3: Becoming
Be Loved for Your Knowledge, Your Experience, and Your Faith
WHO ARE YOU? WHO AM I?
As a child I responded with confidence, offering answers like, “I have brown hair. I like green.” As I got older I began to feel trapped by genetics, family history, social structure. They seemed to imprint indelible images that defined my future: student, employee, wife, mother.
But I wanted to be something else.
First, I wanted to be a rockstar, but genetics took the wind out of that. Then, I wanted to be an herbal healer like Ayla in Clan of the Cave Bear, but my family’s financial status nipped that in the bud. Then I wanted to be smart, so I absorbed enough ink from books to begin to think I could write them, but years went by, and I realized I didn’t have the credentials to write books about some of the things that mattered to me, like abuse, motherhood, and feminism.
Somewhere along the journey, I was led to believe it was all up to me.
That if I was going to achieve anything beyond the outline that originally defined me, I was completely responsible for it. But that isn’t happening in my situation.
I’ve become a writer, but I’m not writing stories about anything I’ve achieved or done. Well, sort of. I’ve showed up. But I’ve just been an observer. Not a journalist who reports on stories about others. I’m writing stories about amazing things that keep happening in my life with little or no conscious effort on my part.
This event involves the person who coined the term, synchronicity, Carl Jung, and it seems like it would be a lot easier if I’d just seen a unicorn.
Not too long before, though, I’d been so bold as to make the claim that I had reached the same conclusion about God as Jung, saying, “I know God exists,” as he was saying in 1960, but I never dreamed I’d have any kind of connection to him. For me, Jung was like superman, beyond the reach of anyone.
Then one afternoon, it happened.
On Facebook, I posted a quote from my book, Critical Revelations in the Realm of Contemporary Spirituality, that said: “For most of my life I didn’t think anyone would ever be able to say they knew without any doubt that God existed. Then, I found myself in a place I never dreamed could be possible—I was trying to understand experiences that were so remarkable there couldn’t be any other explanation.”
A friend of a friend, who I will refer to as D.D., said, “Extraordinary claims require Extraordinary evidence.”
I replied, “I have collected extraordinary evidence over the past 15-plus years. I am just getting started sharing it. I have example after example.”
My friend, J.T, commented next with some information about Jung, including the fact that Jung thought ancient cultures (Egyptians, Mayans, etc.) had important answers. He also said that Jung believed that science needed to examine this further.
Then, for some reason, instead of sharing one of my stories, I decided to share Jung’s Scarab Beetle story since I’d just heard about it.
That event occurred when Carl Jung was with one of his patients. While she was telling him a dream about a scarab beetle, he heard a tapping at his window. When he opened the window, a scarabaeid-type beetle flew in, and Jung caught it. It was a short, clear example of synchronicity, an extraordinary event. So I went to get a link.
The first time I looked it up, I read the Wikipedia version, but I decided to click the first option Google provided (http://jungcurrents. com/synchronicity-the-golden-scarab-beetle).
Then, instead of just copying the link and pasting it into our conversation, I scrolled down the page past Jung’s Scarab Beetle story, and I was stunned at what I began to read.
Under a subheading called “The Mythology of the Scarab Beetle,” I found information that had a connection to our conversation, as well as a remarkable connection to an aspect about my experiences that I had recently begun to notice.
J.T. had mentioned that Jung thought ancient beliefs held some important information, specifically mentioning Egypt, and it turns out that while the scarab beetle was an important part of Egyptian mythology, which I’m sure Jung knew, there was something else about it that he might not have understood fully.
In ancient Egypt, the scarab beetle was revered. It was part of the god of the rising sun, Khepera. The beetle was either the head or it was sitting on top of the head of Khepera, which many of us have seen. But I don’t think many people know that the god’s name, Khepera, comes from the Egyptian word, kheprer, which means “to become.”1
When I saw the words, to become, it felt like another pin dropped into place.
I had just begun to talk about the importance of the process of becoming in relationship to the events my daughters and I have been experiencing. Earlier in March and three days before, I had shared that perspective in a couple of online conversations:
Twitter (March 12): .@________11 We are in the process of becoming. No one would take the steps needed to grow if our lives were perfect.
Disqus, “Now is Then” (March 27): I have been able to see that the events have simply been necessary for me to become who I am, who I love being, and for my daughters to become who they are becoming.
My conversation with D.D. and J.T. resulted in a stunning connection between Jung’s Scarab Beetle story, the ancient Egyptians, and an observation I’d made about my experiences.
In 2015, I lost my home and for about a month, I stayed with a friend, hoping I could find work in Seattle. One weekend when she had company, one of her other friends let me stay at her home. On her refrigerator, I saw a tiny piece of paper that said, “Be loved for your knowledge, your experience, and your faith.” It was the graphic I chose for the Facebook post. I was amazed to see that, while I took a photo of it because I recognized that the concepts have been central to my journey, it is ultimately about becoming.
Next Chapter
4: The Unmistakable Red Rows | And the Red Rose: A Widely Recognized Symbol of Love
McDevitt, April. “Ancient Egypt: The Mythology - Khepera.” Ancient Egypt: The Mythology - Khepera. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Dec. 2016.