Ring around the rosy

This morning as I was meeting with a client, I happened to mentioned we’d had an office across the street years ago. He told me a family had purchased that house and intended to restore it. He mentioned a few more details and it became very clear that the family is one I know from an entirely different circle than the person with whom I was conversing. He was incredulous. I was not surprised.

I always love those connections, when the world seems small and friendly, not big and cold. They seem to happen with more frequency ... or am I just more aware?

Some people call it chance, serendipity or coincidence. But I think otherwise.

It reminds me of a concept postulated (more likely “inspired” wisdom) by the early monastic Abba Dorotheos of Gaza. He described the relationship between people and God and other people as a compass with God as the center point, the outside circle the world, and individual lives as the lines from the outside to the core. “The closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they became to God,” he said.

I find in my own life that as I have grown more intimate with God and developed deeper relationships with others, we all seem to touch and bump into each other more than when I was younger.

I relish those encounters and am grateful for some awareness when they happen.


• What shape is my world – the one full of relationships between me and others, me and God, all of us?
• Do I feel these chance encounters are something more? What, specifically?
• Have I ever said that out loud or discussed it with someone?
• What do others feel?
• Is this something I should share?


Ring around the rosy.
When we’re young,
we seemed at the center,
everyone gathered ‘round us.

Much like before Copernicus
dispelled the earth-is-the
center-of-the-universe theory.

As we mature, we experience
another rotation, out of
the center and to the
edge of the circle.
We’re no longer rosy.

However, as we gravitate
toward others at the fringe
and the Source at the
core, we move distinctly
closer to ALL.