I was thinking recently about convergence and design.

Sometimes I get into arguments with my psychotherapist friends over the issue of intelligent design. They tell me about randomness and chaos, and I say, “Yes, but are there not some dynamics by which the chaos operates?”

The answer is sometimes “yes” and sometimes “no”.

For instance, while chaos tends to coalesce around attractors, leading to some kind of organisation, order tends toward chaos through entropy. This, some people might say, is the yin and yang of life — opposing forces and dynamics.

Some would go on to assert that it is nothing more than such opposing forces that actually hold all things together, and there is no need to find any personal, divine being behind all of that stuff.

I think there is design in all things. Sometimes we can see and appreciate it, and sometimes we cannot.

A friend of mine claims that there are no fixed mental structures to the mind, to a person’s personality, just slow moving processes. I like that.

In the same way, to me there are no aspects to life that do not in some way bear the mark of God, just subtle relationships to His design.

That’s one of the tenets of my faith perspective. I’ve noticed it in various ways.

One of the most compelling attestations of such design, to me, is the central nervous system. The systems by which our brains function are complex and interdependent beyond imagination.

Any given person carries a universe of activity within the confines of his or her skull. Such organisation, to me, defies random causation. Since design is something that utilises common patterns, duplicated in various ways across levels of organisation and stations in life, people can observe similarity, harmony and convergence.

When there is a paradigm shift in society, for instance, it occurs because many people all over the world begin to think and live with a new perspective, not because one person or government somewhere comes up with something entirely unique and then takes it out on the rest of the world.

So it was that I came up with a series of workshops I’ll be conducting here in Bermuda during the month of February:

[box] Week One: Knowing and Loving Oneself Identity in Christ — knowing one’s place in the created order and in relationship to God, grounded self-awareness, positive self esteem and managing oneself wisely in the world.

[box] Week Two: Sharing Oneself With Others, Communication and relational skill building, authenticity and transparency, forming a practical perspective on the place of other people in one’s life, including God’s purposes for specific relationships.

[box]>Week Three: Connecting Deeply with Others, Physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, et cetera; knowing one another, understanding Christian freedom while appreciating fears and limits, risking being known.

[box] Week Fou$> Abiding in Relationships, Supporting one’s ability to commit to others, dealing with difference and conflict, examining limits and components of commitment (i.e., to whom and for what; speaking one’s truth in love wisely across a variety of relational demands, et cetera).

These will be conducted at a local church. After sharing the idea with some people, Father Joe Palubeski wrote to wish good things for the series and to tell me that the format closely resembled what the Catholic Church provides for their young people considering marriage.

Does that mean that I am becoming Catholic or that the Catholic Church is losing something in becoming more Protestant, or that both are whacked out on pop psychology?

Not to me. To me it illustrates convergence. Some things make sense in life, even if you look at them from divergent starting places. Why is that? Perhaps it has something to do with a common denominator. Perhaps people of very different stripes can find similarity and convergence with one another if they attempt to perceive and appreciate the design that supports what they are both doing.

Are there similar aspirations and goals? Are there shared aesthetic and moral sensibilities? Is there a common belief structure that might be tapped in order to overcome difference that otherwise seems to divide people into opposing colours, political parties, or competing power bases? One might wonder. One might hope.