2020, Synchronicity 2.0 and God
It’s the end of 2020 and reflection season is in full swing. In this final week of our global annus horribillus, I share the same pains and discoveries as most people have had plus, I had an extra dimension to mine. Just before the pandemic broke loose I made the transition out of leading the organisation Emerging Leaders, that I founded fifteen years ago, in order to focus on the next thing. Except it wasn’t that simple. What I discovered was not only a lockdown world, but, in this enforced parenthesis in my working life, a confrontation with the unattended parts of myself. Leading an organisation needed all my focus and attention, but at the same time it sneakily allowed me to bracket off, box up and park up, crucial parts of myself that I wanted to ignore, or were an emotional inconvenience to seeming like I had my s**t together.
What I discovered in 2020 was synchronicity 2.0. Synchronicity is where we know that there is some under-the-surface connection between things that are happening in our lives, but we can’t put our finger on what it is. We feel its power, but we often don’t allow ourselves to pursue our curiosity about its origin. Synchronicity 1.0 isn’t new to me. I’ve often had those surprising alignments across my life span. But this year has been different, extra-ordinary. What I’m talking about is a whole year of synchronicity 2.0. A deep sense of being part of an unfolding story, the drama of me. A deep sense of Presence; sometimes in the light, but often in the dark, sometimes strongly felt, often with no feeling at all. But the story unfolded for me, like a symphony I was hearing for the first time. I didn’t at any stage know what the next note was. Instruments were introduced just at the right time, playing the right note and so frequent was this guidance across the year, that it was impossible not to feel, or to believe, that the orchestra was being conducted.
It's hard to talk about God, the Divine, Presence. It really is. But if 2020 has been teaching me anything, it’s that maybe it’s time to get beyond the embarrassment and get over myself.
For me, the whole year was spent both in a deep, dark wood of life transition and a perfect dance of revelation, inspirations and guidance, that simply weren’t explainable in any normal, rational way. I would find myself reaching a difficult aspect of myself and some friend (who had no idea what I was struggling with), would recommend a book and it turned out to be exactly the book I needed. Or a sentence in a magazine would refer to an intriguing author and I would read that author and discover a whole new way of seeing how to relate to myself. Or that friend would say just the right thing in a conversation that unlocked a question I was wrestling with. I’d pick up a podcast to listen to and just not feel excited about the first few minutes, so I’d turn it off and then flick through some other podcasts and something else would catch my eye. So, I’d listen to that podcast and was astonished that it turned out to be the most relevant podcast I could imagine. Or I would be struggling to develop some mindful practices and someone would refer to another writer, who opened up whole new disciplines for me I’d never heard of. People, books, words, sentences, comments, podcasts, poems, chance meetings, documentaries, friends – all played a part in perfect timing to guide me through the woods. A couple of times along the way, at the points in the forest where it seemed darkest and where I most felt like I’d lost my way, or felt most desperate, or stuck, I would hear an inner whisper in my thinking that unlocked something within me - an emotion, an insight, a next step.
We appear to live in a culture that has become embarrassed to talk about God. It’s not just the kind of embarrassment you feel when you discover a stain on the front of your shirt that everyone except you has noticed. It’s an embarrassment that sits on the edge of shame. It’s the kind of shame that moves slyly between ‘something is wrong’, to, ‘you are wrong’. I get the God shaped embarrassment. I really do. My dad was an ardent atheist. After a little Sunday school in the 1960’s (you did that in those days), sport quickly became the new religion for my teenage years. But I had a few significant, non-churchy, spiritual experiences, that were so genuine that they shaped the next decade and a half of my life and led me into working within churches full-time, (serious converts in the 1980’s had a choice of the church or the mission field).
I left that world in my thirties, not because I didn’t believe in God, just not that shape of God that the mainstream church seemed to specialise in. I had discovered more space and freedom to grow, within the wider horizons of the spiritual experiences from Christian mystics to Zen Buddhists.
When I left the working world of church, I became one of those people who were also embarrassed to talk about God, because the whole idea is so laden with everyone’s bad experiences, projections and prejudices, that I didn’t want to labelled, pigeon-holed or put into anyone else’s negative boxes. I didn’t want people making conclusions about me and being put into a coffin labelled ‘you, as a person, are wrong; there is something wrong with you if you believe in God’. That was too much shame to bear.
As I enter 2021, with whatever it may hold, I’m aware that Synchronicity 1.0 is so much easier to talk about than Synchronicity 2.0, or God, or the Divine Presence and I’m aware of the need for courage to ask the unspeakable question – is synchronicity the language of the Divine?