Serendipity Times Two

Coming face to face with two women this week reminded me of my own words shared in a talk in late June at the Julian Center in Norwich, UK. That talk is the reason I traveled abroad, or so I thought. The first face I saw "across a crowded room" looked out at me from a painting in one of the many museums in Berlin. In fact, this particular museum was the one I most wanted to visit to see the works of Caravaggio, Donatello, Durer, and Rembrandt's "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel" which I had expected to see in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. So, I thought of this as a second chance. When I found the spot where it would have hung, all that was visible was an outline darkened over time against a pale blue wall. The painting was in a traveling exhibit as were most of the others I had planned to see. What I hadn't expected to see was a woman in a 14th century "winged bonnet" who looked completely familiar to me. When she caught my eye, I said out loud: "It's Julian!" I walked directly across the large room to the one painting at eye level, not often the case from my height of five feet. Unmistakably this was the face I had come to know from the book cover "Revelations of Divine Love". This very face was etched in my mind as Julian herself. Now, I had found her hanging around this museum as if she were waiting for me to show up someday. I stood a long time staring at her while trying to recall the exact book cover details on my desk in my study at home in Florida. The painting's title was not Julian of Norwich, but "Frau in winged bonnet", 14th century. I looked on Amazon to see that book cover, and sure enough that same smiling face was right before my very eyes! I knew that serendipity had brought me here in the same way it had brought me to Julian's 14th century anchorage in Norwich twice in four years. My own words came to mind: . . ."That's the way serendipity plays out in our life stories . . .allowing us to consider the Unseen." The circle felt complete in our coming face to face. How serendipity affects our lives is as mystical as the 14th century mystic herself.

Within days, another encounter stirred serendipity yet again. Readers may remember that I wrote about meeting a young woman selling strudel at the Farmer's Market. One comment on that blog was that this woman would be long remembered. Yesterday, when she greeted me, she said she had told her friends about meeting "a cute couple" from Florida who were spending time in her old neighborhood. I told her that I had written about her in my travel blog. Then, a most mysterious moment happened between us: Quite innocently, I asked, "What's your name?" "Lisa" she replied. Pointing to myself, I said my name is "Charlene". Her crystal blue eyes grew large. "My mother wanted to name me Charlene! I have never met anyone before now with that name." She extended her hand and said: "Nice to meet you." It was as surreal as the encounter with the painting! It seems like both women had been expecting me! How can this be? Some things defy explanation while creating links between people and places across time. These two recent events so very close in time couldn't have been planned. Together they seem more mystical somehow. Was I meant to be here at this very moment so that I could come face to face with two women who have been in this one place all this time? I believe so.

TIME, my friends, is not linear it is mystical. We are on that "carrousel of time" that Joni Mitchell sang about in her song "The Circle Game"* when I serendipitously encountered her in my twenties and was too young to really understand. But, there she was strumming her song in a near empty stadium at Berkeley College when I happened upon her on an ordinary Saturday afternoon. That moment lingers and found its way into this writing some forty years hence. I wondered why I had thought of her song before recalling that long ago travel encounter with someone who would go on from this moment in her own young life to become that icon we know today. To this day, I still do not understand, but I do believe that those connections that seem to come from "out of the blue" are nothing less than moments that are truly meant to be.

This seems like the auspicious time to share my Julian of Norwich talk with you.

June 18, 2023

Bending Time

Good afternoon . . . thank you for the lovely introduction and to all of you for coming today.

My book, Return from Exile, is the second in my “Serendipity Series”, so called for the way moments of serendipity come as a surprise to us in the midst of our daily lives. These unexpected threads that connect us one to another create a series of “what ifs” in our minds. Exactly three years ago, I sat in Julian’s anchorage as a solo pilgrim. What if, a year earlier, my flight from the U.S. had not been canceled by unexpected tornadoes and I had come as originally planned that summer? Everything would have been different. There is no way to know how, but I know that certain “chance” meetings that seemed to “just happen” could not have been foreseen when that flight was grounded.

Consider the following episode which I have played over and over in my mind and have written into my story:

What if when I arrived in London a year later, I had gone straight to the British Library that Saturday morning as I had planned?

What if I had not gone first to the St. Pancras station to pick up my train ticket to Norwich while on my way to the Library?

What if two women arriving by train into that station, that morning, at that time, had gone out a different exit?

What if I had gone out the other exit?

What if in that one brief moment standing side by side on a street corner I had not overheard them puzzling over directions to the Library?

What if I had not turned to them to say that the Library was up ahead on the right?

What if one or the other of us while crossing the street had not spoken the name “Julian of Norwich”?

What if we had never met? Would they be here today? I wonder.

That’s the way serendipity plays in our life stories, or at least through the serendipitous lens with which stories may be seen allowing us to consider the Unseen.

My colleague, Sarah Law and I have our own story of connecting from afar, that we will share with you during our conversation. She and The Friends of Julian graciously allowed me to choose the date for this event and serendipity struck again: In choosing this date, I was unaware that it was Father’s Day, and that 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of my beloved father’s passing, just as it marks the 650th of Julian’s Divine revelations. It got me thinking how these connections between souls suspend time whether for 60 or 650 years.

Once upon a time, Julian was no different than you or I sitting here. But, now, she and all of us are soulfully connected on the continuum of time.

Are we bending time?

By breaking through traditional time, Julian proves that time is not linear, but mystical. While she is fixed in time as she once was within her anchorage, she is not fixed to only her time in the 14th century. Otherwise, why would we be here today to celebrate Julian’s visions that ultimately changed her life and have touched ours across time?

Consider just for a moment, Julian in her anchorage, writing day after day, trying to understand what it all meant, that she, a self described “lowly, unlettered woman” should have been shown such mystical things.

What if Julian were physically sitting among us, or at the anchorage window? What a thought! What would we ask her? What might she ask us?

Twice now, within three years, and following one failed attempt, I have traveled a great distance to sit with her in the anchorage, the room where she chose to live out her life. I have heard that some people who live much nearer never do.

Why then should I?

That might be the question Julian would ask me! I have tried to answer it for myself. The answer is not so simple. It is all wrapped up in the mystery of soulful connections: me to you, you to me, her to us. Somehow, Julian seems to be bringing us together once, and for all, and forever.

Our encounters not only feel timeless but are timeless, just as Julian herself.

During the “pandemic pause,” which is analogous in so many ways with Julian’s plagues, the days of the week became blurred: Is it Sunday? Tuesday? Did it matter?

I came to think of everyday as Tuesday because I had always thought of Tuesday as the day of the week without expectations. It simply IS.

I am trying to be like Tuesday on what feels like an auspicious occasion. If today were just an ordinary Tuesday, we could all just have “tea and cakes” and go home. But, our coming together to remember the Divine revelations of a woman whose words called me from across an ocean and you to come here today from near and far, seven centuries notwithstanding, is anything but ordinary.

What if we are not simply sharing stories and “tea and cakes”?

What if each one of us came here today, some of us meeting, once again, because we were brought here for such a time as this?

What if all the serendipity that opened the way for us is a tangible expression of Divine Love?

In conclusion,

Today is not Tuesday. It is Sunday, and Father’s Day, and, clearly, the auspicious time for us to have come together.

It begs a bigger question that we might ask ourselves, and the one that I would ask Julian which she herself asked of God: Why me?

Some of those answers may be found in reading my book. I say some because I can honestly say that I wrote the book to find the answer that still seems somewhat elusive to me.

The answer for Julian came after fifteen years of waiting and longing within her ENCLOSED CELL without clearly knowing why! But what’s another fifteen years when compared with 60 or 650? What’s “fifteen years and more” when the answer that came was timeless? What’s fifteen years when she delivered a universal message that has outlived her and reaches us as if no time has passed?

I begin my book where Julian ends hers, with these words in her 86th chapter of the Long Text:

“And from the time that this was shown, I often longed to know what our Lord meant. And fifteen years and more later my spiritual understanding received an answer, which was this:

‘Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For love.”

While preparing for this talk, I serendipitously came across the following quote. “Love is made up of time. Love is an attempt to make of the instant, an eternity.” (Octavio Paz)

*jonimitchell.com

Monumental Choices

The Saturday Farmer's Market right outside my apartment in Berlin brings people from the neighborhood together in a spirit of "joie de vivre". The cafe lined street with choice ethnic restaurants is a mecca any day of the week. People here are living the "good life". A young woman with arm outsretched standing inside her "strudel stall" tempted me with her home-baked delight. Of course, I couldn't resist spending four euros to have a slice of Germany's version of apple pie. She couldn't resist asking "Where are you from?" that ubiquitous question after hearing my "guten Morgan" and "Danke Schoen", a dead giveaway. I followed up with this bright-eyed woman the age of my daughter, who was then celebrating her 32nd birthday this very day in the States. I asked, "Are you from Berlin?" She pointed to the place where she was standing and said she had grown up "right here, on this street." I asked "Has it changed much?" "Oh yes! All the buildings used to be gray. There was nothing here before the wall came down. My parents have a picture of me when I was four years old on my bike and there were only three cars on the street." She understood that I was a transient passing through her world that had seen so much change in her short lifetime. There was no way for outsiders to understand this painful legacy that has risen up from the ashes like a phoenix. Yet, the markers are everywhere in the many monuments that overpower the landscape.

For a place that was bombed out, the past still stands, in part because the zoning laws of "reunification" construction, that continues thirty-four years after the wall came down, calls for old facades to be maintained wherever possible. This creates an unusual dichotomy both architecturally and symbolically, especially if the original place itself symbolized the worst oppressors: men who controlled the populace through sheer willpower going back centuries. One of the most recently opened (twenty years in the making) is the former City Palace renamed the Humboldt Forum after the geographer and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt. The outside was maintained right up to its gold cross atop the dome that can be seen for miles. Not all Berliners agreed with the choice to allow the former Prussian kingdom's wealth, never shared with the people, to be restored to its opulence as a showpiece monument. To counteract this choice, the gutted palace has become museum space housing collections acquired from around the world. Talk about adding insult to injury! Nobody denies the controversial nature of such choices. The "forum" is meant to be a culturally diverse place for open discussion and debate. Some call it part of the healing that needs to happen here. I hope it will function in some way that does more than glitz over the real damage that was done to innocent people. I cannot help but think about the monuments in my own backyard that have been lightning rods rather than soothing balms.

Most recently in St Augustine, Florida, the city government voted to remove from the central plaza a monument that had stood in that place for decades. It was commissioned long ago by the Confederate mothers in honor of their fallen sons in the Civil War. The proposed removal prompted fury by some and delight by others. The monument was a symbol of all that the South had fought and died for, namely, slavery and its preservation. The plaza itself is no more than a small rectangular piece of geography that has its own violent history. Reverend Martin Luther King and local black people walked peacefully through the square after King called St. Augustine "The most racist city in America." He was jailed when he sat at a local lunch counter. Years later, the Mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, followed in those footsteps and was severely beaten in the plaza. The monument was standing tall through it all. It is not a stretch of the imagination to think who might have perpetrated the violence against these black men years after that monument was placed there. When it was decided to take it from there and relocate it outside the historic district, threats of violence were hurled once again. The weeks-long dismantling required tight security. Those monument movers were called from other Southern states where monuments had been removed to do the same dangerous work where I lived. Their lives were threatened. In the end, the monument was moved under cover of night by boat on the river rather than through the city streets in order to protect the movers.

The choices to move a monument from view or to reconstruct a monument to its glory are flip sides of the same coin. It makes me wonder about the deeper intrinsic value we have placed on these stone symbols. Why do we feel so viscerally attached or disgusted by them? Why do we step outside our comfort zone to support or protest the outcome of a choice made long ago by others? Every country has its monuments, like its own version of apple pie. It says something about pride of nationality and country to share your strudel with a foreigner. Is the choice to save a monument so important or, is it as simple as apple pie?

Today is Tuesday except . . .

Today is not just Tuesday - it is the Fourth of July in my homeland. A day to celebrate FREEDOM from oppressors dating back to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Here in Berlin, in 1791, the Brandenburg Gate was completed as a symbol of peace. Later it was trapped behind the Berlin Wall like the people that Wall was meant to contain and control. . . until it didn't.

Yesterday I stood beneath the magnificent and massive gate which is adjacent to the U.S. embassy flying its red, white, and blue flag. The juxtaposition of these two symbols of freedom gave me pause. I felt linked to a story I did not live, but had grown up hearing and reading about. I couldn't help but think of the parallels with stories of oppression being written today in my own country. How Berlin came to its own ugly, not so distant past, so far from its monument to peace and freedom provides a cautionary tale for us.

Old and new friends in England, spoke about the precariousness of the States today, like a see-saw that could tip either way. I imagine that was true for Germany as it teetered between freedom and oppression: The people voted for Hitler! The rest, as they say is History and a very dark story that exists with its many scars on the landscape in the Holocaust Memorial; the violin music played daily in the Tiergarten (think Central Park) to remember the genocid ases; the remnants of a Wall torn down after forty years, by people like you and me.

Today is not just Tuesday - It is the Fourth of July, a day celebrating FREEDOM from oppressors! Yet, today in the midst of celebrating, there are bans against reading many books; bans against making private choices; bans against dressing as one wishes; bans against voting without fear; and, the worst oppression of all, fear to speak one's mind openly in public spaces which feels to me like a ban. I recently read that authoritarians want people to self-censor. That is totally anathema to OUR Constitution celebrated today across the United States: "We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Here, in Germany, both Hitler and the Wall failed, but at a very high cost to life, liberty and happiness. Both crumbled because the peoples' will and spirit resisted oppression. The will of resistance proved to be more powerful than the MEN who forced their own wills on others. Without a doubt, this was the best outcome in the end. But the slippery slope to oppression should be avoided at all times by those of us who know better, i.e., "We the people . . ." you and me together, friends. We must not be afraid to speak truth to power. Not now, not ever!