Bell Graham said, “A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” Seems pretty accurate…Marriage is the ultimate test of cooperation, and cooperation is pretty hard without forgiveness….Deep down we are all a little broken and miswired…As you go through your life together please keep this in mind….
And marriage is also unpredictable… A favorite quote of mine on this subject comes from Gilda Radner who found her own true love Gene Wilder later in her life…
“I always wanted a happy ending… Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”
And so guys, remember that there’s a lot of stuff you can’t even see right now…You will argue, you will fight, and you will do the silly, petty, and ridiculous things humans do.. You will survive this because you have learned to laugh together…..A simple look around should show you how many of us are rooting for you 3 to have a wonderful life together…..I know I speak for everyone in this room when I say we love you and wish you the best on this terrifying rollercoaster you are about to jump aboard…You may scream, you may protest, and you may even feel like yelling at the deranged Carny to stop the ride….But in the end, the fun you have together will I’m sure make it all worth the trip……
The reason why I have included this vignette is to demonstrate a point about friendship. So often we get lazy about putting in the time and effort to maintain friendships and they just kind of wither away and die. Because my friend took the time to find me, I am now a part of one of the most significant days of his life. The fun we had that day and the story of me performing his wedding ceremony will I’m sure be something we remember when we are old men, and it happened because he was willing to do a little extra work to stay in touch.
So perhaps the lesson is to work hard at maintain these friendships, as the dividends echo much longer than we may realize. I have attended several funerals where person after person says the most glowing things about the deceased, while also acknowledging that they had unfortunately lost touch with the person over the years. What a shame this is, that people often go to their graves not knowing how everyone felt about them.
So looking back now as an officially ordained “reverend” I realize again that there is a strange serendipity in the fact that I was ordained to help bring people together, when this perfectly describes how I am trying to make sense of the world right now. How and why do we all fit together like we do? How is it that you can bump into one guy on an elevator and perform his wedding ceremony, while you walk blindly by others who may have been a doorway to some other fascinating new experiences? I’m not sure I know the answer to any of these questions, but what I do know is that I want to know as many of my fellow travelers as possible while I try and figure it out.
Some People Live a Lifetime in a Moment.
Scent of a Woman
Looking back now I am noticing all kinds of connections I hadn’t before. Today I found myself thinking about a trip to Ireland I took last year and some of the things that happened to me while I was there.
I’d hit kind of a rough patch in my life and was struggling to figure out where I was going. I decided a trip to Ireland where my grandmother was from might help me make sense of where I came from, and maybe even offer some clues as to where I was going.
I had a deeply transcendent moment when I was in Ireland. High in the Wicklow Mountains I climbed to the top of the highest peak and looked around. Miles and miles of green hills, beautiful mountains, and clear skies surrounded me, and something just came over me. I knew that there was something bigger out there than just me. That I had been given a gift to get to dance here on this beautiful planet for however long, and that I was called to do something bigger than gratifying my own selfish needs.
So it was with this newfound awakening that I returned to Dublin to finish the rest of my vacation. I was staying in hostel that weekend, and my roommate was a girl from Spain who spoke very little English. I tried to talk to her but it was difficult, as I spoke predominantly busboy Spanish from my many years working in restaurants. Even still we tried to talk over dinner in the bar downstairs. Then I looked at her and saw a single tear fall down her cheek.
"Yo se que la vida es dificil" I said, (I know life is hard)
And with that she began to chuckle. She studied me closely and looked deeply into my eyes, apparently wanting and needing to convey something deeply important. Soon her smile faded though and she looked back down into the napkin that was folded in her lap.
"I am alone in the world," she said in broken English as she wiped a tear from her face.
"Me too," I replied, and she looked up with understanding eyes, this time patting my hand as she tried to comfort me.
"I know life is hard" she said.
And with this we both smiled, having discovered, in this odd little corner of the world, the power of making a small human connection.
So we spent some time together over the next couple of days, neither one of us speaking the other’s literal language, but both very much strangely attuned to something the other seemed to need. We drank, we ate, and we danced over the next couple of days, and in a sense it was one of the most intimate connections I had ever made with another person, despite the fact we were virtually unable to hold a conversation. We were two lonely people, who made each other a little less lonely by trying very hard to understand each other. This is exceedingly difficult with someone who knows the same language as you do, as often the words just keep getting in the way. Yet here, in this time, in this place, we had found a language that was unique just to the two of us, It was wonderful.
Eventually our trip came to an end. My last memory was the bus ride together back to the airport, where miraculously I remembered I had the song ‘Guantanamera” on my ipod. We both took an ear and sat and listened to the song as our time together came to an end. Both of seemed to sense that, although we had made an intense human connection, we both had to return to very different lives. It was sweet, it was sad, and it was perhaps the most melancholy moment of my life.
So we exchanged information and wrote back and forth a few times, but in the end, neither of us had the patience to continue to translate the other’s language. I hadn’t thought about her for some time, when a couple of months ago I got a postcard from her saying simply.
“Life is not so hard now, thank you for being my friend, it meant more than you know.”
My heart was deeply touched. I thought about her a lot after that. Was she my lost love? Should I have pursued her further? Tried harder? But in the end I think we were just supposed to have those few days together. In those few days we found a way to give each other something we both seemed to desperately need, and for me, it was an experience that will remain in my memory forever.
The death of the father is the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life.
Sigmund Freud
The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.
Carl Jung
It started out to be the kind of day like any other day. At the time I was managing a large nightclub in Chicago, making good money, and living a hedonistic, carefree life living in the city. I had been doing this for a while and was pretty content if not a little bored.
I had fallen into managing nightclubs almost entirely by accident. I had moved to Chicago to become a comic, and often worked as a bartender to actually pay the bills. I was so bad as a bartender that eventually they just kind of made me a manager, and soon I had given up my dream of being a comic and instead spent the majority of my time doing various chores running a bar.
Something was nagging at me though and I didn’t totally know what it was at the time. I knew I wanted more out of life than what I was doing, but I had gotten very comfortable and at the time I couldn’t see too many other options than to continue to do what I was doing. I had developed an interest in Psychology, and had taken to analyzing my dreams in pursuit of this interest.
One night I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I had dreamed that my brother and I were wandering through the woods in ragged clothing, terribly impoverished, and searching for our father. I woke up with a tremendous sense of loss, foreboding, and pending doom. I opened one of my books on dream interpretation and found a passage interpreting a dream similar to the one I just had. It said this kind of dream may be indicative that one would be called to a deathbed soon. I dismissed this interpretation as fatalistic. One hour later my mother called, informing me my dad had died during the night.
At my father’s funeral the priest read from the book Tuesdays with Morrie. Sitting in that church and hearing those words about loss and regret, I vowed to change my life. Upon my return home I enrolled in school and began my personal journey towards being a Psychologist. And my first assignment in my first class? Read the book Tuesdays with Morrie and relate the concepts in the book to a loss in my own life.
I could have simply dismissed all of these events as coincidences, but I knew from my experiences that the universe had just hit me with a thunderbolt, and that I had better begin paying attention.
So years later I’m a therapist. It’s an incredibly gratifying job and one that I feel totally energized doing. I get lazy all the time and forget to listen to the signs that surround me. I’ve become convinced that everyday the universe is trying to tell you SOMETHING… Most days I miss the sign. Jung said one of the fundamental drives of human beings is to be lazy, and I am as guilty of that as anyone. But when a person has experienced these kinds of things in their lives they start to pay a lot more attention, and right now, I can say, in this period of my life, I’m awake…
“When you look back on your life, it looks as though there were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then later you see it was perfect.
Arnold Schopenhauer
I’ve thought about this quote a lot in my life. My life feels like a chaotic mess about 90 percent of the time. And yet, often when I look back on other messy periods of my life, I realize I emerged from these experiences a much wiser man.
The first truly astounding “coincidence” in my life occurred when I was 24 years old and road tripping across the western United States to work in Glacier National Park for the summer. It was a glorious time in my life. I had a Volkswagen bus filled with so much beer I could barely fit my luggage in there. I brought along dozens of books to read for the summer. I was young, I was single, and I was free.
So I took my time getting out to Montana that summer, stopping every hundred miles or so to camp, to drink, to meet the locals in little towns, and really just relax. At one point I pulled into a little KOA campground in Idaho and set up shop for the night. I began icing down my beer when I noticed a young couple doing the same in the campground across the way.
As was my custom, I walked over to them and invited them to come by later and hang out and drink some beer. They were a couple of years younger than me and were traveling across the United States for the first time. They were a little lost as to where they were going, and accepted my offer to come and hang out with great enthusiasm. The offer of free beer of course didn’t hurt..
So we talked well into the night. I gave them some advice on places to go, and they told me about their lives back home in Kentucky. We talked about books, philosophy, sports, beer, and everything else people in their 20’s talk about as we watched the sun come up as the fire slowly dwindled. Eventually they returned to their campsite and I fell into a very deep and contented sleep.
When I woke up they were gone, apparently eager to hit the road and check out some of the places we had talked about. I envied them, seeing this beautiful part of the country for the first time. At 24 I felt old, not knowing that I was in fact in one of the most wonderful and adventurous periods of my life.
I had the most glorious, wild, reckless, amazing, summer of my life that year. From the little bars in strange corners of the state, to the Calgary Stampede, to road trips, and hiking and drinking, it was a summer I would never forget, and yes I even fell in love. I met a Southern Belle, and cut to two years later I moved down south to be closer to her.
I never pictured myself living in the South, but I actually adapted pretty quickly. I was working as a bartender and trying to figure out my next move in life as I continued to get a little older. Although I loved traveling and adventure and being free, I was starting to think that maybe it was time to get a little better plan together as to what I actually wanted to do with my life.
So one day I was at a party at my girlfriend’s house when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I didn’t know to many people there at the time, so when the kid asked me, “Is your name Joe?” I was definitely a little surprised.
It turns out it was the kid from the campground who I certainly thought I would never see again. Certainly this was a small world kind of moment and kind of an amazing coincidence, but simply seeing him again was not the end of the story.
“This may sound weird man, but I want to tell you something that’s pretty important,” he went on. “Talking with you that night and hearing how passionate you were about all of these books you’ve read really sparked something. I guess what I wanted to tell you was, I decided to become a teacher because of that night and that conversation that we had.”
And I was blown away!! Here I hadn’t even scratched the surface on my own career and I was altering people’s lives with a one-night conversation. I can still remember that conversation as if it was yesterday. It was the first taste I really had that people paid any attention at all to the things I had to say. I always felt a little like an imposter, dispensing advice, discussing literature, and pontificating, when at the time I didn’t even have a college degree.
And looking back all of these years later, I realized that conversation did in fact send me on a long road to becoming a kind of teacher. I’m a therapist now and a writer, and while I’m still not totally convinced anyone really listens to what I say, I do know how much power even one small conversation can potentially have. In this particular story I met this man twice, but somehow we had improbably each altered one another’s destiny in a profound and powerful way. It still amazes me really.
My journey with religion has been a long and winding road. I went to Catholic school for the first 8 years of my life, and just by the process of Osmosis I learned a lot about the Bible and all of the major players in it. I fainted once on Ash Wednesday. I dreaded the idea of someone putting dirt on my head and my body just shut down. I was in fourth grade. Another time the Bishop of our dioceses poked me in the eye and then went right back to working the room. He knew he did it. That was the end of the religious chapter of my life. I was about 14.
The next 7 years or so me and spirituality kind of broke up. Books became my salvation, and these were the years I did some serious discovery, most of it in the hammock of my own back yard. One day when I was 21, I was reading the book “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles and came across this quote.
“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
And that was it for me. I hit the road. My first stop was Yellowstone park for a summer. It was incredible. I remember watching the movie Field of Dreams. One of the characters said “We don’t realize the most significant moments of our lives while they are happening.” I didn’t know it at the time but that was incredibly prophetic. That summer was my first taste of so many things. Somehow the time spent out in the wild had also reignited an old spark. I felt something when I was wandering in those mountains..I don’t know what it was, but it felt like what I thought religion should have felt like. Plus no one was poking me in the eye or trying to rub dirt on my head.
Something was stirring, but I didn’t know then what it was. As Soren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
A year later I was working at the Grand Canyon. One day I went hiking all the way to the bottom with a couple of friends. We got separated and I would up all the way at the bottom of that place with not another soul around for miles.
It was Dusk…
I took it all in All of this had been around for millions of years, yet at this time, in this place, it belonged to me. This was my moment. This was my time. And then I felt an energy. An incredible energy, rise up inside of me… I knew. I knew that whatever energy existed in this world I shared a piece of it. I was connected to it. I had access to it. I also knew that I was supposed to add to it. That I had been given gifts that would help me add to it. Improbably, against all odds, I had defined at that moment what spirituality meant in my own life…
This experience would lead me to the study of what Carl Jung called Synchronicity, which defines how there are really no accidents in our lives. If we can break though the noise, the apathy, the laziness, I discovered that we just might find there were incredible secrets to unravel as to why people come into our lives when they do. This is a lesson that has been presented to me over and over again. I still don’t understand this in real time. I need to stumble, to fail, to push people out of my comfortable world, before I really realize their importance. I am humbled by this. But it has, finally, after many years, made me a person who likes to listen. It’s why I love people’s stories. They are transformative.
So for me the interconnectedness of human beings is the spirituality we have in this world. We all need each other so much, yet we find a million little ways to push people out of our spaces. I do this too. People that come into therapy do it a lot as well. I am well-equipped to advise them because I have fallen down all the same stairs. We all have little parts of ourselves that loves to sabotage our happiness. Like a Big Blue marble of misfit toys, we are fallible and we are flawed, but we can come to appreciate and even love each other’s imperfections because we have them ourselves. That is our shared legacy. That is what spirituality means to me…
Synchronistic events offer us perceptions that may be useful in our psychological and spiritual growth and may reveal to us, through intuitive knowledge, that our lives have meaning.
Jean Shinoda Bolen
After the death of my friend I received a letter from one of his good friends who I did not know. She said something that really struck me and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head ever since. She said “Sam's death will make just as much of an impact as his life did.”
That one sentence summed up so eloquently everything I’m trying to get my head around right now. The chain of events all of our significant actions (and many of our seemingly insignificant ones) set in motion. I am paying so much more attention now, as I am starting to observe where I once turned a blind eye.
One explanation as to why we turn this blind eye is that we are simply too busy to go around noticing coincidences and paying attention to mystic omens in our lives. Joseph Campbell, a great believer in synchronicity and a kind of disciple of Carl Jung, referred to this as “the refusal of the call.’ He explained that,
“The Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or 'culture,' the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration."
In essence when we refuse the call, we are trying to avoid the suffering that taking risks may bring, but in this avoidance we bring another kind of suffering on ourselves. Jung said, “Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.” All of us will grow old, get sick, lose loved ones, and die.
So although that sounds rather morbid, perhaps by truly seizing this adventure we can beat back the mundane, the boredom, the pain, the illness, and all the rest of it for the short time that we have been given. Hemingway talked about making love as “beating back death” and I think that’s a good metaphor for life’s grand adventure.
So all of this leads me back to the idea that my friend may have as much of an impact in his death as he did in his life. Something about his dying sent a little existential shock wave into my life that I haven’t been able to fully comprehend. Part of this came from contemplating my own mortality. Whenever someone close to us dies, at least some of the grief we feel is thinking about the fact that one day we will be gone as well. One quote that always reminds me of this comes from J. Furniss who reminds us,
“Never forget that you must die; that death will come sooner than you expect... God has written the letters of death upon your hands. In the inside of your hands you will see the letters M.M. It means "Memento Mori" - remember you must die.”
I’ve always loved that quote but I’ve rarely lived that quote. Until recently I’ve really felt a creative spark that was ignited by my friend’s death. I haven’t done comedy in years. My writing has very much been on the shelf for the last couple of years, but now, well, I have been massively creative. But why? What was it about someone dying that lit this fire?
I do know that I saw the outpouring for my friend when he died, and I thought to myself, what is the secret to being remembered like this? What are the qualities of this kind of life? What does it look like?
And I kept coming back to overcoming fear. My friend was pretty fearless, and whatever energy he left behind, I know I somehow absorbed a lot if it. Perhaps that is what the afterlife really is. The goodwill, laughter, friendship and wisdom you leave behind becomes a kind of energy that those you left behind can use as they wish. That’s what it means to me anyway, and I’ve been getting some daily reminders of how this is true..
Posts
