What about "no synchronicity?"

No synchronicity? You’re kidding, right?

Carl Jung wrote, “Notice the synchronicity and you’ll know you’re on the right path.” My oldest son, Pepper Lebeck-Jobe, asked, “But what about when there is no synchronicity?” He had me stumped for several weeks. But I finally have an answer for him. I would even speculate that Jung might be pleased.

There is never no synchronicity. And that leads to another question. Are we ever on the wrong path? No.

Now you may begin to throw rotten tomatoes. Even if it makes no sense to you, please smoke it over. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, but I think everything that happens flows out of everything that has already happened in such a synchronistic and connected way that we can either love it or be doomed to nit pick until the cows come home.

Really? Yes, really.

For the moment, set aside the obvious problem with this idea or notion or belief. What about evil? For many years, the problem of evil has stumped people who think about this stuff. Bishop John Shelby Spong made the point that so many have made, especially since World War II and the Holocaust, that there simply cannot be a loving God who cares deeply for us all if Hitler and that crowd could act with such violent cruelty. But what if there is something loving in the totality of everything? What if love comes out of every beat of our hearts, every act of kindness, every sunset and every dew drop hanging at the tip of a leaf of grass? What if this assumed-to-be-loving god-like energy is not off somewhere pulling cosmic puppet strings, and we are, instead, finding love under every rock, in every cloud shape in the sky, among the objects on the counter tops in our kitchens and the places where we stack our mail to be opened later? What if it is all synchronicity?

Some friends and I have made lists of moments when the apparent unseen hand or fate or God or Jerry Garcia appears to have lined things up so that we are struck by what looks to be a miracle. Here is one of my favorites.

Gary Phillips and his wife, Ilana Dubester, were listening to the radio and heard a song called “Cotton Mill Blues,” which was recorded on June Apple Records, a label in Kentucky for which Gary had once helped make a quilt.

Phillips, a community based minister, gardener, poet, essayist, and one who often sings to lead worship, knew immediately that he wanted to add the song to his repertoire, so he began searching for recordings. As most of us do these days, he used the Internet. He found nothing. He worked with several web sites, sources of lyrics, recordings and such and gave up.

Next door to Weaver Street Reality, where Gary has worked for many years, is All-Day Records. He walked over and asked about “Cotton Mill Blues.” The guy looked incredulous and asked if one of his partners had put Gary up to the request. When Gary said, “no,” the guy handed him the album with only a paper sleeve, saying the recording had come in just that morning in the wrong jacket, and he was just before mailing it back to the supplier for a refund. He charged Gary five bucks for the album.

Bizarre, uncanny, some would even call it a “God wink.”

But before you throw your next rotten tomato, let me offer that there are countless synchronicities in this story. Both of these two men had beating hearts, lungs that processed the air they were breathing, food in their bellies from a morning breakfast, urine in their bladders that would soon need to pass, dozens of thoughts about the day ahead and memories of times gone by. Two men who met briefly to acknowledge what novelist Allen Levi calls “mysterious choreography.” But how strange it would have been if either man had failed to breathe or suffered a heart attack. When poet Max Ehrman told us “The universe is enfolding exactly as it should,” was he on to something awfully important?

Of course, Hitler was awful, but when we trace back his own child abuse, the anti-semitism of the previous centuries, humanity’s passion for war and therefore needing some “others” to hate and kill, is there any way that anything else could have happened? There is a whole genre of literature that seeks to undo history and ask multiple layers of “what if” questions. But everything that has happened is over and done with. It is crystalized and hard. Some new facts are found at the backs of dresser drawers in old letters and such, but there is an overwhelming doneness about all that has happened.

And there is an overwhelming doneness about our heart beats, our lungs, our bellies and our bladders. Things are simply as they are. Yes, we make judgments and seek to better ourselves and opportunities for others. Yes, we are active in our pursuit of dreams or simply getting dressed in the morning, but what if that all happens exactly as it does because of everything that has gone before? Do we have the choice of loving life as it is or must we offer the occasional niggling complaint? In offering that niggling complaint, are we not doing what we would have done no matter what some old preacher might recommend?

Let the rotten tomatoes fly.