Coincidence has always played a wonderful part as proof of god. Our brains are predisposed to seek and find patterns -- we are walking metaphors, we are embodied hyperboles and we live inside mandalas. Every part of our "consciousness", which is the black box inside our incomprehensible existance, is devoted to "explaining", to "seeing connections", to linking our sites, to sorting categories of imperatives.
At the same time, Chance is rolling out its infinite die. Lady Luck accompanies us but her company is the only predictable thing about her. Yet so often, so many of the chance events in our life appear to be "more than coincidence" -- as if our lives were guided by god, even in the most mundane ways. As if a god would care if we were late to a hearing or a party, or as if our suffering is a punishment or an opportunity. Is it "God's Hand" that plays us? This thing that is all over us with serendipity?
Example of coincidence in a mundane matter: In May 1944, a cross-word puzzle was published in the London Daily Telegraph. The answers to the clues included such names as Utah, Omaha, Overlord, Mulberry, and Neptune. A few days later, those words were revealed as highly-secret code names for D-Day operations. After investigation, the extraordinary use of 5 words from classified war operations in a cross-word was ruled to be pure coincidence.
Clearly, the god of coincidence works full-time, and is not shy about war secrets or above cross-word trivia. The patterns we see in our lives may not be "real". It may just be chance, keeping its grip.
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