In yesterday’s post, we mentioned that Petrarch was astonished by what he read from Saint Augustine’s Confessions after he reached the summit of Mont Ventoux. He recognized the coincidence as part of a larger pattern, a transformative moment. In awe, he descended the mountain in silence. (He’d climbed with his brother.)
“I could not believe that it was as mere accident that I happened upon them. What I had there read I believed to be addressed to me and to no other, remembering that Saint Augustine had once suspected the same thing in his own case.”
In fact, Saint Augustine had undergone a nearly identical experience in the garden of Milan in 386 as he confronted a spiritual crisis in his life. He heard a child’s voice from a nearby house mysteriously repeating the words, Tolle, lege,” (“Pick up and read.”)
Baffled, he finally opened a copy of Saint Paul’s epistles read what amounted to a direct response to his lifelong conflict and addressed its resolution. “The light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shadows of doubt fled away,” he later wrote.
So just as Augustine’s words randomly read by Petrarch a thousand years later led to the Renaissance, Augustine’s own experience gave rise to the birth of the Christian era. Until his time, Christianity had been a minor sect. So one synchronicity heralded Christianity, the other the Renaissance.
I have a vague memory of hearing about St. Augustine’s Synchronicity in a sermon. I also remember how much clearer the life of Jesus became when I took a tour of Galilee. The guide would explain the different sites as we rode along. When we stopped he would have us read a Bible passage about the place we were about to visit. At the site of The Sermon on the Mount we took turns reading the Beatitudes as we sat on benches or on the grass under the trees with a view of the Sea of Galilee below us.
Ray