Archive Home Page *
"The encounter and separation for all of it's wildness, is typical of the sufferings of love, For when a heart insists on it's destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too is the danger. Forces, however, will have been set into motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass."
- Joseph Campbell - The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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"Here is your Scarab" - Carl Jung
On Synchronicity (and Symbols)
This section get's it's title from Carl Jung's treatise "On Synchronicity". Following are a few stories about synchronicities that I experienced. I picked these examples because they either show a particular type of synchronicity or because they "scale" symbolically . I also picked them because they are interesting stories, that I've always wanted to tell, and just have never been able to until now. Writing about these synchronicities is a form of therapy for me.
There are many different kinds of synchronicity. A well known type of synchronicity is when someone thinks of someone and then they call. My experiences with synchronicity have rarely involved premonition. In fact without getting into the details, I'm somewhat premonition adverse. Another well known type of synchronicity can be seen in Jung's Scarab story where an event is linked to a dream. I don't dream a lot and the few dreams I have almost always related to some aspect of my own personal emotions. None of the content in this archive came from my dreams.
I experienced synchronicity as "meaningful coincidence". String together enough related meaningful coincidence and you get a destiny. Pile them on too frequently and ... well let's just say that destiny is a historical process with it's own needs that are not always aligned with that individual's freedom or happiness.
A few caveats...
What I'm mostly describing here is subjective experience, so there isn't any objective way to prove or disprove it. So believe me or don't believe me, it makes no difference to me. I'm not in the conversion business. You know, there are actually advantages to being a self admitted schizophrenic when discussing the range of topics that I was dealing with.
When reading these do not try to draw conclusions regarding cause and effect. I make no claims of controlling cause and effect in this domain. Quite the opposite. A synchronicity wouldn't be a synchronicity if it was created by the person experiencing it. Synchronicities by their very nature suggest processes beneath the surface, or beyond our current scientific understanding of the world. I also make no claims as to knowing who or what processes created these synchronicities. In some of these examples I will be relating very large scale symbols to my personal experiences. Because of that I want to be very clear that I claim no authoritative insight. Being some kind of guru or preacher or spiritual advisor is not in my nature. Besides, I'm more of a crazy lunatic infrastructure kind of guy.
Finally keep in perspective that all of these things happened to me over ten years ago, sometimes closer to 20 years ago. That is why I call this an "archive". I don't experience scalable synchronicity of this nature very often anymore. Some might say that's because I'm no longer as delusional as I once was :) I would say that that's because I'm no longer circling as close to the center of where ever it was I once was.
As always as much as possible in the following stories, I try to exclude anything that might positively identify another person.
Prelude - Moscow - Summer 1987
I'm calling this a prelude because it was a synchronicity that occurred before I really had any awareness of them. I've only been outside of North America twice. Once when I spent 4 months in Asia in 1989 and once when I took a 3 week tour of the Soviet Union and the Baltic States in 1987. As we traveled thru Russia I would go jogging every other day, usually along whatever river was near our hotel. So when the tour finally arrived in Moscow the natural choice was to run from the hotel, down hill to the Moscow river, along the Moscow river parallel to the Kremlin, up the hill along one of the Kremlin walls, past the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to Red Square, and then thru Red square past Lenin's tomb and St Basil's Cathedral, and back to the hotel. Basically it was a circle around the Kremlin.
1987 was the time of glasnost and perestroika before the fall of the Berlin wall. Gorbachav was the premier and the USSR was still intact. There wasn't much street commerce. The only street vendors were a few painters selling either landmark paintings or portraits. The portrait painters almost always drew a huge crowd. The landmark painters drew smaller crowds. One of the landmark painters had a small picture that she liked to show to the western tourists of the German teenager landing his plane on Red Square, an event the year before that helped Gorbachav consolidate power.
There weren't many joggers either, especially near the Kremlin, and especially ones wearing western style running shorts and running shoes. I recall the Kremlin guards giving me curious looks as I huffed and puffed my way around the Kremlin. On the day before we left Moscow I was once again running, and as I ran up the steep hill from the river to Red Square, I noticed a long line of people stretching halfway down the hill. It turns out they were Russian high school seniors. Thousands of them. Much in the same way that American kids graduating from high school visit Washington DC or go to Disney World or Six Flags, the Russian high school seniors at that time went on a field trip to see Lenin's tomb and the other memorials surrounding the Kremlin. As I started running past the line, some of the kids started to cheer, and then more of the kids started to cheer as they looked back to see what the fuss was about. Soon I was joined by several of the teens running alongside me and patting me on the back as the crowd cheered on. This went on for the entire length of the line until I finally reached the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the relative obscurity of Red Square, where I just about collapsed from exhaustion.
When you think about it, except for people in entertainment or athletics, experiencing something like this isn't very common. Events like fun runs and and parades (a few examples follow) always bring out the cheers by and for everyone, but for the vast majority of us it's rare to be the focus of this kind of experience. What makes this a "meaningful coincidence"? It wasn't just that I had this once in a lifetime experience on the next to last day of my first trip to the Old World. It was that it was given to me by Russian teens as I was circling the seat of Soviet power.
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The Heart of it All - Agra, India - Winter 1989
I hadn't originally planned to visit India. It was after two months in Nepal that I decided to detour there. I was glad I went, however it got off to a less than auspicious beginning. I arrived at the Indian Border after a jarring 5 hour bus ride. The bus was late arriving at the border and the custom's officials were one by one taking folks into a room where they checked visas and passports against a huge book of names. After much hemming and hawing, and just as I was beginning to think I would miss my connecting bus, one of the several officials across from me in this small room appeared willing to sign my visa. However he gestured that he needed a pen in order to sign it. So I dug into my luggage and produced a pen. He signed the visa and gave it back to me, all the while smiling and pocketing my pen. He stole my pen !!
Of note here is that in the entire 4 months that I spent in Asia, this was the only time something had been stolen from me.
Oh well, so I continued on to Calcutta, and then New Delhi, and then finally Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal is everything it's said to be. While not a large building, it has a almost perfect sense of balance and proportion. It is also a tomb. At it's center are buried the wife and daughter of a 17th century Mughal king. It was built as a memorial to love. This mythological symbol in it's own right, is enhanced by the story of the king who wanted to build a second Taj Mahal in black , but was overthrown by his son who jailed him in the nearby Red Fort. Here he lived out the rest of his days, able to look upon the Taj Mahal from a distance, but never again to visit it.
So I spent a day hanging around the grounds just taking in the feel of it all. Late in the afternoon I was sitting in the grass on the main lawn when I struck up a conversation with a young Indian man who had just graduated from college with a degree in computer science. This was before the birth of the software industry in India and he was frustrated by the lack of available jobs in the field except thru family connections or bribes. He asked about opportunities in America. After talking for a while he seemed sincere and honest, so I told him that while I couldn't help him right away, I would give him my mailbox address and see what I could do when I returned. So he produced paper and pen and I gave him my address. As I was returning the paper and pen, for some reason, he insisted that I keep the pen.
It wasn't until later that evening as I was writing in my journal that I realized what had happened. You see, the pen that had been stolen from me at the border of India, had been returned to me at it's heart. Now that's what I would call an auspicious beginning.
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A Tale of two Cities (and four synchronicities) - San Francisco - 1985 thru 1989
I've always had mixed feelings about San Francisco. On the one hand it was such a vibrant, fascinating place, so filled with erotic possibility, and on the other hand it scared the shit out of me. While living in Sacramento I used to frequently sneak into the city on weekends, driving 70 miles in, spend an hour or so writing in my journal and eating breakfast at a patio restaurant in the Castro, spend another hour putzing around the Castro, and then drive 70 miles back. Other than my own behavior nothing unusual here, however when I went to San Francisco for a specific event, that was when something unusual always seemed to happen. A few examples...
Once a year I would meet up with a college friend of mine, who was working in Silicon Valley, and we would go to the Mac World convention. It was a great way for us to stay in touch. I would come in early to eat breakfast in the Castro, and then meet up with him later at Moscone Center. One year while trying to find parking near the Castro, I turned into a steep uphill and was immediately confronted with a 2 1/2 ton truck barreling down the street. It so unnerved me that I slammed my car sideways into a parked vehicle. It just so happened that out of all the vehicles that I could have hit, this vehicle belonged to a well known actor. He apparently saw what happened as he stuck his head out a window and yelled at the truck which just kept barreling down the street. What were the odds.
And then there was a San Francisco Pride parade where, as I was walking down the street with a AIDS Volunteer group that I had worked with in Sacramento, for some reason I just picked someone out of the crowd (it was a vibe thing). When I bumped into him later I found out he grew up in the same town as me in Florida (several years younger than me and went to a different school). Turns out, having just come up to San Francisco from a Grateful Dead concert the night before, he was heading back to Esalen near Big Sur California where he was in a work study program. So that led to spending several nights as his guest at what many would consider to be the epicenter of the human potential movement. Just picked him out of the crowd. Like I said it was a vibe thing.
And then there is when I did the AIDS Bikeathon. I was a reasonably in shape biker at the time, and managed to stay with the front runners for a couple of miles, but then dropped back into the pack. Several days after finishing the Bikeathon I get a call from a friend telling me that the Bay Area Reporter had an article on the AIDS Bikeathon, and that a solo picture of me on my bike was splashed in the center of the front page of the local section with the caption "The Hundred Milers on their way to Marin". Apparently while I may have had problems connecting with the city, it didn't seem to have any problem connecting with me.
The key to understanding this last synchronicity is knowing just how much body shame I carried as a result of my child abuse. For part of the 5th and 6th grades I would wear a sweater, even in the Florida heat and humidity, just to prevent parts of my body from being exposed. I was a awkward skinny kid to begin with, and very shy, so I was about as far as you can get from the kind of self confident exhibitionism that is often a part of libidinal attraction.
By the summer of 1989 I had put my things in storage, said goodbye to most of my friends, and was living in a VW bus. Basically going where ever the wind blew me up an down the West coast. So I rolled into San Francisco for the Pride parade. By then all those years of running , biking, weight lifting, track skiing and and hauling 50 lb packs up and over the Sierra's, combined with graceful aging, had transformed me from an unconfident wallflower into pretty much a hunk. I probably wasn't going to be winning any posing contests at Laguna Beach, but I had that self confident vibe that was sure to attract attention. Gay guys know what I'm talking about. Alas as the song goes "the old gray mare just ain't what she used to be", but in hindsight it seems important that I experienced myself like this. So anyway I roll into San Francisco and am watching the parade, and here comes the AIDS Volunteer group from Sacramento. But in contrast to the rather disorganized stroll of prior years, they have used rope to cordon off the group into a square phalanx and they are all wearing identical blue shirts. So I join them, wearing a white shirt. And then the group behind us is a drum corps banging out a distinctly rowdy beat. Very easy to dance to. So along with others in the phalanx I dance on down the street playing to the crowd. I was on a pure energy high for most of the march.
This was symbolically and emotionally quite different from what happened in Moscow. This was the end point of a transformation. So there I was. A single white dot, against a blue background. Dancing past a quarter of a million Gay people down the street of the city that scared me because of it's sexual reputation.
Slightly off topic..., since I'm talking about the American city long associated with Sodom... The biblical story of Lot is symbolically, emotionally, and explicitly about father daughter incest. Always has been. I don't know how anyone can read a unadulterated version of it without seeing that it is about a man justifying sex with his daughters. Not that it's any surprise that gay people have been forced to carry that particular cross. You can see the same kind of projection going on with Freudian theories about homosexuality.
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The Morning After - Sacramento - Fall 1987 and Summer 1990
"To Michigan, Florida perfumes shall tenderly come,
Not the perfumes of flowers,
but sweeter, and wafted beyond death."
- Walt Whitman - Drum taps
John died in late October 1987 at the end of a Thanksgiving dinner given in his honor. He had been hoping to live thru Thanksgiving, however it was obvious that he would not make it thru the next week, so the AIDS volunteer group I was with, and his family, decided to bring Thanksgiving to him. I had met John about 9 months earlier and was assigned to work with him shortly after my Russia trip. Though John could barely talk, the dinner was a chance for everyone to celebrate his life and one by one say goodbye.
It was not something I was ready to do. In many respects John and I were very different, but in the short time we knew each other we had developed an emotional bond, born of many things, and with all the intensity that comes when dealing with issues of life and death. Part of his attraction to me was romantic. As the party was winding down, and after everyone else had said goodbye, I finally went to him. What happened next was totally unanticipated. After talking with him for a few minutes, I simply knew and told him it was time. I knew a little about his spiritual beliefs. His father gave him a last dose of oral morphine, and surrounded by his friends and family, I guided him into death. Nothing in my life had prepared me for that. I had never before been even close to death. It was simply an abstraction to me. Helping him die was simultaneously both the hardest thing I had ever done and the rightist thing I had ever done.
The following day I awoke to what looked like was going to be a dreary morning with the valley fog so typical of that time of year. So I decided to go out and wash the clothes that I had worn the night before. But when I stepped outside and looked up thru an opening in the trees surrounding my apartment, I saw not the gray I expected, but instead a perfectly crisp blue sky. And just as that was registering in my mind, a V shaped formation of ducks flew thru the center of the opening. And then it hit me. Everything was all right. And I knew it was about John for the otherwise perfectly formed formation was missing a bird. The remaining birds were flying in what is known in the military as a dead man formation.
That was my first actual experienced synchronicity. In the absence of any context it is easy to dismiss this as a visual hallucination brought on by my grief, but as always there was more to what had happened here than I even knew at the time. John had apparently before his illness been a really stunning man and in his last months had been telling me things about his life that seemed a little unusual. He was telling me tales of the city if you will. How he had once been the birthday present for one of the richest men in San Francisco, and how this man had out of jealousy had another man killed because of him. He told of a life where wealth and power coveted and manipulated youth and beauty, and vice versa. He even warned me away from some of the people he had known, particularly a hypnotist (who subsequently showed up at John's funeral and had the nerve to invite me to visit him in the city). Some of the folks working with John thought this was all a manifestation of dementia. I for one believed him.
Now, I'm no Pollyanna. As the line from Casablanca goes "I'm shocked, shocked, that there is gambling going on in this establishment". What was bothering me was not that he had been someone's birthday present, but the feeling that he had been stripped of his ability to consent. So I started to dig around. It wasn't until I got back from Asia two years later, and was peeling back the layers of my own child abuse experiences, that the last piece of this puzzle came together. It was very clear that my first abuse experiences had occurred while I was living for a year in Washington D.C., and the most difficult memories seemed to be coming from a summer camp I had attended. John and I were the same age, and I knew that he had also lived in D.C. for a little while. On a hunch I called John's father who confirmed that John had also attended a summer camp while living in D.C. Now in a long arc across 20 years and thousands of miles the pieces had finally come together. Based on the description of the camp from John's father I came to the conclusion that there was a high probability that we had both attended the same camp, and even a possibility that we may have known each other.
At this point all I will say is pick a conspiracy theory, any conspiracy theory. It does not matter. History is larger than justice.
Little did I know it at the time, but now the stage had been set for the next 10 years of my life. Internally the juxtaposition of love and death would be the central theme of what was to become a long painful journey inward. Externally the vision of abused children as trapped souls would drive not only my personal thread in a highly specific way, but would also inform my every attempt to "speak truth to power". Both of these themes underlay and inform virtually every post in this archive. These themes were the operating gestalts, however as you will see later they were not the unifying symbol.
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I Never Promised You a Rose Garden - Sacramento - Fall 1990
This one is a little unusual. Note that there is very little mention in this archive of the specifics of the mental torment that I went thru for several years after going off the deep end. Talking about it simply served no purpose then and doesn't serve much purpose now. Still I'm going to talk about this synchronicity, not only because it scales, but because it makes use of a sense not normally associated with synchronicity: smell.
The fall of 1990 was a time when everything fell apart for me. The mostly positive, hopeful and even amazing path that I had been on since John died was totally gone, replaced by voices and synchronicities that were hellish and condemning. The basic message repeated in countless varieties was "You are not who you think you are, this is who you are, here is what you've done, here is the terrible manner in which you are going to be punished and die, and it's going to happen very soon." This is the period of time when I was forced to identify with not only the worst of human history, but the worst aspects of religious belief. I had gone from the belief, partially based on the synchronicities following John's death, that someone was looking out for me, to the message that not only had he hated me, but that his suffering and death was because of me. As terrible as that sounds, it was a fairly typical reversal during that time
The imminent death "de jour" of this particular story was death by being burned alive. Multiple elements of my past experiences, that had been brought together in my mind and were being driven by voices, included: Knowledge of what a 3rd degree burn felt like, knowledge of having seen a body burn in an open air cremation, seeing the the red and orange tinged clouds from a sunset as the view from within the pyre, and of course the long ago indoctrinated Christian vision of a fiery hell where death never comes . It's just not possible for me to describe in words the kind of fear and anxiety that I was experiencing. I wouldn't dispute a diagnosis of psychotic :) The voices had started up about a month earlier, and by now I was quite traumatized. I was no longer capable of defiance, and barely capable of incredulity about their wider and wilder accusations. I was going to burn, not forever, but for a long long time.
That's the background on my mental state when late in the day of this inevitable death, I visited a Rose garden in a park near where I was living. The directive was to smell the flowers and that the one's I could smell applied to me and the ones I couldn't smell didn't apply. The key was in the names of the flowers. There were only three varieties in the garden that I could smell. A deep blood red rose named "Mr Lincoln", a pink rose named "Sweet Surrender", and a probably rare blue variety of a rose named "Angel Face". I could smell nothing of the other thirty varieties in this memorial garden. The structure underlying this synchronicity, and what seems to be symbolically important, was that the names and colors of the roses I could smell, were a progression from life to death. The color progression was from hot to cool. It was the blue flower that promised relief from the fiery hell. In the same order as the colors, the names are also a progression from life to death. Mr. Lincoln, the man whom some still actually hate and blame for the bloodiest days of American history, Sweet Surrender, a letting go, and finally Angel Face.
Obviously I didn't burn, and I've been thru too much to believe that fiery punishment, eternal or otherwise, awaits me or anyone else. Fourteen years after this experience I revisited this rose garden. Absent the horrific voices and fear, I didn't know what I would find there. Much to my surprise the only three roses that I could smell in 1990 were still there, and were still the only roses that I could smell in 2004.
I don't know what the moral of this story is, if indeed it has one. It was what happened to me. It's an example of a synchronicity involving smell. As for fire, I was never threatened with it again. I personally believe that religious belief in fire as an eternal punishment, while a historical necessity, is ultimately wrong. Like so many other concepts that reach into the eternal, history has rendered fire as both negative and positive. Keeping alive the eternal flame for a positive example. We are indeed both fascinated by it and terrified by it. Finally here is my favorite quote on the subject.
"A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lit" - Plutarch
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Nuclear Gemini
"As for the stars of the sky that appeared
and the meteorite(?) of Anu which fell next to you,
you tried to lift but it was too mighty for you,
you tried to turn it over but were unable to budge it,
you laid it down at my feet,
and I made it compete with you,
and you loved and embraced it as a wife."
"There will come to you a mighty man, a comrade who saves his friend--
he is the mightiest in the land, he is strongest,
his strength is mighty as the meteorite(!) of Anu!
You loved him and embraced him as a wife;
and it is he who will repeatedly save you."
- Epic of Gilgamesh
One day in India, while rummaging thru a stack of postcards, I found what I was looking for. It was a post card showing a view down the very long hallway of an ornate temple. I had no way to discern the original religious context of the postcard. But that didn't matter to me, for as the hallway receded in the distance it centered onto an fuzzy image that at first glance appeared to be a single object, but on closer inspection could be seen to be the image of two beings intertwined. The image was bathed in light in such a way as to suggest something beyond this world. As if suggesting a union of souls. For me at the time this postcard was a major find for it gave artistic expression to something, no doubt born out of the destruction of my childhood innocence, that I had been seeking for a long time but could not embrace (see Survivor's coping mechanisms). I even went so far as to send it to a recent romantic interest I had met while traveling with the single sentence "Down this path lies my destiny". My romantic idealism, though at the time focused inwards on a Don Quixote like quest, was never totally divorced from Human reality.
What I did not see at the time, for I was so focused on the symbol at the end of the long hallway, was that about halfway down was the barely perceptible shadow image of a man sitting on a bench with his head bowed. It was only a year later, after going off the deep end, that I noticed the shadow image. So there it is. Not only my first clear encounter with the unifying symbol I later called "Nuclear Gemini" but also my relationship to it. This wasn't about me anymore. I was the shadow figure before the vision. What lay beyond was much much larger than me.
In my own beliefs, the symbol Nuclear Gemini is the "omega point" of the process theology. It's an eternal symbol whose realization by God is where History ends and something new begins (see for example Walt Whitman's 150 year old vision in Song of Myself ). A way to conceive it classically would be an Ouroboros, but not one being alone, but two together. I reference the symbol in about a dozen different contexts in this archive. Probably the most powerful context is the vector to it at the end of the posts titled "A Trip to the Mall". An early reference on AOL was in a piece of computer folk art I created called Matruska Folders. Originally it consisted of a series of Macintosh folders that opened one after another as you clicked thru them (transitional), but it's shown here as a single combined image. In this poem "Over the Carnage", also from Whitman, you can see a vision of the collective energy informing the symbol. (I discovered Whitman in 1992, after the worst had past, reading poems at random while wandering a civil war battlefield).
Notice how carefully I stay away from traditional religous texts. It's not because I don't respect or value them. I was raised Roman Catholic back when the mass was said in Latin. That perhaps explains why I would focus more on symbols than text. I only occasionally looked to religious scripture for entrances to and insights on the symbolism and related collective emotions underlying the text. The juxtaposition of seeming opposites, attached to a central symbol, often hints at an important underlying cusp.
In the context of this symbol. It was a real eye opener when I realized that the last words spoken every week by millions of Christians, before launching into both a ritual and personal identification with the central mystery of their faith, came from a Biblical story whose entire meaning can change radically based on the translation of the single greek word "pais". Out of all the stories, why this one? There are many other Biblical stories and words that more easily give entrance to the transcendence of the mystery. Certainly from the standpoint of traditional moral teachings there are safer stories to use as a launching pad into unity with Christ than this one. Why hidden beneath the surface, continually energize this particular story? As the poet Yeats said, "Surely some revelation is at hand".
So with that, let's take it a step further. Having spent so much time dealing with the symbol internally (including many of the negative emotions that surrounded it), much to my surprise many years later, I found an external manifestation with many of the salient characteristics. It was a Supernova. It announced itself in a 13 second wave front of neutrinos at 07:35 UT on 23 February 1987 from an insignificant magnitude 12 star in the Large Magellic Cloud, one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies. The first supernova to be visible to the naked eye in almost 400 years.
SN1987A, otherwise known in the context of my belief system, "Nuclear Gemini".
SuperNova SN1987A (large picture) - 1999 - The stars by the way that appear to be traveling along the rings are actually in our own galaxy. They just "coincidentally" appear as they do.
SuperNova SN1987A Center ( picture) - 2003 - Continuing to evolve. Most scientists explain the structure as the result of the supernova having once been a binary system, which of course just adds fuel to my fire :)
SuperNova SN1987A (external link) - 2007 - Scientific overview at 20 year anniversary. The universe is of course filled with these fantastic images, but like Shoemaker-Levy/Jupiter, who would have expected the first supernova seen in 400 years to be so unusual.
A telling of my personal experience is of course entirely subjective, and there is no way that I can prove to you that my story isn't the product of an overly invested schizophrenic imagination. Perhaps my path towards this destination was set when the last TV show that John and I watched together before he died in 1987 was the premiere of STNG where the symbol and many of it's emotional components are played out on the screen (Encounter at Farpoint Part 2).
In the second picture above, does that look something akin to a fuzzy image centered in the middle of a ornate temple? I have no explanation. All I know is what I felt. The scale here is quite overwhelming except in the context of the shadow image before the vision (a useful coping mechanism that initially only attached to this symbol but eventually became the foundation of my belief in mankind as volunteers in the resolution of suffering).
Did you know that the internet search engines report over 800 million pages existing with the word "love"? Of these approximately 340 million (40%) of these same pages also contain either the word "star" or "stars". That's a fairly good indication of the collective belief of mankind in their linkage. So what else can I say, except that I believe Joseph Campbell was right. Welcome to the inner reaches of outer space.
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Numerology Redux - Tennessee - 1993
"Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind" - Shakespeare Sonnet 113
When I was living in Tennessee the house number where I lived was 113. The office number where I worked was also 113. Same thing for the program I worked on the most. It ended with 113. Finally the only piece of scripture that I quoted more than once while posting online? You guessed it. From the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Logion 113.
Go figure :)
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Pride Parade - Atlanta - Summer 1994
Following are a couple of posts from the AOL GLCF forum that talk about an interaction between Gay People and Christian Fundamentalists at the Atlanta Pride parade back in 1994. I mention two churches in this post. One is still there and thriving. the other no longer exists. The relationship to synchronicity is in how this event showed a large symbol system.
Subj: Atlanta Pride 94-06-13 13:25:49 EDT
From: Joe Uhrig
I am just back from the Atlanta pride parade and celebration, so many incredible men, it's going to take a month for my poor libido to recover :) , and I wanted to share something I observed there.
More often than not when I travel, I find myself drawn to or standing within large symbol systems. This one relates to the relationship between Christianity and Gay people.
The Atlanta pride parade route goes up Peachtree Street, which is the major street in town. Along the way it passes a number of large churches. At one point about midway there are two churches facing each other on opposite sides of the street.
One was a fairly modern looking structure of a mainstream denomination, with it's entrance close to the street, and with a very large banner hung across the building stating "All are welcome here". The church members (mostly straight as far as I could tell) had tables set up and were carrying trays of cold water out to the thirsty marchers. There was no proselytizing of any sort whatsoever and the church members seemed to be caught up in the spirit of the event. The cool shade of their front lawn was filled with people watching the parade.
Directly across the street was a large traditional looking (but magnificent) structure, again belonging to a mainstream denomination, set back from the street with very large (but closed) doors. The impeccable lawn was empty save for a concerned deacon and three police officers guarding the property (there is no history as far as I know of the pride parade ever doing any damage to this church's property).
Two startling contrasts in every detail.
The Sunday morning services of both churches let out about a half hour before the parade, so I got a chance to observe their respective reactions. On one side mostly curiosity and amusement (you have to admit we can be pretty outrageous). On the other side mostly disapproval and most significantly... fear.
But then of course there was more... (continued).
Subj: Atlanta Pride continued... 94-06-13 13:27:38 EDT
From: Joe Uhrig
Catty-corner to these two contrasting symbols was a third. A group of fundamentalists had set up shop with a number of banners stating their unequivocal belief in Jesus and the Bible (I personally believe in one without believing in the other). There was also of course the obligatory major hunk holding the banner with a picture of Jesus. Most notably there was not one single word of condemnation or hatred on their banners. It was all positive. As the parade went by they did not yell out or chant, but rather simply waved at the marchers.
I did not really talk in depth to any of these folks, though I imagine they had a traditional old testament view of homosexuality, but watching the interaction between these folks and the marchers was real interesting. I did mention to one of the women ahead of time that I loved these parades because of their enormous diversity, their celebratory spirit, and that as they would see there was "something for everyone". You could see that they were having difficulty dealing with some of the extravagance (I didn't stay around to see their reaction to the live whipping float, yet there is some biblical relevance to such things ).
This group of fundamentalists really weren't being offensive. The only time I saw them give out a pamphlet was when someone gave out a pamphlet to them. They looked like they were feeling a little tested though.
Just as interesting was the reaction of the marchers to the fundamentalists. Since there is a lot of anger on both sides of these issues I expected the marchers to be real hard on this group. But at least while I was watching, all the heated exchanges seemed to falter. A few solitary confrontations, a few chants of shame, but all short lived. There was also the irony of a marcher trying to get a Jewish group to sing Jesus loves me yes I know...
I left this scene to march with the PFLAG group so I can't comment on what happened afterwards. But I have to tell you I felt like something was happening there. It felt like, if not an emotional reconciliation, then at least a summation was occurring at some level. All the issues were present in both real and symbolic form.
Just thought I would share this. I am not a Christian in the normal sense, and if this folder is for support then I'll refrain from further posts as my views are very radical. As someone pointed out earlier, it's difficult sometimes to be Christian and Gay, and I don't want to be a negative influence here.
One last thought:
"It's more than a dream. It's a part of someone. Over the horizons. Hello everyone. More than a dream, it's what we are, working together for so long. Bring us together one by one. It's more than a dream. Hello everyone."
- courtesy of Ma Bell
Subj: Re:Chicago's Gay Pride 94-06-14 11:46:54 EDT
From: Joe Uhrig
I look forward to the day when they march with us (and we with them) in one great big celebration of life.
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