I started a post on my Book of Mormon blog -- gave it a title, "So as by fire," and pasted a list of scripture references I wanted to deal with -- and then saved the draft and went to teach my final class of the day. As I was writing today's date on the board, I thought, for no obvious reason, "March 25, so nine more months till Christmas." A second later, I realized that that made today Annunciation Day -- i.e., the day Jesus would have been conceived if he was born on Christmas Day, assuming a pregnancy of exactly nine calendar months. Mormons have nothing like a liturgical calendar, so I rarely notice such things (though a dream about Annunciation Day is what started the whole "Chip Monks" thing). When I returned to the computer after the class, one of the other tabs I had left open was the Synlogos feed, which had been updated while I was away. One of the new posts, from Catholic blogger Mark Docherty, was titled "Feast of the Annunciation: 'By the fire of your charity, by the unction of your humility, you have drawn the Divinity to come within you.'" The quote in the title is from St. Catherine of Siena, who says in part:
O Mary, vessel of humility, you were pleasing to the eternal Father, and in His own singular love, He has captivated you and drawn you to Him. By the fire of your charity, by the unction of your humility, you have drawn the Divinity to come within you. . . .O Mary, my sweet love, you opened to the eternal Divinity the door of your will, and the Word immediately became incarnate within you. By this you teach me that God, who created me without my help, will not save me without it . . . but knocks at the door of my will and waits for me to open it to Him.
It was by "fire," says St. Catherine, that the Blessed Virgin opened the door to God, thereby teaching us that God can only "save" us if we do the same. Since my post is going to be about references to being "saved by fire" in the Book of Mormon (I'll add a link here once it's published), that's a solid sync.
Just after I had typed most of the above, a student came into my office to ask a question about her high school homework. It was a reading comprehension exercise, and the reading passage was an advice column called "Jesse Cohen Says." The "Chip Monks" link above goes to a word search for that phrase on this blog, and the first post that comes up is "Jesse Eisenberg: the connecting link between Chipmunks and Bigfoot." (It's about the "Case of the Missing Acorn." The acorn recently came up in "Stones as seeds" as a symbol of Joseph Smith's seer stone.) The sync of a Jesse with a very Jewish surname prompted me to run a search for "jesse cohen says" just on the off chance that it was a real column. The top three results were all for the same news story, dated May 2, 2014: "Graffiti Tag Found on Dead Whale in Atlantic City." An ad the bottom of the page (no longer there when I refreshed, and I didn't get a screencap) showed some female celebrity standing in front of a wall that had the Virgin logo inside a red heart, so positioned as to appear as if it were crowning the woman's head -- a sync with the Blessed Virgin and her "fire of charity."
The whale in the story was found on May 1, just four days after I posted my many-eyed whale dream ("A beast with many eyes") on what I would discover years later was the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision. The graffiti tag on the whale said "ΤΕΦ 94," and Jesse Cohen was a spokesman for the Jewish fraternity presumed to be responsible. My whale dream included a precognitive link to the film 47 Ronin, and 94 is twice 47. Jesse Eisenberg, incidentally, starred in The Squid and the Whale.
This was originally going to be a brief sync prescript to my BoM post, but it got too long and involved for that, and now I've written this instead of writing the post. Well, as someone once said, tomorrow is another day.
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