When my father died a portal opened that beckoned me to follow him. I was twelve years old. He was alive and well one day and dead the next. The world that I'd known before he died collapsed with his passing and all that remained of him was that portal. Thankfully it closed as I arrived at his burial. As the car that I was in ground to a halt in the gravel beside his grave I flipped open the ashtray in the armrest beside me and there, stuck to the underside of its chrome lid, was a chewed piece of chewing gum.

After a solemn graveside prayer our pastor offered me a child-sized shovel to throw some dirt on my father's casket. However, it wasn't the pageantry of my father's funeral or the ritual of his burial that caused the portal to close: it was that piece of chewing gum. I had flipped the ashtray open in the midst of questioning if I was still alive or not, if what I was experiencing was real or not. And behold, there before me was God's answer: "Of course you're still alive. And by the way, nobody gives a shit, including me."

I found this exhilarating. I immediately went back in time and told my distraught self of a few days earlier that everything would be okay. This mirrored what my mother had told my sister and me the night my father died, but which I had not believed at the time, which in turn mirrored what our pastor had told us, which I had also not believed. That chewing gum, however, was definitive and irrefutable: God had spoken to me directly. I was on my own. From then on I became mindful of how important my future would be to my past and I began taking actions that I believed would make my younger self happy to be alive.

The Geneva Awakening was a period in time in the early 1800s when a group of young protestant students and pastors, including a young Genevan pastor named Emile Guers, confronted the established Church of Geneva and demanded a more direct relationship with God. In their view the church was standing in the way of its parishioners' relationships with God by interpreting the bible for them instead of letting them come to their own conclusions. They expressed their displeasure with this by evangelizing biblical literalism, in particular with respect to biblical prophecy.

In 1856 Guers wrote:

That's some pretty kick-ass writing for the 1800s if you ask me, all spun up as an affront to the established church because it insisted on dictating how biblical prophecy, which Guers himself admitted was bonkers, should be interpreted. I felt the same way about the rituals around my father's death. I needed to grieve in my own way, interpret the symbols around me for myself and come to my own conclusions. In retrospect I appreciate the reassurances that my mother and my pastor offered me, but it's that chewing gum that I remember the most vividly because of its timing, visual impact and specificity to me.

I liken Guers' and his colleagues' combative spirit to the religious right of today: their insistence on following a path of populism and nationalism being not so much an expression of a political ideology or faith in its leaders as it is a way to demand their right to believe whatever they want to believe without having someone else's self-serving warmongering democidal globalist agenda shoved down their throats.

At university I became interested in Carl Jung's ideas about a universal collective unconscious and archetypes: in particular his ideas about the father archetype, which led me to question if I might unconsciously augment my fading memory of my father with an archetypal projection and then hold that up as an impossible standard for myself later in life. Jung also gave a name to what I had experienced with the chewing gum: synchronicity.

Two years after my father died my mom began dating the pastor that had buried him. When I was fifteen years old they married. My stepfather, like Emile Guers, enjoyed what I still view as a direct relationship with God: he had marched with Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and the leaders of the Methodist church and had become a conference leader himself. But over the decades he had also become increasingly at odds with the church's dogma, which he felt had come to center around empty words and the collection plate instead of doing good deeds in the larger community. In his final years he told me that he was optimistic that a new generation of Christians was emerging that was focussed on practicing their faith by doing good deeds. This came as no surprise to me. My stepfather had been my pastor from the age of eight to twelve. I had experienced his evolving relationship with the church firsthand through his sermons and discussions about them with my father before his death. I continued to observe my stepfather's evolution and discuss it directly with him over the decades that followed. What I learned from my stepfather freed me from the church and enabled me to live my own life in a state of grace even while he continued to grapple with the church's drift into collection plate salvation in his.

My father's memory never ossified into Carl Jung's traditional father archetype as I had feared it might. Instead it blossomed into an expression of my own history, sense of humor and joie de vivre as one might expect it would. While light on archetypal symbolism my silly Zoolander dream was chewing gum level for me in terms of personal meaning: I met the mother of my daughter working with Ben Stiller. The hand model motif resonates with the invisible hand of God in an insanely wonderful way. And then there's the synchronicity of Hansel, Sting and, well, Synchronicity...

Jung's insights into family archetypes: father, mother, and child, were not particularly novel. If they were they wouldn't be universal. However, he started a discussion about gender and family stereotypes in a language other than religion. Organized religion is in the business of turning stereotypes into dogma, whereas stereotypes disembodied from dogma are just stereotypes: we can take them at face value, embrace them, discuss them, laugh at them, and defy them without our doing so being an affront to God. We can even question if some stereotypes may actually be innate; if religion may derive from biology rather than the other way around. Jung's ideas were an intellectual leap forward from the dogma of the church. They helped me understand my stepfather, Emile Guers, and others that made it their life's work to question religious dogma while also inspiring me to embrace and explore my own direct relationship with God and to act accordingly.

Jung was asked near the end of his life if he believed in God. He answered, "I don't have to believe. I know."

I'm now approaching being old enough to have been my father's father when he died. When that portal finally returns for me and I meet my father again the first thing I'm going to say to him is, "It's okay now. I did what you wanted me to do. I lived!"

Of course I'm only guessing what my father would have wanted, and I won't actually say anything because I'll be dead, but my memory of my father belongs to me now. I can say to him whatever I want.