Signal Graces: The Rosary as a sync magnet

From time to time, I’ve run into the expression “signal graces” in connection with the Rosary. The first of the 15 promises given by Our Lady to Blessed Alain de la Roche is:

Those who faithfully serve me by the recitation of the Rosary shall receive signal graces.

I had always assumed that signal was being used in the ordinary adjectival sense of “striking” or “remarkable.” I’ve recently discovered, though, that most people understand it as referring to signals as a form of communication, and that in practice signal graces is a Catholic way of saying synchronicity. For example, Sober Catholic defines it thus:

A “signal grace” is a free gift from God (grace) that is extraordinary in nature and evident in some manner (signal). It may be a visible sign or deep interior feeling that a prayer has been answered or a direction you’ve been seeking has been given. Another name for signal grace is “God-incidence,” a play on “coincidence” as with God there are none, because God actually works in that mysterious intersection where seemingly unrelated events in space and time meet up.

A website called Signal Graces has this to say:

What are signal graces? I bet you've had signal graces before and just called them coincidences. What if that coincidence was God trying to encourage you or communicate with you? What if you could count on God communicating with you in this way? It turns out you can!

I was not aware of this apparently common Catholic concept when I wrote this on January 23 of this year:

Earlier this month, after more than a year of praying the Rosary every day, I decided to stop for a while just to see what would happen and to prove to myself that it hadn't become a superstitious compulsion. The main effect I noticed was that syncs stopped as if turned off with a tap. (I wish I'd known that trick back when I was trying to make new syncs stop for a while!)

My breakthrough into a state of more-or-less constant synchronicity occurred well before I took up the Rosary, but it’s still interesting that taking a break from the Rosary caused a break in the syncs.

Leo quoted that January post of mine in explaining how he, too, decided to give the Rosary a try, in his post “Praying like Tolkien (and WJT).”

As an example of this Rosary-sync connection, Leo — who often makes a point of saying that he is not a sync guy like Bill and me — just happened to publish this first post of his about the Rosary on October 7. You may know that date as the Tsar’s birthday or the anniversary of last year’s Middle Eastern unpleasantness, but to Catholics it means something else: