Good Shepherd Sunday (knock, knock)

Yesterday was, with the exception of a couple of funerals I attended in childhood, my first time attending a Roman Catholic Mass.

I had actually intended to go to Mass three weeks previous, on Easter Sunday. On Good Friday, I contacted the only Catholic church in my city (a Filipino congregation) via their Facebook page and asked if and when they had Latin or English Masses. It turns out there are no Latin Masses celebrated anywhere on the entire island of Taiwan, but the local Filipino church does have an English Mass every Sunday morning. Then, having noticed that all the photos on the church's Facebook page showed people wearing Science Masks, I asked if they were required there -- and was told that they were! Well, in the end I just wasn't willing to compromise on that, and so I didn't go.

Fast forward three weeks.

I was up extremely late this Saturday night -- my head didn't hit the pillow until nearly five in the morning -- and, not having set an alarm clock, I expected I would probably sleep until noon or later. Instead, I spontaneously woke up in the morning, aware that I had just been dreaming and that the dream had ended with someone saying, "Wake up, time to go to Mass." I glanced at the clock and saw that, yes, I had just enough time to catch English Mass if I got up and started getting ready right away. So I did. As for the Science Mask issue, I figured I'd just not wear one and hope nobody said anything about it. That worked, and the Mass was a good experience. It was only about 90% in English, but that was good enough. If you ever need to say "Behold the body of Christ" in Tagalog, by the way, it's apparently "Ang katawan ni Kristo."

Unbeknownst to me, the third Sunday after Easter is called Good Shepherd Sunday because that's the Gospel reading for the day, and it was the subject of the priest's sermon. He particularly emphasized the first two verses: "He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep" (John 10:1-2). The emphasis on door imagery struck me as synchronistically relevant. In fact, the very text I have quoted put in an appearance in the sync stream back in January ("The gate is strait, deep and wide -- and doves" and "The strait and wide gates, ripe and green figs, abundant life, red and white doves").

In the afternoon, I visited a used bookstore in Taichung and browsed the handful of shelves devoted to English works. One that caught my eye was Meditations on the Heart of God by François Fénelon -- a name I recognized as one frequently cited by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy. Several of the other Christian mystics to whom I was introduced by Huxley's book (Thomas Traherne, William Law, The Cloud of Unknowing) have turned out to be very much worth reading, so I thought Fénelon might be worth a gander. I took the book off the shelf and opened it up at random. This was the page I got:

A different Gospel text, also using door imagery -- a minor sync with the Good Shepherd Sunday sermon. I flipped to the foreword and saw that it said, referring to Fénelon, "Come with me now and sit at the feet of this beloved shepherd, and hear the words of a wise master" -- that's a much more specific sync with "I am the good shepherd, and my sheep hear my voice."

The chapter title I had opened up to, "Never Stop Knocking," made me visualize knocking on a door, getting no answer -- knocking again, still no answer -- beating on the door as hard just as you can, again and again for a really long time, determined not to stop until someone opens up -- and what it made me think of was the way Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal. "Knock louder," I imagined Fénelon/Elijah saying, "for he is a god! Either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked."

I took the book and moved on to the next shelf, where my eyes immediately lighted on a spine labeled Bang on the Door. I pulled it off the shelf.

Now my natural instinct is to give a very wide berth to anyone with a "guru smile" like that, but in this case my sync curiosity got the better of me. I checked the table of contents and found the chapter which gives the book its name. It has an epigraph from Thomas Merton and then begins with a pretty clear reference to the same Gospel passage that served as Fénelon's text for "Never Stop Knocking."

Several thousand years ago someone said, "Knock and it shall be opened unto you." The human mind two thousand years ago was simple, natural, closer to the source. One needed only to knock on the door and it would open. Today the mind has become more complex, more confused. Knocking will not help. One has to bang on the door.

Five thousand years ago a person would not have needed to knock. He would have found an automatic door. The moment he went near the door, it would have opened. . . . The state of humankind five thousand years ago was much simpler than it is now.

That image -- really banging on the door because no one's answering when you just knock normally -- is virtually identical to the one brought to mind by Fénelon's chapter title. The general theme of the passage I have quoted -- how primitive people apprehended spiritual reality more directly, without conscious effort, than we do today -- also syncs with another book I am reading at the moment, Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield.

When I got home, I started reading the Fénelon book, starting with the biographical introduction by Robert J. Edmondson. Half the citations in the introduction come from none other than Thomas Merton, the same 20th-century Catholic monk quoted by the Indian guru.

In Bang on the Door, the Merton quote is on page 18. In Meditations on the Heart of God, the Merton citations are on page xviii.

The second and third chapters of Meditations on the Heart of God are called "The Kingdom Within" and "The Narrow Door." This quote is featured on the back cover of Bang on the Door:

You are locked out of your own house. Bang on your inner door. Right now you are on the doorstep. Do not delay a moment. All wealth is within you. When your inner door opens, there is love, just love.

As a postscript for those of my readers who attribute significance to these two numbers, I should note that among the other titles in the rather meager English section of that used bookstore were a book called The 33 and another one called 34.

Update: I read the Ravi Shankar chapter about banging on the door. Lots of references to one door opening when another closes: "When you shut one door, another door opens all by itself. . . . When you close one door, another door opens. When you close your outside door, then your inner door opens. . . . So we shut the door towards these things and our inner door opens and one day there is just love."

The next day (Monday, May 1), I ran across this meme online:

Update 2: On Tuesday, May 2, I checked /pol/ -- something I haven't been doing much lately -- and found this:

An anon posts the number 33, and his post number ends in 44. Then the very first comment says "I want to get a post ending in 55 please," and it does end in 55! One of the replies claimed this wasn't a real coincidence, though.

Hate to burst the bubble but it's possible to ''queue'' posts so they execute on a particular post number

Don't ask me how, idk

I have no idea whether that's really possible or not -- hax0rz move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform -- but in this case it's not an adequate explanation. The 55 post was the first reply to the 44 post about 33. If the anon had queued it to be posted the next time a number ending in 55 rolled around, rather than posting immediately, it is highly unlikely that he would have been the first.