Friendships come and go, but thanks to technology, I’ve been able to preserve a few that would have been dismantled otherwise by distance. When I moved to the U.S., back in 2017, I brought with me on my phone two good friends, Mateus and Julia, who I had worked alongside in the same office for three years. Since then, our conversations have been confined to Telegram, a messenger app.
On March 23rd, 2023, as I was scrolling down my Twitter account feed, I ran into this Seinfeld meme:
Since our group chat has been consistently used to joke around, I then quickly shared it with them commenting, “People still use Seinfeld material for their memes around here!”
Because of our hectic lives, it’s not always possible to open the messages and reply back to each other right away. So, two days later, on 3/25/2023, my friend Julia opens the chat to see what’s going on and says, “I watched exactly this episode on the same day you sent us the meme.” She had been completely unaware of the meme up until that moment. She then shared a picture of her watching history with the dates and the titles of the shows she had seen: 3/23/2023, Seinfeld: Season 3: The Subway. “You’ve got to be spying on me…”, she added.
Seriously, what are the chances of this happening?
The first person who observed this kind of phenomenon – to my knowledge – was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. He relates the following1:
My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably ‘geometrical’ idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab – a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the windows-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, ‘Here is your scarab.’ This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.
Jung goes on and classifies this previous example in a category defined as2:
The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content (e.g., the scarab), where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable.
Regardless of his own conclusions, Jung acknowledged and brought to the fore the presence of synchronicity, or “causeless” coincidences. It’s easy to see how the bug played a meaningful role to that particular story. In fact, I know people who experienced meaningful coincidences which influenced their lives in a substantial way in marriage, work, or with a breakthrough business idea. But what about those coincidental episodes that seem devoid of any meaning at all? This is precisely what stuns me. Synchronicity has puzzled me for years.
Another interesting episode happened to me in June 9th, 2024. After a long Sunday, having all the kids in bed, Natalie and I were catching up in our living room and I learned that one of her relatives was struggling with depression. The sad news was very surprising to me because this person always seemed to be in good spirits to me. She and her husband had recently retired and their two children had gone to college. Well, I should say that her husband had retired in theory. We talked about how – after building a mini-empire in the heating and air-conditioning business and handing it down to his son – he decided to farm full-time, a dream of his youth apparently. Trying to make sense of it all, I speculated that Natalie’s relative’s new condition might have been triggered by her life expectations. Maybe for a long time she had had specific dreams of enjoying life now and anticipated spending great moments and doing all sorts of things with her other half. Perhaps she dreamed about a revival of her nostalgic romantic days. Nonetheless, she now had to deal with disappointment and an empty nest.
With our conclusions sitting up in the air, my wife decided to go to sleep, but I still felt that my energy tank would allow me to read something for another 15 minutes before I joined her. I looked at the big pile of books right next to my chair where I was sitting and considered for a moment which book I would pick for that occasion. I then spotted one I had gotten around a month ago which I still hadn’t “touched”: Force for Good: The Catholic Guide to Business Integrity by Brian Engelland. I thought to myself, “Perfect! Let me just read the introduction and I’ll be ready for bed.” I read on page four of the book:
My dad grew up on a large Kansas farm, where he learned that equipment serves an important function at planting and harvest time. It must be properly maintained if it is to be useful when needed. Later he applied that understanding in developing a residential heating and air conditioning business (emphasis added).
I had a “mirrored” synchronicity here. That’s pretty neat! Synchronicity has been around my life for more time than I can even remember. These series of events are so numerous and frequent that I’m not able to keep good track of them. When I talk to people about them, it’s like they awaken for a new kind of awareness as they start noticing similar episodes in their own lives! I won’t hide. It’s refreshing to know I’m not alone with this weirdness.
Picking a name for an invention can get really exciting and it wasn’t different with my writing business. To enjoy the short Michigan warm weather, I took my family on a sunny evening walk in late spring this year. I told Natalie how I wanted to share with people unique perspectives on culture, religion, life, etc. as a layman Catholic writer perhaps on a newsletter or blog. Then I gave her a few potential names, including my favorite one at that time: The Catholic Exile.
On the very next day, Natalie opened her email in the morning and came across the latest St. Paul Center newsletter, which was promoting Scott Hahn’s brand-new book: Catholics in Exile.
In a different occasion, a friend gave me the sad news that his wife had just lost a baby. Later that week, I sat on my chair to relax for a few minutes during my lunch break. As I recollected in a praying disposition, I focused on my friend’s name, remembering the miserable days he was living. Two or three seconds later, one of the characters of a cartoon show my oldest daughter was watching spoke my friend’s name on the TV.
The examples are endless. You could think of a song in your head and then somebody starts singing it close to you. Or you could find an object that had been lost for years after a bizarre sequence of events. Here’s the burning question: What does it all mean? Before I try to answer this, let me bring forth what I do know. I know that even the hairs of my head are counted3. I also know that everything, absolutely everything, that happens in reality happens under God’s knowledge, permission, and control:
Lord, you have probed me, you know me: you know when I sit and stand; you understand my thoughts from afar. You sift through my travels and my rest; with all my ways you are familiar. Even before a word is on my tongue, Lord, you know it all. Behind and before you encircle me and rest your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, far too lofty for me to reach.4
So, how can I make sense of all this? By accepting reality as it presents itself to me – not willing to squeeze understanding from every single detail – is the solution I found for my own synchronicities. Not knowing everything – but accepting this limitation – puts me in a position of humility. I realized that it’s not so much about the content of those episodes or the amusing stories that may come with them. It’s not even about their meanings, but rather the fact that they happen to me. I’ll take them as God’s reminders of His presence, nudging me to bless His name, thank Him for all the graces, and ask Him for mercy, despite my imperfect grasp of things.
We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.5
Saint Augustine teaches in his treatise On Rebuke and Grace 6 that God works all things for our good to the extent that “even the sins of the elect are turned by God to their advantage”. If this is true, and I believe it is, this means that I can also offer up to God my awe before synchronicities, for love of Him and my own advantage, especially when surrounded by mystery. Thank you, Lord, for my synchronicities. You know all things.
1 Originally given as a lecture, Über Synchronizität, at the 1951 Eranos conference, Ascona, Switzerland, and published in the Eranos-Jahrbuch 1951 (Zurich, 1952). The present translation was published in Man and Time (Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, 3: New York and London, 1957).
2 Ibid.
3 The Holy Bible, Luke 12:7.
4 The Holy Bible, Psalms 139:1-6.
5 The Holy Bible, Romans 8:28.
6 Saint Augustine, De Correptione et Gratia, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1513.htm