What I Have Gathered From Coincidence
And: A surprise visit to a most holy place with a marvelous guide
“Take what you have gathered from coincidence.” — Bob Dylan, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”
My friend Anna texted me from Hungary the other day commenting on a travel piece on Hungary in The New York Times that about Hungary that quotes something I wrote. That kind of thing happens a fair bit these days. Anna texted, “I bet growing up on the bayou you didn't really envision your name being forged in with this obscure Eastern European country.”
Well, no, how could I? The first Hungarian I ever met was Prof. Bela Bollabas, a world-renown mathematician and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He and his wife Gaby escaped from communism in the 1960s, defecting to Britain. I met them both in late August of 1985, in my apartment complex near LSU in Baton Rouge. I had just moved in to start my freshman semester, and was hanging out in the pool. I popped a mix tape in my jambox, and began playing pop and rock music, loud.
On a lounge chair poolside, a thin, angular older man looked up from his newspaper, and scowled at me. I thought this might be a chance to make a friend. “What’s your favorite music?” I called out.
“Barrrrrtok,” he growled.
We became friends indeed. At the end of the semester, before Bela and Gaby returned to Cambridge, he gave me the name and address of his sister back in Budapest, Emöke, a dentist. If you’re ever in Budapest, he said, look her up. I wrote the information down in a little red notebook I kept. I’m sure there’s no way I’m going to ever visit a communist country, I figured, but it couldn’t hurt. Over the years, I would run across that Magyar name in the notebook — “Emöke Erszébet Bollobas” — and try to work out the pronunciation. I used to wonder what a Magyar woman with such an interesting name must be like. What kind of city is Budapest? It seemed to mysterious. Eventually I lost the notebook and forgot about it.
Well, Bela and Gaby’s son Mark, who was just a little kid when I met him in the fall of 1985, now lives in Budapest with his wife and children. We have become friends. A few weeks back I texted Mark to let him know that I had rented a flat starting in September, a nice one right on the Danube on the Buda side, with a view of Parliament, and at a very good price. I gave him the address.
“That’s next door to Emöke!” he said. And so it is. I had no way of knowing it. I hadn’t seen her address in decades, and anyway, I was tipped off about this flat from a friend who lived there, and was moving out.
What are the odds? Of all the places I could have rented in that great big city, I stumbled into an apartment next door to a woman whose name and address I was given almost four decades ago, and who was the first person in Budapest I ever thought of.
I passed this story on to Anna in text. She responded:
In typical Rod fashion!!! Your life is so full of these, you should write a book. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
You know, it really has been full of these coincidences that seem somehow more than mere coincidence. Jung called them “synchronicities, which he defined as “meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” I’m generally very wary of Jung, but I think he was onto something there. From an essay about Jung and synchronicity:
Originally, Carl Jung coined the phrase “synchronicity” to explain the unexplainable. He had a patient that was incredibly smart. In fact, she was so smart that she was unavailable to receive the treatment that she needed to receive. She believed that the rational she experienced on a daily basis was enough to explain her own worries.
However, one day his patient had a dream about a golden scarab piece of jewellery. Then, while she was attending a session with Jung, a bug kept hitting the window. Intrigued, he opened the window and caught the bug in midair. It was a scarab beetle. When handed to his client, she saw past her own rationale.
Jung says that the key to understanding synchronicity is to look past the coincidence of it. Sure, coincidences happen all the time, but it’s when there is a deeper understanding of the coincidence that synchronicity takes place.
In fact, Carl Jung defined synchronicity as: “Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.”
More:
The only problem with synchronicity is that psychologists have a hard time describing it. Carl Jung himself had a hard time describing it because it’s a word to explain the unexplainable. However, there are some ways that synchronicity seems to manifest, including:
Two unexplainable coincidences
Seeing the same color or sign over and over again
Coincidences happening during highly emotional occurrences
Events happening frequently over a short or long period of time.
That’s not a very deep essay, so I wouldn’t click through to it if I were you. But it gives you a general idea of Jung’s thought on the topic. Remember, a synchronicity is not just a coincidence, but a meaningful coincidence. Here, by the way, is the scarab beetle incident in Jung’s own words:
By way of example, I shall mention an incident from my own observation. A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.
It was an extraordinarily difficult case to treat, and up to the time of the dream little or no progress had been made. I should explain that the main reason for this was my patient's animus, which was steeped in Cartesian philosophy and clung so rigidly to its own idea of reality that the efforts of three doctors—I was the third—had not been able to weaken it. Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce. The dream alone was enough to disturb ever so slightly the rationalistic attitude of my patient. But when the "scarab" came flying in through the window in actual fact, her natural being could burst through the armor of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin to move.
See, that’s the meaningful part of this coincidence — it was an extraordinary event that was needed for the patient to have a breakthrough.
I have found over the years that synchronicities tend to occur to me when I am at a crossroads in life, and am feeling anxious about a big decision, or some path I’m taking. I’ve learned to accept them as minor signs from God that I’m going in the right direction. Funnily enough, I just googled “synchronicity” and “right path” to see if others had had this experience, and I found this essay from a writer in Psychology Today, who said exactly that. The man tells this story about how a powerful and recurring synchronicity entered his life at a time when he was agonizing over whether or not to leave his newspaper job and become a freelance writer:
However, after years of trying to ignore this call, the signs pointing toward it took on a whole new tack. This is how it began:
I was driving home from work one day, listening to a song on the radio called “Desperado,” by the Eagles, and as I pulled up to the curb in front of my house, the last line I heard before I turned off the car was “Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, she’ll beat you if she’s able; the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet.” I turned off the ignition, opened the door, stepped my foot onto the curb, and there at my left foot was a playing card—the Queen of Hearts.
I just sat there utterly dumbfounded, and wondering, of course, what it meant?
When I mentioned the incident to a friend that evening, she said, with an extravagant quality of assuredness, that when you’re on the right path, the universe winks and nods at you from time to time, to let you know. She also said that once you start noticing these little cosmic cairns, once you understand that you’re on a path at all, you’ll begin to see them everywhere. It’s what happened, she reminded me, when I bought my Toyota and suddenly started seeing Toyotas everywhere.
I didn’t know I was even on a path, I told her, much less whether it was the right one. I simply found myself unable to make heads or tails of the episode, and ended up filing it under “Unexplained Phenomena,” along with esp, deja vu, spoon-bending, water-witching, spontaneous remission, and certain incomprehensible acts of human forgiveness.
But even more remarkable than finding that Queen card when I did, was that over the next two years, as I searched for a sense of clarity (and courage) about this call, I found five more Queen playing cards, in incredibly improbable locations all around the country: a sidewalk in Cincinnati, a conference room in Santa Fe, a sand dune in Cannon Beach Oregon, a mountain wilderness in Colorado six miles from the nearest trailhead. The whole thing made the Twilight Zone seem like Mister Rogers Neighborhood.
And every time I found another Queen card, the sheer unbelievability of it took another giant step forward, and eventually, it went so far beyond the laws of probability that I only barely hesitate to say that it’s impossible there was nothing more going on here than a statistical aberration. This was orchestrated by something with wits. Which shot my rational view of the universe pretty much to hell.
I come from a family of scientists, detectives, journalists, non-fiction writers, and New Yorkers—and you don’t get a more cynical bunch than this—and this stuff just doesn’t happen in our universe. And yet, though the phenomenon became more inscrutable with each find, in a way it also began making more and more sense. A pattern—more, a passageway—seemed to emerge.
I came to understand that this rather profound administering of chance was directing me toward something both my writing and my life needed at that time: more heart, less head. More intuition, less intellect. More of the inner life, the emotional life, the life of the senses. More listening. More of what Carl Jung referred to as the anima, the force of the feminine in a man’s life. And the Queen, of course, is the archetype of powerful feminine energy, which I felt myself being compelled toward by the kind of meaningful coincidence Jung called synchronicity.
People who believe in synchronicity but who are not believers in God like to say things like “the universe is sending you a sign.” Yes, I believe that signs are being sent — by God. They are meant to remind us that nothing happens by chance.
My late sister Ruthie and her family had a series of synchronicities around a number. I told the story in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. It started with a foot race Ruthie ran while Mike was deployed to Iraq:
An eerie thing happened in that race. Ruthie ran wearing Mike’s 769th Battalion t-shirt and his dog tags. Her official race number, printed on her paper bib, was 709.
Months later, Mike learned he would be sent home for an R&R break at Easter. He sat at the kitchen table in Starhill unpacking the small bag he had with him on the plane, and took out the bib numbers he had saved from the 5Ks he ran in Iraq.
“Ruthie said, ‘What are you doing with my number?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about,” says Mike. “‘She said, ‘That’s mine.’ I said no, I just took it out of my backpack. She took off running to the back of the house, and came back with hers. They were exactly alike, with the number 709.”
She thought it was God winking at us, letting us know that there is a hidden order running deeply beneath the surface of the world.
“My car died after Mike went back,” [Ruthie’s best friend] Abby says. “I had to buy a new vehicle, so she let me borrow Mike’s truck while I was shopping. I was headed out to her house one day, and she was headed into town. We passed each other going opposite directions. In front of me was a van from the penitentiary with the number 709 on the grille.”
Adds Mike, “The weird thing was that my rotation in Iraq was officially called OIF – for Operation Iraqi Freedom – 07-09. In her mind, that meant something. And believe it or not, I happened to arrive back home in the U.S. from Kuwait on July 9 -- another 07-09.”
After a few days of demobilization, Mike and his men made the last leg of their journey home, to the Baton Rouge Airport. Dignitaries and the media awaited them on the tarmac, but more importantly, so did their families. A photographer from the Advocate shot the moment Ruthie and the girls embraced Mike. It would be on the front page of the next day’s newspaper.
Because Mike was an officer, the Lemings lingered at the airport for an hour, until he had seen all his men off safely home. Meanwhile, Abby was frantic. They had planned a surprise party for Mike in Starhill, but Abby’s flight home from a Florida vacation had been delayed into New Orleans. She threw her luggage into her car and flew north, hoping to beat the Lemings to Starhill.
As Abby sped past the onramp near the airport, Mike and his family were at that moment pulling onto the interstate.
“That’s a 709 moment right there,” Mike said. Then they looked at the truck’s digital clock.
It read 7:09.
The greatest example of synchronicity in my life were the events having to do with my marriage to Julie. A week or so before we met in the fall of 1996, I had had a powerful series of synchronicities, followed by intense dreams. In the dream I had the night before I got on a plane to go to Austin, Texas, to meet my pal Frederica Mathewes-Green for a trip, I dreamed that I was walking on a rotten wooden deck holding the arm of a very old monk, a sweet, tender man who was withered with age. He was as dry as the boards on which we walked. I was steadying him as he talked to me. As he leaned against the railing, it was so dry that it gave way. The old monk tumbled into the lush green ravine below. I ran down to him, and watched him writhing in his last breaths … and then he turned into a beautiful young maiden.
The dream was so obvious that I thought it might mean that my three or four years of loneliness and chastity were coming to an end. That that asceticism, as hard as it had been, had spiritually matured me, and now my spirituality was going to be transformed by meeting the woman for whom I had prayed and hoped.
The next day I flew to Austin to meet Frederica, who was there to give a speech, and a reading of her new book at a Christian bookstore. At her reading, I was introduced to Julie, who was an undergraduate journalism student at the University of Texas. I was instantly thunderstruck. I thought: could this be The One? I had never, ever felt that way on meeting a woman before — and this is what I had prayed for. That feeling, I mean.
See, I was a very anxious young man, and very insecure. I had no trouble talking to women, even flirting like crazy. But if i was really romantically interested in a woman, I would get tongue-tied and super-neurotic. After I became a Catholic in 1993, I prayed the rosary all the time, asking the Virgin Mary to be a nice Jewish mama and pray that the Lord would send me a wife. And I also asked her to let me know if I was ever standing in front of that person, because I knew my heart well enough to know that I would bug out and blow my chance.
Well, here she was — and I had this overwhelming feeling that this girl was the one I had been waiting for. It was so strong that the feeling overcame all my usual anxieties. She was feeling the same thing. We fell in love that weekend. Four months later, we were engaged to be married, and planned our wedding for late in that year, 1997, after she finished school.
For various reasons, we decided to marry in New Orleans, not Dallas, her hometown, or my hometown. One weekend, we met in New Orleans to search out a Catholic Church in which to have the wedding (Julie was in the process of becoming a Catholic). We spent most of the day driving around, looking for one that felt right. The ones we liked weren’t available the day we needed it, and the ones that were available were unlovely. Dejected, we decided to drive back to my mom and dad’s place, and come up with a Plan B.
A friend of mine in the city suggested that on the way out of town, we try one more parish. We drove over there, walked in, looked at each other, and said, “This is the one.” It felt right — and it was available. We booked the church, and went on our way, pleased as punch.
Not long after that, Julie phoned me one night in Florida, and asked me what I thought about going to Portugal for our honeymoon. One of her father’s business colleagues had a house there on the coast he was willing to let us use, and her dad’s boss offered to buy us two round-trip plane tickets as a wedding present.
“Uh, yeah, I’d love to go to Portugal,” I said. “I’m going to tell you why, but it might weird you out, so here goes.”
I told her about how passionately devoted I was to the rosary, and how for years I prayed for a wife using it. When I moved to Florida in 1995, I got into the habit after receiving communion of going to the same side chapel in my parish to make my thanksgiving. Inside the chapel there was a statue of the Mother of Christ as “Our Lady of Fatima,” after a 1917 series of miraculous apparitions in a rural Portuguese village. I knew a little bit about the apparitions to three shepherd children, and that there had been a huge miracle on the final apparition, witnessed by over 75,000 people.
I told Julie that it would be a real blessing to me for us to be able to go to Fatima as part of our honeymoon to thank Mary for praying for us, and bringing us together. I could tell that she was slightly freaked out by all this, but she said fine, let’s go to Portugal.
After we got off the phone, I was sure that this had to be more than a coincidence. What are the odds? So I went online then, pointing my AltaVista web browser to a page about Fatima, so I could learn more about it.
What I learned was that the date of the final Fatima apparition — October 13 — was also the date Julie and I fell in love. And on that date, the Virgin told the children, “I am Our Lady of the Rosary.” The church that just felt so right in New Orleans that we booked it? Our Lady of the Rosary parish.
I knew then without a shadow of a doubt that our meeting and our coming marriage were orchestrated by heaven.
Now, of course, we are getting a divorce. A friend asked me if that caused me to doubt the Fatima synchronicity. Not at all! The Lord brought us together through the intercession of His mother — of that I am certain. But He did not promise us that we would stay together. We had the freedom to fail his gift, and His grace. And may God forgive us, that we did. But the first fifteen years of the marriage were the happiest of my life, and brought forth three wonderful children. The youngest, Nora, was born on — yep — October 13, 2006, ten years to the day from the meeting of her parents. Though we had just become Orthodox before she was born, we gave our daughter the middle name Lucia, after one of the three shepherd children of Fatima.
The aftermath of the divorce filing has been shattering — well and truly so — for all of us. As you know, I can’t talk about details, out of respect for the privacy of Julie and the kids. It is sufficient, though, to say that it’s going to take a long, long time for us all to heal. My friends in Hungary at the Danube Institute offered me an opportunity come work there for a while, organizing networks of broadly right-of-center religious leaders and intellectuals for conferences, symposia, things like that. I see it as an opportunity to put some of what I learned researching Live Not By Lies into action.
But I did not, and do not, want to move away from my kids. Matt, who has one more semester left at LSU, wants to move to Europe and go to graduate school, so he will join me early next year. The two younger ones, 18 and 15, are still at home. We have a lot to work through, though, and for various reasons, now is not the time to do that. Understand that I’m writing around this delicate issue, but the simple fact is, a bomb went off in the life of these kids, and I helped build that bomb without knowing what I was doing. Dealing with the consequences of the explosion is going to take a lot of time, prayer, and steadfastness. If there were any chance that we could work on this now, I would not be moving to Budapest. The moment we can, I will be on the first plane back to Baton Rouge.
I say all that because I have been criticized on social media by people who don’t know us, and who don’t understand the particulars of our tragic situation. They tell me I have no business going to Budapest. If I were in their position, with their limited knowledge, I would feel the same way! And besides, bearing the spite of strangers is part of the cross I have to carry for my own failures in this marriage. But regarding the marriage’s breakdown and its difficult aftermath, I’m in possession of the whole story. Forgive me, but I need to stop there.
Anyway, I’ve been torn up about the Budapest thing, because though it seems very much like the right thing to do now, for several reasons, it also might not be. Nothing is more important to me than my children. Yet I’m moving overseas next month (though I have scheduled in frequent visits to Louisiana in my contract), and how do I know for sure that I’m not rationalizing? The anxiety over all this has been tearing me up inside.
So, the synchronicity of Emöke Bollobas’s apartment gave me confidence that I was on the right path, that God has a plan for me in Budapest — and that this plan fits somehow into His plan for my kids and me. I don’t know how, but one day, it will all be clear. I have experienced so many synchronicities since I first became a Christian back in 1993, and I have learned to trust them as little signs from God that I am on the right path. This is what I have gathered from coincidence.
If you’ve ever experienced synchronicities, I’d love to read about them in the comments.
A Surprise Trip To Mont Saint Michel
Y’all will remember how put out I was at myself, and at fate, for my self-inflicted visa troubles this summer. They got me deported from the Vienna airport back to England, where I cooled my heels for two weeks, then went to Hungary for three more weeks while I worked out a residency visa. That was almost half the summer, and my planned trip to Mont-Saint-Michel abbey, and to the medieval shrine at Rocamadour, had to be cancelled.
The good part of my misfortune was that back in Cambridge, I was able to meet and interview the Anglican priest-poet Malcolm Guite for my book. Malcolm put me onto Martin Shaw, whose glorious work and new conversion to Christianity will add a new dimension to my forthcoming book. Plus I learned about St. Bede and St. Cuthbert, and the late contemporary Anglican bishop Simon Barrington-Ward, the father of my hostess Helen Orr, and a devotee of the Jesus Prayer. So, that was excellent recompense — but I still missed Mont-Saint-Michel, which I’ve longed to visit for over a decade. I personally chose to feature it on the cover of The Benedict Option after seeing Terrence Malick’s great film To The Wonder, which uses the abbey as a symbol of God’s steadfastness.
Well, I am tonight in rural southern Normandy for the wedding of my friend Pierre, a devout young Catholic friend who was to be my guide for Mont-Saint-Michel and Rocamadour. As it turns out, though, the courageous small-o orthodox Christian Gavin Ashenden — a very prominent Anglican priest (he was the Queen’s chaplain for a while) who left Canterbury to become a Catholic not long ago — has a holiday house not far from Mont-Saint-Michel. Gavin and I have been in touch in the past, but have never met, though he’s one of those people on my short list of Those I Feel I Must Meet. He invited me today to come stay with him on Saturday, visit Mont-Saint-Michel together, and stay overnight, so we can sit up late talking of God and His many glories.
I was so very sorry to miss MSM with Pierre — but Lord have mercy, to be able to visit the place with Gavin Ashenden (here’s a link to his website), and not just visit it, but to spend the evening at the Ashendens interviewing him for my new book! It’s providential if ever anything was. Gavin told me in an email, “I had a strong feeling that I was supposed to take you to Mont-Saint-Michel.” And so, it’s going to happen. Glory to God for all things.
I bet the next issue of this Diary — I’ll write it after Mont-Saint-Michel and Gavin — is going to be one for the ages. Thank you for subscribing, and for praying for me. I promise to remember you all in prayer at the great abbey on Saturday.
My wife and I got married at City Hall in New York - 1/11/02. We had been looking for an apartment in the city and having a tough go of it -not a lot of money - subpar credit. We looked in Upper Manhattan, Brooklyn etc. Someone I worked with suggested Astoria, Queens. We looked and quickly by chance found a 1 bedroom for $1,000 a month (!). We moved in. About a month later we were lying in bed, and I said to my Wife “our zip code is 11102…same as our anniversary date”. We looked at each other and I remember we felt the weirdest feeling, like this was way past a coincidence. We have been married almost 21 years. I’m a pretty rational guy, but I always believed this was a sign….
On October 1, 2012, my husband and I were watching Warehouse 13 on tv when the postman knocked on the door. It was a book for my husband, "The Emperor and the Saint," from the History book club, by Richard F. Cassady. I wanted to look at it, as we are both book fiends, and opened it at random to page 317, ch. 13, and saw a photo captioned "Steinerne Bruke," a photo of a bridge in Ratisbon, Germany. At that precise moment, the actress C.C. Pounder said on screen, "Bruke means bridge in German." Well, that got my attention!
It occurred to me then that the word "bridge" suggests "pontiff." Pope Benedict was German, so the "German Bridge" would refer to him. On a hunch, I went to Wikipedia to check out the bridge location and was surprised to learn that it was very near the birthplace of Benedict, he had taught university there, and owned a residence less than a kilometer away. I posted about the synchronicity on Facebook, and commented that since I had noticed that such synchronicities often were meaningful, I was going out on a limb and predicting news about the Pope in the near future.
In February, when Benedict announced his resignation, I mentioned the synchronicity to my husband and said perhaps this was the news I'd "predicted." He was all bah, humbug. I forgot about it again until March 13, when I remembered the "13" connection, and had an intuition that the new Pope would be chosen that day. Once again, my husband said bah, humbug, they're going to pick the new pope any day now anyhow, which I had to admit was true. I came home from work just in time to see that the new pope had been chosen, and had picked the name Francis I, after St. Francis of Assisi. It was only then I thought to go back and look at the book again, and realized that it was about Frederick II and St. Francis of Assisi! At the time, I had handed the book back to my husband and not even glanced at it again. Anyway, he was slightly impressed by this.
I wrote a letter about this series of coincidences to Fortean Times Magazine and they printed it. It was only after that I thought to open the book again and read all of page 317: it discusses the murals in the cathedral at Ratisbon, which show Christ in Glory surrounded by the chosen people of the Great Tribulation. The facing page shows a stone throne, yes, a stone throne (stone=rock= St. Peter) which is, of course, empty. Make of it what you will. I wrote Fortean Times another letter about that but they didn't print it. I probably need to read the whole book this winter now after ten whole years, but I'm almost afraid to.
Oh, during the pandemic in the summer of 2020, I had time on my hands and looked up the episode of Warehouse 13, which I hadn't even bothered to pay attention to either. My husband was the one watching it. I kid you not, it was about a blue flower from China that emits a poison vapor that threatens to carry an epidemic around the world. And invisible nooses that strangle people.