Madden Mischief

Not just a lucky number, 7 plays a starring role in films, pops up in songs like Taylor Swift’s Seven, sails the seven seas and soars inspiringly throughout the Bible!

From Disney’s Seven Dwarfs accompanying Snow White to The Magnificent Seven fighting for what’s right, there is something not just mystically magnificent, but majestically memorable, even crossing the border into magical about sevenly 7.

It’s a border President Trump would never want to close or even narrow for I believe he thinks like me that you can set the stage for making good luck more probable, more likely to happen, even gung-ho tariffs resulting in happy endings. 

As an early prime number in the series of positive integers, besides Hollywood films and magic like my dad once performed when he wasn’t playing his violin, the number 7 associates closely and symbolically with religion and philosophy. And yes, also with mythology and superstition.  And it’s a number that has played a starring role in my life too.   

I was seven years younger than one of my favorite movie actors, James Dean, whose mood-swing personality was light years from another Dean, Nixon’s crafty White House Counsel John Dean during the Watergate scandal.  My hero was a more complex, intriguing character who one day crashed his Porche 550 Spyder into another vehicle and broke his neck.  I was 17 when it happened and I would soon break mine too in a diving accident when I was a lifeguard in Atlantic City, NJ.  I survived.  He didn’t. We were both 24.  

Lucky 7 is often considered in Western culture as “everything’s coming up roses,” a culture which often sees 7 as highly symbolic and prophetically fortunate in reaching the most desired locations and outcomes . . . without speeding.

The seven classical planets resulted in seven being the number of days in a week. 

The Bible

In the Bible, the number 7 holds further significant symbolic meaning.  Often Seven represents completion, perfection, and divine wholeness.

Saintly 7 appears 700 times in the Old and New Testaments starting with God’s resting on the seventh day after creation.  Speaking of rest, I’m pleading with a hyperactive author friend of mine to slow down when he drives!  I bailed him out of jail once for speeding, but that’s it.  “Behave yourself before you become crime news yourself,” I told the host of a true crime podcast. 

While each number from one to nine represents a unique set of traits and values affecting vibrations around us in their own special ways, the number 7 stands out.

In both Theology and Numerology, each number impacts us on internal and external levels daily, but the most striking and impactful for me has always been seven, my lucky 7.   In that diving accident, when I broke and dislocated my 5^th and 6^th vertebra, my 7^th stayed strong, and I survived.

A number both deep and wise.

Seven is not satisfied with such frivolous stuff as simple explanations at surface-level.  Just as heaven knows, seven knows where the real gold is buried deeper and won’t stop until it finds it … then keeps digging for something more– wisdom.

Seven is forever asking questions, researching, listening, and sensing with special skills abounding as an ever curious 7 keeps searching for awareness, meaningfulness.

While in Spirituality, number 7 shows many uplifting qualities, in Numerology it takes a more intellectual approach to life than a personal, emotional one. It is an analytical number that enjoys gathering and filtering through information to find answers.  Truth!

Yet, a combination of conscious and subconscious thinking allows the mind of numerological number 7 to shine a light into the very deepest realms to access hidden truths. Whether it’s practical or metaphysical doesn’t matter, the number 7 always wants to know more, just as I do and what this book 7 is about!

In the spiritual world

Spiritually, the 7’s understand there is always something deeper, something more we can’t see, while it instills in us a great sense of spirituality.

While for some religion may be too limiting for this boundless number, a very personal, intellectual connection to the spiritual world gives it more mystery, meaning and inspiration.

So, dear reader, I hope to see you one day not just shopping for something sweet to eat in a 7-Eleven, but in the sweetest of all the seven places, heaven!  

In October comes more birthdays.   I’ll be having one along with John Dean when we’ll both turn eighty something. Can you guess what that something is?   What number will come just to the right of 8?  You guessed right if you said it would be my lucky 7.

This is a chapter from Tom Madden’s upcoming seventh book with the seven-word title: As America’s Hippest, Is Catholicism Now Coolest?  Besides writing books and blogs, Madden and his resourceful daughter Adrienne Mazzone run the award-winning public relations firm, TransMedia Group, serving clients worldwide.