I woke up Friday morning to a text from my mother. My mother texting me in the morning isn’t unusual in itself but the content surprised me. Included with her text was a photo of C. S. Lewis’s book The Screwtape Letters. She had been given a copy of the book as part of the Lent services at their church. She wrote that synchronicity was at work. I smiled.
Now, you may know from the article that I started this A Changing Frame of Reference series with, that I wrote about another C. S. Lewis book. On a trip to Ontario I took in 2022, a friend who had driven me to the airport described a book he was reading, Surprised By Joy. I’d never heard of it but had already become fascinated by some of Lewis’s other work. When I had arrived at my parents’ home on that trip, sitting face-up on a bookshelf in the bedroom I slept in was Surprised By Joy. My parents had no idea how the book had got there. My father, who typically has great attention for detail, didn’t know they even had the book. Was it synchronicity?
I was in Ontario last week to visit my parents but the real purpose for my trip was to see and hang out for a while with my brother. A reunion of sorts, though “reunion” seems inappropriate for what it was. The relationship I’ve had with my brother over the years now seems quite odd but might best be described as stiff and estranged. Though only two years his senior, we’ve had little to do with each other than annual family get togethers since high school, which is forty odd years ago. But what now has happened to us I feel is best left to psychology and holds no interest for me to figure out. I just want to enjoy this new relationship with one of my new best friends, who happens to be my brother.
Why this new connection you ask? It started last summer after a family incident, the nature of which was irrelevant to what was to follow. After phone calls, emails and feeling like I was missing important information as to what had happened, I decided it would be best just to go and visit my parents to better understand what they were actually dealing with. After helping to resolve the issue, I called my brother to let him know what had gone on. Leave it to say, we started talking regularly by phone on the things that were happening. That weekly call progressed into this unplanned get together last week. He was flying into Toronto from a week of business in Boston to visit our parents and wondered if I had any plans to head east. As luck would have it, or maybe something else, I’d been looking at flights to Toronto. The timing was set and now our “reunion” was all arranged. What brought this on, and why, is hard to say, but its hard not to think there were forces at work beyond us. In a way, not unlike synchronicity.
The reason for my mother’s morning text and her use of the word synchronicity is because during the weekend’s conversations with my brother and parents, I brought up Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. I was referencing, which I’ve written about in a previous article, how in the book Lewis writes from the point of view of a high-level representative of evil (Screwtape). At one point in the book, Screwtape describes to the demon he is training how humans live in time but the demons’ Enemy (God) destines them to eternity. He goes on to describe how their Enemy wants humans to attend to two things: eternity and the point in time called the Present. Lewis reasons that the Present is where “time touches eternity.” The evil world wants to tempt humans into either the Past, identifying widows and scholars as examples of those who might live in that time, or the Future. For them (the demon world) to make humans live in the Past has limited value for there is “some real knowledge of the past” and with its “determinate nature” has some resemblance to eternity. But the Future is the best time for the demons, says Screwtape, and is least like eternity as it inflames hope and fear. It is the unknown and “makes them think of unrealities.” The concept of the different points in time that we live in and think about seemed pertinent to the discussion we were having. My mother had not known the book was written in such a way and thought she might like to read it. Hence, when the book came into her hands days after our discussion, she thought of synchronicity.
For those of you not familiar with the word, I’ve become intrigued by C. G. Jung’s Theory of Synchronicity. It’s found its way into several of my articles. Jung’s theory that recognizes unusual yet meaningful coincidences that link our internal world with our external world, which I have extended to how the unconscious links to our conscious world, or our so-called reality. I’ve been onto synchronicity, and convinced of its workings, for years even though it fits more into what we see as the metaphysical than scientific. Investigating what reaches beyond science and our material world also is the reason why I see in our trying to understand existence, or reality and what’s beyond it, we must include more than the physical science of our world. There’s simply too much around us that is not of a material nature to try and pin it all on science. If you’ve been reading previous articles even science is telling us that ninety-five percent of existence (the universe) consists of dark matter and dark energy that is invisible to us and, thus far, seemingly inaccessible.
Further to the picture my mother sent surprising me, was not that we’d just spoken about the book during the visit but that my mother was seemingly buying into the phenomena of synchronicity.
My mother’s text with a picture of The Screwtape Letters was only one of a culmination of the weekend’s events that seemed to be synchronistic. There were many. Saturday morning, my good friend Harold—one of the early guests on my Better Than Not podcast—stopped by on his way to Ottawa. That we’re connected at all seems another manifestation of synchronicity. We worked at the same company for years but never worked together—barely knew one another. We met when missing a connecting flight in Amsterdam. We shared a train ride to our destination. That fortuitous chain of events turned into an unexpected LinkedIn connection a couple of years ago and has us now continually sharing new discoveries. I had brought with me a number of books to give him but should have realized he would be reciprocating. The books he brought were like I’d requested them. Again, I experienced that synchronistic feeling as he handed me George Woodcock’s Thomas Merton, Monk and Poet: A Critical Study. In Episode #16 of Better Than Not I spoke with author Christiane Banks who highly recommended reading Thomas Merton and doing a silent retreat at Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky where Merton spent years of his life. His work is on my list. Harold then passed me Lisa Randall’s Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs subtitled The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe. My hands were shaking having written considerably about dark matter along with the connectedness of things in our existence like eternity, the unconscious and the Holy Spirit.
Once you become open to this synchronicity thing, you can’t not realize it. As I mentioned on one of my previous trips and finding Surprised By Joy on the shelf, this time added more. I haven’t yet written about historian Tom Holland but will be. His latest book is Dominion, which I’ve been keeping my eye out for. But looking through my father’s books on this visit, I came upon Holland’s book Persian Fire. I was surprised but smiled as I feel this synchronicity thing is a moniker to label this unknown part of what happens to us in this existence. What is the uncontrolled unconscious—our dreams—where we go at night when we sleep trying to tell us? Is it the same thing that brings us our thoughts? Or that runs our bodies—we clearly don’t? In addition to the Holland book, I also found C.G. Jung’s Flying Saucers, which I’d made note of wanting a couple of weeks before. Not as surprising a find in my father’s books as Holland’s but unexpected both in Jung’s choice of topic to write about—UFOs, really?—and that my father would have it as part of his Jung book collection.
Interestingly, this doesn’t just pertain to books. The other day while dressing for a run, I wished I’d had a few more long sleeve T-shirts. They’re lighter than a sweater and warmer than a T-shirt. Just after lunch on Saturday, my mother called me into her bedroom. A couple of what I thought were T-shirts lay on her bed. They were different colors. She held out one. Would I like them? They hadn’t been worn and she was going to get rid of them. They were my size. I didn’t hesitate. Sure, I’d take them. I didn’t ask any questions and only found out they were long sleeved when I packed them in my luggage with the books.
Why did a copy of The Screwtape Letters get in my mother’s hands? Or the other books I’ve mentioned get in my hands? Or the T-shirts? Over even the whole weekend? Or the richness and brotherly connection that surged up to bring my only brother and I to hang out together and become friends? Synchronicity?
I don’t have the answers and don’t expect them but synchronicity seems to be connecting something. It’s hard not to be struck by what I included in last week’s article and has happened to me, from Matthew 6:33 in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” In finally recognizing that I can’t do this life thing alone, I wrote about it in my 46th article, “Can’t Do It Alone.” Daily this becomes clearer to me, by the things that are directed my way by no fault of my own—that synchronicity thing.
It’s not a weakness to realize we can’t do life in this existence alone despite that we might hear the opposite from what we watch, listen to and see. Every line of thinking I seem to go down as part of this series, seems to end or point to the same end—it’s God’s doing. If you haven’t noticed, we didn’t get into this existence—this life—alone either. We had nothing to do with it, yet we are here.
Or maybe we should be glad and celebrate it as a weakness as Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 12:10, “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Sorry Hank to take so long with this reply. Great to hear from you! I hope you're doing well. Thanks for reading my A Changing Frame of Reference series. I've found much in this journey that's so opposite to what I'm now learning from both history and the Bible. Stupefying in fact. I hope you'll keep reading and send me more comments.
Yet when I am weak I am strong!!!! So..so key in life.Only when I lean on Him I am content and happy.Worldly psychologists take note. THX.Doug from an old friend(literally..70 now) Hank from Husky🤪