A Cluster Synchro Involving St. Jude

 We have a lot of grocery stores in our town. Publix, a chain, is the closest to our  house and is where I usually shop. It’s where I met a Cuban woman, Marina, who bags groceries.

In Cuba, Marina was an emergency room physician, a woman accustomed to dealing with a crisis rapidly, efficiently. She made a good living, her mother and sister lived nearby, but life was never easy.  In the 1990s when the lottery opened up for Cuban residents to immigrate to the U.S., she tossed in her and her husband’s names. And then she lit a candle to St. Jude, the Catholic patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes.

St. Jude’s day – October 28 – is widely celebrated in Cuba. Candles are lit, prayers are uttered, meals are dedicated to him. For days and weeks and months, Marina supplicated St. Jude to let her and her husband’s names be drawn in the lottery. And when her name was drawn, she felt certain that St. Jude had intervened on her behalf.

This is the sort of stuff Marina and I talk about in the Publix parking lot, while we’re unloading my groceries from the cart and putting them in the trunk of my car. During our last conversation about St. Jude, she told me that Publix carries St. Jude candles, with the prayer written in Spanish on the back. I said I would buy one and light it for her sister, who is undergoing treatment for leukemia.

Around this same time, Jane Clifford, a healer in Wales, wrote that she had invoked St. Jude on several occasions and the saint always had come through for her. In one instance when her son was younger, she needed a lot of money for Harry’s tuition – more than 30,000 pounds – and it had come through.

 I began to think about this, about St Jude’s name appearing twice in a short period of time, and knew that if there was a third occurrence, it would count as a cluster synchro and I’d better pay close attention. Sure enough, mid-October rolled around. My friend Hilary arrived for a week of intense writing, in which we intended to finish a screenplay for my novel Ghost Key, that we started last spring. We put in more than 70 hours, with a break for a couple of dinners out and a trip one afternoon to a hair salon.

During that drive to the salon, we talked about philosophy, UFOs, metaphysical belief systems. Hilary is a Hemingway, the niece of Ernest, and she wrote a screenplay with Andy Garcia about Hemingway’s last days in Cuba that will go into production next spring. She’s married to Jeff Lindsay, the creator and author of the  Dexter books. Before Dexter, they were struggling as writers. So I said, “For your lives to have changed so radically, there had to be a dramatic change in your beliefs. What was it?”

She thought for a moment, then said, “I can think of only two things. We went to Key West one weekend and there’s this big ceiba tree  where people write down their wishes and places them in the gigantic roots. I wrote my wishes for Jeff, that his new book would sell and succeed  separate from anything Hemingway. The other thing was that Jeff lit a candle in honor of St. Jude and kept it lit for a year.”

Bingo. Three references, a cluster synchro.

As a long lapsed Catholic, the only thing I find seductive about the Catholic church and its beliefs is the mystical element – the belief that certain things are powerful.  It’s no different than a belief  in a particular nutritional program that will help you lose weight or a belief in lucky numbers that will attract your soul mate. Belief, it all boils down to belief. This type of thinking is often referred to as magical – and usually in a disparaging way – but I figure, well, why not? What do I have to lose? Yet, we aren’t in desperate straits, its not as if one of us is dying of some terrible disease or that we’re going to lose our house tomorrow. But, why not? Why not?

We have a number of pending projects, so today I wandered over to Publix to find the St. Jude candle. There weren’t any. I could have made the hike to a botanica in downtown West Palm Beach, a shop that stocks all the tools uses in Santeria, a Cuban-mystical religion. I knew it would have the candles. But I realized the power of St. Jude lies in the ritual, the lighting of the candle, the invocation, the intent of the person who is asking for intervention. So I bought this beautifully scented candle that is probably used in the rooms of model homes.

During checkout the cashier sniffed it. The person bagging my groceries sniffed it. The customer in front of me took a whiff. All of them approved. Sniff, sniff, nod, nod, very nice.  Yeah, it was a weird moment.

When I got home, Rob had already looked up prayers for St. Jude, which were too overtly religious for us. So we made up our own invocation.

Stay tuned.