Mere Coincidence? Grace, Synchronicity, and the Holy
Spirit
by
Rev. Richard Hasselbach
“You
yourself are a fragment torn from God: you have a portion of Him
within yourself.”
Epictetus
Introduction
In May of the
year 1748, the Greyhound, a badly damaged English merchant ship,
struggled to stay afloat off the coast of Newfoundland. The vessel
had been battered for more than a week by a severe North Atlantic
gale and was taking on water. On the eleventh day of the storm,
John Newton, an exhausted young seaman, had been alone at the helm
struggling to keep the ship on course for more than eleven hours.
Newton was not a particularly religious man, but he recorded in his
journal that when it seemed to him as if all was lost and the ship
would surely go down, he found himself praying “Lord, have
mercy upon us.”
The ship did not go down, the gale subsided, and eventually the
Greyhound made it safely to port in England. Newton believed that
God had answered his desperate prayer and saved the ship. Sometime
later, Newton realized that the battered Greyhound, struggling to
stay afloat in the stormy North Atlantic, was a metaphor for his
own life.
In
the storm that nearly killed him, John Newton began to find a
deeper meaning in life. Slowly, the spark that ignited in his soul
on May 10, 1748 transformed a coarse sailor, one engaged in horrors
of the slave trade, into a man profoundly in touch with God. Years
later Newton, now an Anglican divine, wrote a hymn about his
transforming moment at sea; we know it as Amazing Grace.
Coincidence brought John Newton to his moment of grace. Newton
happened to be on the Greyhound during this voyage; the gale
happened to occur while the ship sailed the North Atlantic; the
ship’s distress happened to suggest the state of his own soul
to him. Were these coincidences mere coincidence?
Carl Jung called coincidental events that are experience as tied
together by life shaping meaning “synchronous,” and he
considered “synchronicity” a phenomenon by which the
deepest archetypal aspects of our psyche attract us to a fuller
life. Saints and sages throughout the ages
attributed
this
phenomenon to the grace of God, which is symbolized in Christian
Trinitarian theology by the Holy Spirit.
What is
Grace?
Perhaps we can
best understand Grace by first discussing what it is not. Grace is
not quantifiable; we can’t see it or measure it. Nor is grace
within our power to create or control – we can neither earn
grace nor lose it. Rather grace is the very life of God given to us
freely as the life of our life. Grace is God’s creative
self-gift – divine love so intimate that it constitutes our
very being as human, and which is ours by virtue of our creation.
Grace, put simply, is the outpouring of divine love into the human
spirit that makes us who we are.
Grace is our
individual identity in relation to the universe, and in relation to
each other. It is our deepest personal reality – yet it is
beyond us; intensely personal, it is shared with all other created
things. Grace is the dynamism that enlivens the human spirit
– ever luring the attentive heart to be more fully alive and
more deeply and individually real. In religious terms, Grace has
been described as the breath of God; the Ruach Elohim (Spirit of
the Lord), ever present, invisible, gentle, supremely powerful, and
unremittingly persistent. It is both the great storm that swept
Jonah into the belly of the beast, and the “still small
voice” heard by the Prophet Elijah, who knew when he heard it
that he was in the presence of God (1 Kings 19:12-13).
Every living thing contains a spark of the divine. Throughout
history, humankind has built churches and temples to house the
deity and theologians of all faiths have written volumes on the
nature of the “one true god,” but the ineffable Ground
of our being eludes all human effort to encapsulate it in either
bricks and mortar, or dogma and law. The human soul is the
paradigmatic ‘temple’ of God’s presence in the
cosmos; the place where the graced relationship of divinity and the
universe is made complete.
Through our
coming to consciousness, and to the extent we come to
consciousness, we reveal the divinity of the world to itself, and
we discover in the process that the heart of our own unique
personhood is the spark of the divine that we carry in our hearts.
Grace is ours neither because of our adherence to laws nor because
we have embraced some dogma in faith. We are graced because the
life of God enlivens our own inner life – grace is who we
really are, and it lures us to realize the full possibility of our
humanity.
All the great religions, with their tradition, ritual, and sacred
stories, are important to the work of grace; they show us ways to
access the mysterious depths of our heart; they chart the inner
journey. All religions, rooted as they are in humanity’s
archetypal experience of being in the world, capture an aspect of
the eternal that can resonate in our heart and help us to
understand the journey within and live mindfully.
Grace and the
Holy Spirit
Christians speak
of the divine life dwelling within us as the Holy Spirit. In
Trinitarian terms, if the Father is the symbol of the absolute
transcendence and otherness of God, then the Holy Spirit is the
symbol of God’s absolute intimacy with our souls. The Spirit
bespeaks a love so intense that the Lover is one with the beloved.
It is the divine feminine: Her presence within us is pure gift. The
gift of the Spirit is the Grace of God.
Another name Christians give the Spirit is “Paraclete.”
The name comes form the Greek parakletos, which can be translated
variously as “teacher,” “helper,” or
“comforter.” There is a sense of gentle formation in
this notion. The Paraclete is the presence of God within that
lures, teaches, and helps us on our inner journey to full selfhood.
The Spirit invites us to become one with our center, which She is,
so that with St. Paul we might say: “It is no longer I who
lives, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). This
mystical sense of achieving oneness with the Ground of being is not
unique to Christianity: it is at the root of the Hindu’s
great realization that “Atman is Brahman;” it is the
Buddhist’s enlightenment; it is living in accordance with the
Tao.
The Soul and
the “Self”
When
psychologist C. G. Jung writes about the Archetype of the Self he
is describing that aspect of the human psyche, observed in his
clinical practice, which is analogous to what Christians call the
Spirit. Like the Spirit, the Archetype of the Self is both our most
intimate identity and also an aspect of our inner world that
reaches beyond just the inner world. The Self is both the heart of
the psyche and more than the psyche. It is our deepest and most
personal reality; where we are most real. Consciousness strives
toward the self – attempting to appropriate the Self and make
it, and not the ego, the center of the soul. Yet Jung believed that
the Self also transcends the psyche – through it we are in
touch with the eternal and universal Ground of our being.
We are most profoundly united to other people and to the
world It is
through the
Self. As the presence of the Ground of being, the Self is the
cosmos within us. In being present to the Self, we are present to
the universe in all its particularity; we are one with everything
and everyone. The realization of this oneness is the basis of
selfless love and compassion for the stranger.
The Archetype of the Self, both imminent and transcendent, is
simultaneously in time and timeless. It is the archetype that
organizes all other images and symbols, arising out of the
unconscious to achieve a single end – to lure our
consciousness to it. The Self calls out to us to be who we are, and
to be everything we have the potential to be. It guides us to be
ever more authentic and individual. It is the magnet of creation
that draws us – through dream images and imaginative
experience – into the role we ought to play in the unfolding
of the universe. The Archetype of the Self is a Jungian description
of Grace at work in our individual lives and in the
world.
Synchronicity
and Soul-making
Jung believed
that one of the powerful ways the Archetype of the Self lures us
into our best future is through profoundly meaningful, coincidental
events of the type Jung frequently observed in his own life and the
lives of his patients. He called these events
“synchronous,” and defined the phenomenon of
synchronicity simply as “acausal, meaningful,
coincidence.” It is worth looking at each word in that
definition separately to understand clearly what Jung means.
First, synchronous experiences are coincidental. They involve two
or more events that happen proximate to each other. They may be
events in our inner world, events in the outer world, or a
combination of the two. However we experience these events not as
merely random, but as occurrences that are deeply related to each
other. They are not merely incidents they are co-incidents.
Second, the synchronous events, while co-incidental, are not
related to each other causally. The relatedness of the events
cannot be explained in terms of the cause and effect paradigm of
modern thought. While we can’t explain why these events
occurred proximate to each other; we know that they did –
that somehow they belong together.
Finally, though not related causally, synchronous events are
profoundly related by meaning. They jolt us, or surprise us with
some insight. Through the organization and confluence of events, we
are invited to deepen our understanding of who we are and what we
must be in relation to both our inner and outer worlds. Some
synchronous events are quite dramatic while others are subtler; all
call us to a deeper level of individuation; they invite us to be
more “at one” with the Self - the Spirit.
When a synchronous event occurs there is always an aspect of
surprise in it – and awe. Jung explained that synchronicity
is the work of the archetypal level of our collective unconscious,
which carries with it a numinous quality. We neither expect the
co-incidence, nor can we rationally explain it, but through the
meaning it engenders we know that we are in the presence of the
mystery of our own unfolding humanity. In these moments, which can
be called moments of grace, the Self breaks into our present,
time-bound existence giving us a glimpse of the eternal and
timeless. Synchronicity invites us to become more fully ourselves
– to step into our best future, and sometimes even to step
into eternity.
Synchronicity
in Action
I can think of
no better example of synchronicity than the story of Abe
Zelmanowitz, a 55-year-old computer programmer who worked on the
27th floor of New York City’s World Trade Center. Abe was in
his office on the morning of September 11th when the WTC was
attacked. He could have gotten to safety. Co-incidentally, though,
he wasn’t alone in the office that morning – he was
with his paraplegic friend and co-worker, Ed. Abe called his
brother Jack soon after the first plane hit the South Tower. Jack
said “Abe, why are you still in there?” Abe’s
answer was as simple as it was striking. Abe stayed because he
didn't want to leave Ed trapped in the office alone. In a radio
interview Zelmanowitz' sister, Rita Lazar, explained, “Abe
accomplished nothing, really, except to decide on September 11,
2001, as the twin towers of death and fear filled his 27th
floor office,
just what kind of man he would be.”
In the
pandemonium of the moment, Abe distinguished between the ultimate
and the transitory. As important as life was to him, something more
was at stake, something the presented itself to him in the form of
his trapped friend. More real to him than his personal safety or
his instinct for self-preservation was his sense of
“belonging to and with the other. Abe Zelmanowitz
couldn’t leave his friend in the tower because it would have
been abandoning the deepest part of himself. He didn’t’
choose death; he affirmed life!
Abe responded to the synchronicity of the moment. He was caught up
in a moment of grace, and pulled by it to become his truest and
best self. His sacrifice is a reminder to us that we must be
attentive to our own synchronous moments – those times in our
lives when for no apparent reason events flow together and seem to
call us to decide who we are and who we will become.
Conclusion
The work of Grace is subtle. It neither forces nor coerces. Rather,
slowly and gently, and with utmost care, it urges, attracts and
guides us into itself, and into our own self-realization. Alfred
North Whitehead captures the dynamic when he describes God as
“…the poet of the world, with tender patience leading
it by his vision of truth, beauty and
goodness.”
Thro’
many dangers toils and snares
I have already come;
‘tis grace has bro’t me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
John Newton