August 18th, 2003
In Southern Skies, a Rare Close-Up Glimpse of Mars is on the computer screen. Mars will be closer to Earth than it has been in 60,000 years. “Heaven is on the way” by Bush (the singer, not the president) is coming through the speakers at the moment I read the article. A peculiar confluence of image and vocal, a personal synchronicity to fuel my day.
When do we call something a coincidence, a mere passing of two ships in the night, and when do we call it a synchronicity? When do we choose to hear the universe speaking to us as a moment of connection and grace?
As inclined as I may be towards poetic and spiritual existence, it really can be taken too far. Oh, my GOD, you have a car?!? That’s incredible! I have a car, too! Wait, you mean you’re driving to work? UNBELIEVABLE. I was just on my way to work as WELL. What a SYNCHRONICITY! That’s when my father’s voice pipes up in my head. Look, it’s 9 in the morning and we’re at Dunkin Donuts off the highway. What else did you expect to find? To quote Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
And then sometimes… it’s not just a cigar. You’re at the well, gathering water to pour on a struggling rose bush, and you find a wasp’s nest. You try to drive the wasps away and one of them stings you. You discover at the age of 58 that you’re severely allergic, and you soon find yourself in the throes of anaphyllaxis… choking, convulsions. If the car hadn’t been by your side, you wouldn’t have made it to the house. If you hadn’t decided to go to the pharmacy, you wouldn’t have made it to the hospital. If the doctor hadn’t been next door with a shot of cortisone, you wouldn’t have made it out of the pharmacy alive. In its peculiar way, anaphyllaxis fades rapidly amid the onslaught of epinephrine and cortisone, and that night you fall asleep with no more than a slight rash and deeply shaken nerves.
This is not a hypothetical. Two weeks ago on Saturday I woke up to my mother calling, hysterical, standing in the hospital in the aftermath of my father’s surprise allergic reaction. Later that night he called me, recovered, shaken.
A conversation has ensued with my father since that moment. It is a conversation about death, about circumstance, about lessons to learn. It is a conversation about looking for the deeper meaning in life’s events, about finding oneself in an order of the universe larger than we can perceive. He is skeptical, but he is open. I am excited, but I am trying not to evangelize.
For the past two years or so I’ve gradually learned to listen, to engage in life as a conversation with God. I work my hardest, putting my intentions and efforts out as a service to my highest ideals. Then I listen back to the songs, responses, and events of my world as the voice of the Universe, the voice of my Higher Self speaking back to me. Nataniel, my spiritual mentor, sees a fundamental equivalence between Sufism and Hassidism, the two traditions from which we draw: both teach how to be a holy listener. Existence as dialogue.
Will my father engage in that conversation more than he does now? I certainly do not need him to. He has proven to me that at leasts he understands the way I live and the dialogue I have found. His profound gratitude and impeccable ethics in living show no lack of goodness or humility. I do not need to change him.
I do, however, feel an urge to share this magic, this wonderful dance of life imbued with Spirit. As tempted as I am to give away the ending of the book, I’ll refrain and just say that The Life of Pi captures this beautifully. We have a choice whether to call coincidence synchronicity, whether to live our lives in conversation with a higher power, whether to see ourselves as part of an ever-unfolding and fantastic story. Does this mean that Spirit or God is any less real because we have that choice? Is my love for my friends and family and teachers any less real because I can choose to close myself off? Isn’t there actually something more profound about a man’s love for his wife than that for his mother, whom blood obligates him to love?
Still, I can not but love God. I can not but learn from God. I can not but converse with God. I can not but dream of God. As if these sentences had any meaning at all, casting God as a noun when I could better use the verbs of loving, learning, dreaming, and conversing themselves. On Shabbat we sang a niggun written by Reb Zalman – You are action, you are feeling, you are knowledge, you are being; You are action, you are feeling, you are knowledge, YOU JUST ARE. Those last words captured it all for me.
So is Heaven on its way? Will the proximity of Mars next week bring the presence of Spirit? Will it show this confluence of notes and words to be prophesy? My friends going to Burning Man seem to think so. As for me, I will be seeing a close friend whose absence has torn at my heart for three months. So I guess the moment was right. How about that. Yes, it’s a matter of interpretation, and yes it is deeply tied to my subjectivity. But if I hadn’t listened at all?
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