Life's Curious Synchronies

The enticing nudges of transcendent presence

Word salad from Ransom Notes

Been a while, eh? I know, long time, no words. I’ve been away. Not “away” in that friend-to-friend hand-shielded murmuring “he’s been ‘away’ [wink, wink, nod, nod]” way. Nor alas was I galavanting in exotic climes, socializing somewhere fabulous with the elites, and relishing the life of luxury.

No, just been so thoroughly ‘tied up’ in what has become an all-consuming, even surreal, physician rights initiative. It’s a deeply concerning one, dealing with sham evaluations of physicians and other healthcare personnel done for fun and profit by non-overseen powerful state agencies and that generally result in complete career derailment. Awesomely weighty stuff. And complex too, so much so that if you take a leave from it for even a limited span, you lose the thread.

And so it’s good to get back to writing on less ponderous themes. In fact, what prompted me to come up for air was an engagingly creative, humorous word-play game, Ransom Notes, meant mostly for grown-ups to get together and have some laughs.

A little back story….

Since moving to Rockport, I’ve gotten involved in my local church, one that’s of the Christian “congregational” philosophy. It’s the UCC of Rockport MA, known as The Old Sloop. It’s quite a lovely space and a welcoming community , and has the makings of what I (and I suspect many others) yearn for in a spirit-minded community.

I volunteered to be on our UCC membership committee. Declining church membership, in general, has been a preoccupation of mine for some time, as I believe being involved in any beneficent spirit-minded community helping one live a more virtuous life (or at least aspire to) is not just important but critical for the maintenance of a civil society, one geared toward a collaborative peace-filled world.

We’ve had some animated discussions about what it means in today’s world to attend a church’s services, how’s that different from being "a member,” and why more people don’t come to church, even occasionally – not just ours, but any at all. There have been several great pieces in NYT exploring this disturbing trend. But there’s a corollary question we’re not yet asking that I think is critically important: why DO people go to church? And for that matter, do people have an active spiritual component in their lives? And if they don’t, why not? Is it important? And what is it that makes it so?

To strengthen our connections with each other as a community, we’re resurrecting our long-dormant church directory. The last one seems to date back to an almost Norman Rockwell era, peppered with yearbook-like pictures of smiling wholesome-looking people doing good things together. Whatever the turbulence of that era may have been, it seems so quaint looking at the spite-filled divisiveness and apocalyptic despair we’re mired in now.

Part of our “recruitment” process is encouraging new visitors to consider becoming more regular attendees, and nudging the regulars to formally join us as “members” of this congregation. And toward those ends, we’re revising our Welcome to UCC Rockport brochure. As everybody who's ever sat on an outreach committee of any service-oriented organization knows, this is the sort of project that has probably consumed more committee time around the world than any other human endeavor …, well, shy of the mission statement!

I’d recently ordered a much-talked-about humorous word-play game, Ransom Notes. While I’d never played it, I was really eager to try it out as it looked like it’d be great great fun (and not too crassly vulgar) for a group of people just looking to kick back together and have some great laughs.

So, right after the membership meeting, I opened the “Ransom Notes” box. And thankfully it’s a game that doesn’t require reading an encyclopedia of instructions before you start.

I unpack all the magnetized single-word pieces; it looks basically the same as if you printed out this paragraph and manually cut out each word. Each player then scoops up a random fistful of them (75 or so). While it’s meant for multiple players, I was just solo-exploring this to get the sense of it so I could be the lemme-show-you-how-easy-it-is game-meister when the next opportune social gathering occurs in my otherwise hermetic and all-too-ponderously preoccupied life. So I lay out my array. (Just to ease your mind, no, I do not make my imaginary friends do this.)

To start, someone draws a Ransom Notes “prompt” card and reads it out loud, and everybody (in this case, me and the invisibles) has a minute or two quietly to individually – no cheating – come up with a pithy response to the prompt using their own word spread. Now remember, this game wasn't designed for a church crowd. It was meant to let people be as facetious and risque’ as they want. In fact, the judge determines the winner on outrageousness and laughs, not inspirational sentence-crafting.

And so I draw from the top of the Ransom Notes prompt card stack.

And, omg, what’s it say ?!

“Draft a pamphlet convincing people to join your religion.”

You gotta admit, that’s just downright amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going spiritually woo-woo on you. But it’s just so astonishingly coincidental. Why that prompt? Why now?

It’d be like a compulsive gambler happens to be playing and he’s just lost everything and knows deep down he’s got a problem but has been in complete denial about it, and he draws a Ransom Notes prompt saying “What do you do when you’ve lost everything?”

And the curious thing about such occurrences is that they can often speak directly to one person with laser-like precision, and for everyone else the chosen card is just a fun prompt.

Each player has to construct their response using only the scattered words in their own pile. And being a ransom note, grammar’s not important. Those of you who’ve received one surely know that. So … limited random words, grammar be damned, 2 minute composition. And that’s where it gets really creative. (And hilarious, as evidenced in some of the examples.)

So keeping the prompt in mind, I was scanning my hodgepodge verbal salad and saw a word here and there that might begin to be part of a humorously pithy response.

And from amongst the randomly scattered words in my pile came this:

“we arrest hate . . . finally promise trillion day love.”

Now, mind you, I wasn’t trying to be Mr. HolyPoley. I was actually going for some sardonic humor, which is more my natural style. (Surely I could’ve found some seductive combo to play with given that I had “sleep,” “touch,” and “baby” in my word pile.)

Come to think of it, the fact that that very assemblage of words was right there in my random pile seems itself an additional irony on top of the timing of the opening prompt card.

And it’s kind of meta-ironic too that along comes this humor diversion-intended “Ransom Notes” game nudges you to break out of the darkly ponderous mind-warp that’s enveloped me, and get me back into writing more for pleasure and not just for crafting heavy-duty Molotov cocktail-like missives on the human rights front.

I've had so many curious juxtapositions over the course of my crazy whistleblower ordeal that have given me pause and caused me to reflect that I no longer see them as just randomly occurring coincidences but as the beguiling winks of a larger ethereal mind.

I suspect many people experience these “coincidences” in their life journeys and yet, in their highly distracted, frenzied way of being in the world, and without a larger framework of the possibility of a grander transcendent reality, quickly brush them off as just happenstance occurrence in an otherwise incoherent universe of randomness.

Perhaps this piece could be a nudge for you or someone you know to begin pausing to marvel and reflect on the curious synchronicities as they occur in your life.

Gotta admit, that itself would be a curious happenstance.

(p.s. here’s a link to the Ransom Notes game on Amazon.¹)

1. FYI, I may or may not get a few pennies commission for linking people to the game’s Amazon page. But rest assured, whether I do or don’t, the price you pay on Amazon is the same as whatever price they currently have posted. i.e. there’s no ‘mark-up’ just because you went there on this link as opposed to going via a Google or an online article link. (Btw, they’re getting the same[or more] pennies per purchase).