I’m perpetually intrigued by synchronicity, that phenomenon that Carl Jung described as “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” Translated into English, synchronicity is the thing that happens when mysterious connections pop up with no immediately obvious cause. Occasionally I experience synchronicity in big ways, like when I preached my first sermon about twenty years ago. I was with a group of folks from the Wesley Foundation (the United Methodist campus ministry) at Florida State University, and we were sharing in a Sunday evening worship service at a church in Pinellas Park. At the end of the service, as I was visiting with some of the church’s members, I realized that I had just preached my first sermon from the pulpit of a congregation that had been founded by the man who was the senior pastor of the church I grew up in, and who had been a significant influence in my life and my call to ministry, and who had just recently died of a brain tumor. Forgetfulness is occasionally a blessed thing; I’d heard him talk about Pinellas Park UMC plenty of times, but if I’d been aware I was preaching in the pulpit that O. Dean Martin had once occupied, I’m not sure I could have gotten through it.
When that kind of big synchronicity happens, I experience it as an occasion of encouragement and confirmation, sort of a cosmic “attagirl.” That night in the church in Pinellas Park, I was really early in my journey toward ordained ministry, and I still carried lots of questions about how that journey might unfold. Sitting alone in the sanctuary for a few moments after everyone had left, I had a sense that I was moving in a direction that, while I didn’t know quite where it was heading, was a good one for me, and also that God has a pretty keen sense of humor. (The humor thing has been confirmed plenty of times, and I find that God’s sense of humor seems to grow more twisted the farther I go along).
Those big occasions of sacred timing can be fairly strange, but it’s actually the small occurrences of synchronicity that really mystify me, those coincidences that seem utterly random and minor and without any obvious point. Like seeing a guy in the line at the post office one morning, and then spotting him an hour later in the grocery store. I’d never seen him before and haven’t seen him since. Or like coming across the phrase cui bono while reading a novel recently. It’s a Latin phrase that means “Who benefits?” With all the mysteries I read, one would think I would’ve encountered it before. Ten minutes later it popped up in a movie I was watching on TV.
The big synchronicities make a measure of sense to me because they offer some assurance that there’s meaning in the midst of our sometimes chaotic lives. They remind me that if we work at staying awake and discerning God’s longing for our lives, and if we seek to move in the direction of that longing, we’ll (hopefully) experience cool occasions of confirmation. But the small synchronicities—I don’t really understand those, though they happen a lot. When they occur, they make me wish I could go somewhere like the Existential Detective Agency that Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman run in the movie I Heart Huckabees, where you can hire them to investigate these kinds of small coincidences to see if there’s any underlying meaning.
Even though the small synchronicities don’t seem to have much inherent meaning or obvious point, I think of them as reminders that God is at work, even in the minor stuff, and that everything is somehow connected—mysteriously, mystifyingly connected; that we are “inexplicably inextricable,” as one writer has put it (in “Cold Calling” at her SouthQuest blog). My sweetheart Gary says it’s God winking.
Here’s my favorite recent wink.
I’m a huge fan of the comic “Get Fuzzy,” which, for the unfortunately uninitiated, features a perpetually cranky, vengeful, conniving cat named Bucky Katt, who always has a scheme up his furry sleeve; an endearingly hapless dog known as Satchel Pooch; and their long-suffering human, Rob Wilco (who, yes, has a brother named Roger). A few days ago I was telling Gary about a recent “Get Fuzzy” strip (because it seems important to keep him up to date on what’s going on in their world) in which Bucky was plotting to do product placement in Broadway musicals. The strip I was recounting culminated in Bucky singing, “IKEA! I just met a girl named IKEA!” (You can see it here, though it won’t be quite the same without my off-key rendition of the West Side Story tune.) I told Gary about visiting the IKEA store with my sister in Toronto and that I wouldn’t mind having one here in Orlando. You know, for the day when I’m not living in a wee studio apartment, and Gary and I actually have a home together that needs furnishing.
So, the next day, an IKEA catalog shows up in Gary’s mail. And then yesterday I heard on the radio that IKEA is coming to Orlando.
Wink.
Maybe it means that it won’t be too long before Gary and I have a place that will give us a reason to make a trip to IKEA…
