(Note: These dreams are in no particular chronological order. I had this dream sometime in January, 2013.)
In my dream, I found myself ushered through rooms lit by torches clustered at the intersections of rounded arches. The torchlight was warm and bright, and had the effect of coloring the walls reddish-gold. The upper sections of the walls may have been plaster or stone, though the lower sections were definitely of a more textured and less reflective material, stone or wood. The almost oval archways connecting various rooms were neither very high nor very wide, though I did not feel that the spaces were crabbed together in anyway. Some of the archways slunk away into darkness, but I found myself in long, rectangular rooms filled with tables, light, and with robed men hard at work. I had the impression of being underground, being very secure, and being in a place not my own. The setting was familiar to me, yet I have never been in any place like it. It was simple and beautiful, and reminds me most of Neogothic Anglican-style cathedrals and churches (say built in the late 19th, early 20th century).
I did not stop to talk with anyone, and although I felt led to a very particular place in the bowels of this place, I did not see who was leading me. After ducking through a few different rooms, and winding around tables and people, I found myself in another workroom, with a large, well-lit table in the center of the room.
At some point, someone handed me a set of very large, honest-to-goodness scrolls. The only time I have seen actual scrolls in waking life (in person, anyway) was ceremonial Torah scrolls in a Conservative Jewish synagogue on one of the High Holy Days. Those were lavishly decorated.
These were too. First of all, they were enormous--probably they were two-and-a-half feet tall, and there were two sets of them. The rollers were made of gold, or a material that looked like gold, and were stylized, though not elaborately so. I unfurled--or someone else did--both sets of scrolls and laid them down the whole length of the table--maybe 10 feet or so? I don't know: waking or sleeping I am a terrible measurer of distance or length or quanitity of any kind, really. In any case, I am fairly certain I could have easily laid down on the table and not come to the end of it--and I'm about 5 and a half feet tall. When both scrolls were unrolled the full length of the table, I am not sure that they were opened all the way. Now that I think of it, I think they were not, but what I could see was this.
The paper itself was covered over entirely in gold. Rich, sparkling, deep gold. And written on the gold, in the reddest, most perfect letters you can imagine, in a language entirely unfamiliar to me, in an alphabet entirely unfamiliar to me. The letters were whole and perfect--perhaps a little raised from the text, either done by a typeset or the best calligrapher in the world. The language looked a little like the Cree language, which I have only seen once while visiting The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I had absolutely no hope of ever reading it. Yet, I knew absolutely that the scrolls were mine. The person who was showing them to me was showing them to me precisely because they were mine, and indeed, the Someone showing them to me, was really showing them to me becuase the scrolls were me. And at some point after that, I woke up.
As a student theologian, I am well aware that human beings are made in the image of God. (Hey, that's what I wrote my graduate thesis on!) And as made in the imagine of God, human beings are the parodox of parodoxes: we are finite pictures of the Infinite One. As such, human being really are a living mystery. You think particle physics is hard to fathom? The human person more. You contemplate the workings of a cell and think it profound? The human person more. And not the human person reduced to biology or chemistry or math or physics. No, the human person who is biological, chemical, physical, and also much more than that--God-breathed, God-touched, God-crafted, and God-imaging. Calvin said that the universe was the "mirror of God's work" (and I'm totally going to steal that for a book title someday), but the human person more. No matter how deep how wide how unfathomable any part or even the whole of Creation is, in some mysterious sense, the human person--your neighbor, your enemy, your friend, your loved one--more, because while God has touched all of his creation and left traces of his presence there, he has left something more with human beings, His Very Image.
But that's all well and good and not even all that difficult to say. What is much more difficult is figuring out what that really means in the sometimes not so bright light of every-day life. C. S. Lewis brings this to life brilliantly in the "Weight of Glory" when he talks of the hidden and potential glory alive in every human being. He was inviting us to regard our neighbor as a holy and dreadfully important subject, worthy of considering, love, and something close to reverence . . . because the destiny which God has in mind for us is so great. This dream was more about the noetic side of the equation, whereas Lewis' sermon was more about the ontic. "Noetic" is philosopher-speak for "pertaining to knowledge or knowing." So when I say the dream was noetic or epistemological, I mean that God was trying to show me something about how I am to know myself in light of the mystery of the human being made in the image of God.
The thing he was communicating was this: "You [and potentially anyone and everyone human] are priceless and beautiful. Your soul is priceless and beautiful. You can't even see your soul--meaning the invisible aspect of human life--all the time, but it really is there and it really is beautiful. And you have no idea what's in there. You have no idea what you are or who you are because what you are and you who are is absolutely too wonderful, too deep, too fantastically complicated for you to know. You aren't going to know everything there is to know about yourself precisely because you are made in My image. It is too much for you. It is beyond you. You don't speak the language, and you certainly can't read it. But I know. And I will tell you. I will tell you what the writing says--what I have written--and I will tell you over time and I will tell you what you need to know. But don't worry about it too much, because the thing is in my hand and there's nothing you can do about it apart from what I am doing and what I am saying to you. So don't worry. I will be there and I will speak."
This was all very comforting to me. Partly, it was comforting to me because I am indebted to the Spanish Mystics for a lot of their teaching on the spiritual life, and Christian discipline and virtue, and they, especially Teresa of Avila, have much to say about self-knowledge as a virtue. One of my undergraduate professors said that only Christianity made self-knowledge a virtue. I haven't researched that much myself, but it would be interesting to see the ways in which that is true. In any case, Christianity certainly takes self-knowledge very seriously--you see it especially in Augustine and Calvin. For you Reformed peeps out there, perhaps you remember how The Institutes tie together knowledge of God and knowledge of self? For such diverse Christians as John Calvin and Teresa of Avila, these two things are intertwined and inseperable. And for both, self-knowledge is both a duty and a gift. Self-knowledge is revelation from God just as knowledge of God is revelation from God. The word "revelation" speaks for itself here: God reveals himself and is revealed to human beings--in Christianity, you can't come to the knowledge of God by yourself, it has to be a gift from God. If you think you've come to the knowledge of God by yourself, what you've actually come to (as Calvin nicely puts it) is the knowledge of an idol--something you've made up in your own mind that may resemble God in some ways, but won't in other ways. And it won't be him, and you won't have drawn closer to him with that knowledge, so the project is pretty much moot at that point.
But things that are both gifts and duties are tricky to keep in proper balance and proper dependence on God. If you are prone to having an overactive sense of responsibility as I am, it is easy to confuse the boundaries between responding to God's initiative and gifting in gratitude and obedience and taking on burdens to do things it is impossible for human beings to do in their own power. For me, I tend to get so wrapped up in my quest for knowledge that I forget that knowledge is revelation, knowledge of God and self especially so. I am much more inclined to view self-knowledge as a project for me to complete, and a project that I am responsible to complete. And in my worse moments, to judge other people for not knowing themselves--for doing so poorly on this project, or for failing in their duties to self-knowledge.
In this particular case, I woke from this dream with a sense of relief. Lately, I had had the feeling (though I wasn't quite aware of it) that I was epically failing in knowing myself. There were parts of myself I just didn't understand and frankly that I had not the time, energy, skill or wisdom to address. They weren't necessarily problematic parts of myself--just parts of myself that I either hadn't seen in a why or were new to me. I didn't know what they meant or what I was going to do about it, and while I had decided to accept those parts of myself, I didn't understand them and that made me a bit nervous. I kept wondering, am I doing the right thing here by just accepting myself and moving forward?
The answer I recieved was "yes" and helps free a facet of my personality that I do know isn't the most helpful: getting stuck locking things down with enough certainty to get Descartes to at least grudgingly nod his head at me. Oftentimes, that's a waste of time or an impossible enterprise, but it often doesn't look that way to me: it seems more like a moral responsibility to pursue that kind of certainty--and what more important place to start than the knowledge of who I am as a person?
Now, and particularly with the help of a dream, I can see what a rabbit-hole that is. If all our theology is right and humans are these gloriously complex, weighty, and deep creatures . . . my intellectual and moral enterprise didn't stand a chance. I actually can't achieve what I'm hoping to achieve. In my humanity, I'm actually not capable of fully understanding my humanity. But God already understands it, and he's going to help me see and know and understand in the ways that are proper to do so. Through this dream, I was freed from my over-active sense of responsibility, which was telling me I had to know myself perfectly, on my own, with little or no help from God. That's generally a bad combination of assumptions, and this was no exception.
Well, that's it. Except for two more things. I was thinking that I know why the scrolls were gold and the writing was read. Gold is a useful symbol because it is precious metal that is beautiful and does not rust. That's why it symbolizes things that are supposed to last forever: like human beings, like love, like our most important promises. Red is the color of blood and can symbolize life, which is the function it served here.
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