James 24:7

One time I was being a wise guy with a theologian friend of mine and talking about a story in the newspaper concerning an apparition of the Virgin Mary in the window of a local Catholic church.

I snorted: "I wonder why the Virgin Mary seems to favor Catholics with her appearances.  Why doesn't Mary ever appear to say...Methodists or Baptists?"

Without batting an eye my friend said, "Maybe she does...but the Catholics are the only ones with the skills to see her."

Maybe seeing these coincidences, these God-weavings I'm calling them, is a matter of skill or expectation or desire.  Maybe the more you see them the more you see them.

And maybe there are ways in which we are trained to see them...

Lawrence Weschler, a famous art historian and journalist, published a book a short while back called Everything That Rises.  In that book, he explored what he calls "convergences." 

For example, he sat down with a professional photographer who took over 8500 pictures of the clean-up at Ground Zero and together they explored how those pictures resembled famous works of art from centuries before. 

Weschler wondered with his photographer friend about whether (or how much) his way of seeing through the lens of the camera was affected by his exposure to  works of art.   Weschler's theory was that the photophrapher's encyclopedic knowledge of art unconsciously served to shape his way of seeing the world.  

The more we see....the more we see...the more we see.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson spent his life looking for what he called "the pattern that connects."  He imagined that mom nature had a relatively limited range of patterns at her disposal but that she used those patterns to produce an infinite number of things.

(Think of how much music has been produced with 12 notes and how many sentences are generated from a limited number of grammar rules.) 

The stem and the veins of a leaf resemble the trunk and branches of a tree resemble the river and its tributaries resemble a spine and its extending nerves, etc. etc. etc.

For Bateson one of the happy things that nature does is "branches."

Weschler seems to suggest these convergent patterns are in the eye.  Bateson seems to suggest they are in the world.

Well, sort of...

Bateson went on to point out that such underlying patterns, when coupled together, provided the grammar of metaphor.

"Trees branch.

Rivers branch.

Trees are rivers."

"Branching" is what trees and rivers hold in common.

Or, how about his "Metaphor in Grass"?

Men die

Grass dies

Men are grass.

"Dying" is a process shared by men and grass.

Hmmm...that's Biblical isn't it...men are grass?

In doing that, Bateson was showing a pattern of patterns and how piling these patterns up helped to create things like...well..poetry...like...art.

Those of us who have heard and read the stories of the Bible our whole lives...Those of us who have dived deeply into them...eaten them...ingested them...find that we are, we see, we hear what we eat.

We see what others do not see...meaningful accidents instead of randomness or happenstance.

We sing...we exult...

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God..." 

"These ordinary people walk around blind to their own reality...that they are shining like the sun."

God is afoot in the world.

God bangs upon the pipes.

We hear the echoes of his voice in chance encounters.