I never watch horror movies. (I only watched Cabin in the Woods because it was written by Joss Whedon and I knew it would be a satire or critique of some kind.) The closest I get to horror is the X-Files, and probably nothing on network television should count as horror. I have never particularly liked vampires or zombies or ghost stories. I have either found them unbelievable, or or too gory, or fixated on death and fear--and who wants to be fixated on death or fear? Not only are they unbelievable, they are also undesirable--who wants anything in horror movies to actually happen? I am perfectly reconciled to the fact that part of my love of superheros, science-fiction, and fantasy is wish-fulfillment. But there is no wish being fulfilled for me in the genre of horror.
As such, I was rather surprised when I had a dream that was more or less about a zombie-apocalypse (even though that's the in-thing right now). Now, my imagination tends to be apocalyptic, but it doesn't tend to be full of zombies, so I thought it was unusual when I first woke up. But I will get on with telling the dream.
In the dream, I found myself at a fancy party on the top-floor of a fancy building. It was a large room, with low-lighting and candles. Later, I would notice the sun-setting, so apparently it was early evening. There were all sorts of important-looking people milling around--it was clearly a professional-class event of some kind. There were small tables dotting the room, bedecked with candles and wine-glasses. There were high-to-do buffet tables of some kind lining the far walls, perhaps just with hors d'oeuvre. People were busy talking, but despite the evening attire, it was all the talk of academics and professionals going about their business. No small talk. A current of anxiety was sweeping through the room--people were talking in small groups and they were problem-solving.
At some point, I wandered out of the room with my companion for the evening, into a front-room of some kind, the western wall of which was entirely made of slanting glass. I went out in the room to look for a mirror--something was wrong with my dress. But when I went outside, I could see out the windows over the western part of the city, and I saw the whole horizon of buildings aflame. Los Angeles, I think, was burning. And then I knew--the plague that had swept the world in a matter of days was finally here. It was here sooner than we had expected or hoped, and things did not look good.
My companion said something to me about the city burning, and I remember looking in the mirror. My eyes were starting to change color--one of the initial signs of the plague. Soon--perhaps in 24 hours--they would turn entirely red, and in the course of that 24 hours, I, too, would be turned by the plague into one of the raging, pillaging, burning maniacs out there trying to destroy the world. I remember praying in the dream for help--saying to God that surely if the 21st century ever needed divine intervention, it was now. I was met with a curious kind of silence--the kind of silence that feels like you're being deliberately ignored because you're asking the wrong question. I remember the feeling distinctly--and I've certainly had that sensation in waking life--but thinking how odd it was to have that impression under the circumstances.
I hurried back inside to find a group of professor-scientists talking. Everyone knew now--and knew because we were also changing--we could tell by eye color and by other signs. One woman, who was a biologist or medical doctor of some kind, was talking. "I have the cure," she said. She waved a vial in her hands. "I have it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I have it. Now all we have to do is get the military to deploy it. We're going to have to do it in the water--in the oceans, but we have it, it will work."
Whatever the woman said, whatever her position was--we all believed and trusted her instantly. She was one of the few people in the dream I recognized--in real life, she's one of the most intelligent women I've ever met, an Indian woman and PhD I met at the University of Pittsburgh. But in the real world, she doesn't study life sciences--far from it. Here, she was playing a medical doctor, but I think she was a useful dream construct--because I believed her and believed she knew what she was talking about.
But by that time, we had another problem: Though we purportedly had a cure, no one wanted to use it anymore. The change had already begun, and even with the initial symptoms came a sort of giddy confidence and intense thirst for the rage, madness, and power that one could sense coming. I don't remember feeling that way myself--I more felt numb or neutral. I knew we had to stop the plague, but I didn't really care which way what happened. But the others were wavering. They had the cure, but they were no longer interested in using it.
At this point, our building was attacked by the front wave of the victims of the zombie plague. I remember the group of us heading outside on the roof--although no one wanted to stop the change, no one wanted to killed by the fully changed either. But outside on the rooftop I stopped everyone and got their attention.
"I know you don't want to stop this, but we have to do it anyway. We have to. Not wanting it to stop is part of the disease, but we just have to stop it no matter what we feel." I remember pausing for words, searching for something elegant or persuasive to say and coming up short. But to my surprise, they listened. They all listened. They listened and agreed, and then we were off to save the human race somehow.
Saving the planet involved going down to the Navy shipyards or the docks. I remember thinking the entire time that there was no way for this plan to work. It simply wasn't. The military personnel were waiting for us. Our doctor had the cure, and there were another few vials in existence, but basically our next few hours were spent preparing hundreds or maybe thousands of decoy units--so the zombies wouldn't be able to distinguish the real vial from the fake ones.
Finally, we suited up and went underwater. I remember diving underwater in deep-water diving gear with a metallic cylinder tucked under my arm. And there were hundreds of us divers and thousands of zombies following. I still didn't think this was going to work. I thought we were all going to die and the world was going to go out in a way I had least expected it to. I think there were some underwater fights of some kinds, and some of the fake capsules were destroyed. And maybe a couple of the real ones. But it didn't matter. By the time I surfaced, the sky and the water were already turning green--and green was good. Green was the sign that everything had worked according to our doctor's plans.
Before my eyes, things were turning back to normal. The change was stopping in me and my companions, and the zombies were turning back to normal. I think maybe I shook my head as the sky changed color and the world return to normal and Los Angeles stopped burning. It took less than 24 hours, and all was restored. I promptly woke up.
This dream was primarily about two things I have discerned thus far. The first is about the genre of horror itself, and the second is about the curiously unanswered or curiously answered prayer in the middle of my dream. First things first: horror, etc. As I said in my introduction, I don't really like horror that much and I really don't like fear. I'm probably one of those counter-phobic persons you hear about: I detest being afraid so much I usually try to run out and both meet and master my fears before they can get the better of me. The sooner confronted, the sooner conquered, and then you can go back to your peace of mind. But I don't normally go courting superfluous stress or anxiety or fear, especially in my leisure life of reading or t.v. and the movies. So I've always looked down on horror as the one obviously pointless and irredeemable aspect of contemporary human entertainment. God can meet people anywhere but here, I thought. Surely God is not interested in the imaginations of those preoccupied with enlarging our fears and bringing them to life.
But he is. Or at least, he is interested in meeting and engaging every aspect of human experience, and what humans do with fear is certainly an important aspect of human experience that God will engage. I never expected my imagination to engage with fear very much, and I especially never expected God to engage with me there in a very imaginative way.
The truth is, I suppose, the further one goes in acknowledging the darkness in human life, the more things appear monstrously or supernaturally bad. Evil disfigures the human psyche and deep down inside most of us are afraid of some aspect of the mystery of iniquity--but what if that evil and disfigurement were made physical--the opposite of sublimation, which is deposition. (In chemistry, sublimation means moving from a solid to a gas without stopping over in the liquid phase of matter. Deposition means going the other way.) In any case, for the first time I felt in my flesh and bones how the genre of horror is capable of speaking to or about our fears by embodying them. This is something worth doing.
But there was also the issue of my curiously answered prayer. As I said before, when I prayed in the midst of my dream for a supernatural deliverance from the zombie horde, I had a curious sense that God was smiling wryly at me, letting me know with a glance that my prayers had already been answered, had already been provided for through normal means. What I thought needed supernatural attention, God had already attended to naturally. Sure enough, through the gifts and talents of our medical doctor, a cure was given though hope had seemed like folly.
This was a helpful reminder to me. In our age of complex problems, where difficulties that surround human life seem on the surface to be such complicated jangles that they can hardly be solved through normal human effort (I think of international conflicts, ecological difficulties, fossil fuels, the national budget, cancer, AIDS, etc), things are not quite so impossible as they seem. So often we hear anxious reports, or reports so anxiously given, that this or that issue or calamity is of such and such a difficulty level that we can hardly have hope of solutions to problems. No doubt some of this is reactionary against the optimism (at least in the United States) of the 50s and 60s. Technology did not solve all ills nor even the ills it promised to resolve (since it promised time-saving, making life simpler, making life "easier"), so there is some pessimism in response. There is a greater pessimism, though, from the collapse of the cheerful Enlightenment ideologies of clear and distinct ideas paving the way for universal peace and concord among human beings, and a complete mastery of nature. Having realized our goal to be untenable, we despair of it, and despair not only of a sure and certain victory, but also of our own competence to vie with our difficulties at all. We have come of age in the cosmos, and found ourselves unequal to the challenges of adulthood, and thus we dither in anxiety and fear and security-mongering and despair.
But I think there is a middle way, or at least, a third option of how we ought to conceive of human fitness and capacity to deal with what comes our way. Hubris and cynicism are both false paths and false idols that lead to the shipwrecking of cultural wisdom and identity. A Christian, I think, ought to be properly confident that human beings were made by God to fit well with the universe around us. It is neither too big nor too small for us, with God's help. But his help doesn't have to be what we generally think of as supernatural. God doesn't actually need to rescue us from every skinned knee--or even from global epidemics. He will provide, as he always has, and the human race will go on, and he will provide, most of the time, through natural means--through the natural application of human intellect and wisdom to the problems of the world that confront us. This does not mean that God is not active. Rather, it means that most of God's activity is providential rather than miraculous. (Which in turn is why double agency matters as a theory of causality, but I'll write about that some other time. Hopefully.) Recognizing the power of God's providential care is just as important as recognizing when God acts miraculously, and if you aren't grateful and attuned to the former, you won't be spiritually prepared for the latter--which is the story of Israel and the story of the human race in general. The example par excellence of this occurs in Moses's admonitions to the Israelites concerning gratitude in the early chapters of Deuteronomy. When Israel segues from miraculous provision (manna in the desert) to general provision (normal food from the Promised Land), he warns them not to take the latter for granted or think of it as something they had earned for themselves, rather than a gift given to them from God.
Naturally, this is all complicated by the presence of sin and death in the cosmos, which makes the universe a much more difficult place to live in. (This essay, of course, is not at all an attempt at theodicy). But this isn't because human beings' natural capacities are not fit to take on the universe--of course they are, they were built to be--but rather because these capacities are warped and distorted by sin. So, instead of a "comfortable fit" with the cosmos, we have an uneasy, toilsome fit--our work in the world is marred by hardship and tragedy that need not have been there. But we were meant to be reconciled to the cosmos as well as to God, and wisdom and knowledge concerning the natural world can do a lot to bridge the gap. But it is not that the world is too big for us, it is that we are at odds with it, and it with us, and all of us now subject to futility and loss.
So my prayer was answered, and had been anticipated by God's provision. And so much of our prayers are both answered and anticipated by God's provision. We don't always have to look for miracles or what we think of as divine intervention, but we can expect to see the hand of God everywhere.
Showing posts with label Dreamform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dreamform. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Monday, February 4, 2013
Dreamform Two: Gold Leaf Scrolls and Red Writing
(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.
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.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Dreamform One: Jesus Walks Into a Dream
The first dream that I can remember that ever really mattered to me was one in which Jesus actually showed up in person. I have never had another dream like it and it certainly made me pay attention at the time.
In the dream, I was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. I remember looking at the row of ships on docks off to my left, and to my right was nothing much beside sand. At some point, I remember peering down onto the deck flooring of a ship that was curiously clear--I could see straight down into the water. That was a moment of fun outside of the dream and wonder within the dream. At some point--I had no sense of being in a hurry--I wandered up to where Jesus was. He was working on mending some nets and seemed also in no particular hurry.
If I was surprised to see him there, I wasn't very much surprised: it was the sort of surprise you have when you're not exactly expecting to see a friend to show up in a place where he or she might very well naturally show up, but you like your friend so much you are excited to see him or her anyway. So I was a little excited to see Jesus, but not crazy excited to see him as I would be if I turned around in my living room now and saw him standing there.
I knew very clearly in the dream that I could ask Jesus anything at all that I wanted to, although I had no particular sense of anxiety or nervousness about it. So, naturally, I asked him some wandering and convoluted question about how one should interpret some complicated problem of "authorial voice" in Scripture. My question had something to do with both epistemology and ontology and I think had some relevance to some modernist quibbling about the inspiration of Scripture. Honestly, I don't quite remember exactly what I asked, but since Jesus never quite got around to answering my question, I suppose that didn't matter too much. What did matter and what was remarkable and what was the lesson for me was how he responded to my question.
The first thing Jesus did was actually think about my question. He mulled over my question for a moment, asked me a clarifying question that went along the lines of, "So what you're really asking is x because of y and z?" In turn, I thought about it for a little while and rephrased my question with his question in mind. All the while, I noticed this sort of scrawny, mopey looking young man with quite the bush of thick brown hair sort of skulking around the edges of our conversation. At some point he wandered off down a pier, looking remarkably sad and forlorn. Jesus and I were still talking, but I remember watching the guy and feeling sort of sorry for him and distressed for him at the same time. (I got the impression this was the Apostle John of all people.) Both my eyes and Jesus' eyes followed the young man down the pier.
Jesus then interrupted our conversation by saying that he needed to go and talk to him. Then he put down whatever he was working with in his hands, followed John down the pier, and put his arm around his shoulders. I remember watching that and wondering whether I should feel put off because Jesus ditched me to go talk to someone else. Oddly, I didn't really feel ditched. I milled around the pier for a few minutes, not sure what I was going to do next, and then I woke up.
At first, I was rather puzzled by the dream. Why have a dream with Jesus in it, in which he didn't really say anything to me that was informative? Why get a chance to ask any question, but not have the question answered? I puzzled over it for a moment or two, but then I went off to do my daily morning routine of Morning Prayer plus hymn singing. The hymn I opened to, unplanned, happened to be: "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy" by Frederick Faber. After I sang through especially verse 3, I knew exactly why I had dreamed the dream. The meaning of the dream was threefold: One, that Jesus is far more human than I believe him to be, two, that Jesus is far kinder than I believe him to be, and three, that Jesus "speaks my language".
The dream was meant to be corrective of the kind of "gnostic" or overly-spiritualized intuition I had about Jesus--that he was "god in a bod" (Apollinarian heresy)--God's mind in a human body. The Jesus I spoke to actually had to think about my questions and process them and respond to me in a human and therefore limited way. What I was really surprised about in the dream was how sharp and incisive Jesus' question was: the way he began to consider my question showed that he could more than keep up with me intellectually, and I've always been a little paranoid about the fact that the Jesus in the gospels doesn't seem to be a nerd, so how could he really relate to me. (More on that in another post.) I was being myself and Jesus seemed to be being himself when he asked a nerd question about my nerd question. Fascinating.
But the dream was also corrective in that I tend to think of God the Father and the Son as strict disciplinarians, partly because of my own upbringing. It genuinely hadn't occurred to me that the first thing Jesus would do with John was just give him a hug instead of, say, scolding him for acting like a baby. In the dream, I felt some degree of compassion for John, but I didn't expect Jesus to. I expected him to demand that John grow up and behave more sensibly. That Jesus is so naturally and casually compassionate and kind . . . that really hadn't been a part of my image of God.
The Jesus "speaking my language" bit now reminds me quite a bit of the Luke 5 text wherein Jesus goes fishing with Simon and basically says, "You think I don't know how fishing works? I know how fish work so well they just do what I want." When I read that text, I see Simon confronted with the fact that he's honored by this rabbi's interest in him, but he really doesn't know what Jesus has to do with his life. But then Jesus says through his actions, "I own this, I own fishing, I know how it all works, I know and have mastered your livelihood--so why don't you trust me, and moreover, why don't you just come follow me already?" In my dream, Jesus was telling me, "You know, I really get the life of the mind. I really have that down. You don't actually have to worry that I won't understand you or we'll run out of things to talk about or I won't be interested in you or your life. Actually, I own all this, and I made it all up and it's all beautiful and fascinating--so why don't you stop dithering and come, follow me?"
Anyway, that's the impression I get about the dream and one of the reasons I rather like dreams, and rather like when Jesus walks into one.
"For the love of God is broader
than the measure of man's mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
If our love were but more faithful,
we should take him at his word;
and our life would be thanksgiving
for the goodness of the Lord."
~Third stanza of Faber's "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy"
In the dream, I was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. I remember looking at the row of ships on docks off to my left, and to my right was nothing much beside sand. At some point, I remember peering down onto the deck flooring of a ship that was curiously clear--I could see straight down into the water. That was a moment of fun outside of the dream and wonder within the dream. At some point--I had no sense of being in a hurry--I wandered up to where Jesus was. He was working on mending some nets and seemed also in no particular hurry.
If I was surprised to see him there, I wasn't very much surprised: it was the sort of surprise you have when you're not exactly expecting to see a friend to show up in a place where he or she might very well naturally show up, but you like your friend so much you are excited to see him or her anyway. So I was a little excited to see Jesus, but not crazy excited to see him as I would be if I turned around in my living room now and saw him standing there.
I knew very clearly in the dream that I could ask Jesus anything at all that I wanted to, although I had no particular sense of anxiety or nervousness about it. So, naturally, I asked him some wandering and convoluted question about how one should interpret some complicated problem of "authorial voice" in Scripture. My question had something to do with both epistemology and ontology and I think had some relevance to some modernist quibbling about the inspiration of Scripture. Honestly, I don't quite remember exactly what I asked, but since Jesus never quite got around to answering my question, I suppose that didn't matter too much. What did matter and what was remarkable and what was the lesson for me was how he responded to my question.
The first thing Jesus did was actually think about my question. He mulled over my question for a moment, asked me a clarifying question that went along the lines of, "So what you're really asking is x because of y and z?" In turn, I thought about it for a little while and rephrased my question with his question in mind. All the while, I noticed this sort of scrawny, mopey looking young man with quite the bush of thick brown hair sort of skulking around the edges of our conversation. At some point he wandered off down a pier, looking remarkably sad and forlorn. Jesus and I were still talking, but I remember watching the guy and feeling sort of sorry for him and distressed for him at the same time. (I got the impression this was the Apostle John of all people.) Both my eyes and Jesus' eyes followed the young man down the pier.
Jesus then interrupted our conversation by saying that he needed to go and talk to him. Then he put down whatever he was working with in his hands, followed John down the pier, and put his arm around his shoulders. I remember watching that and wondering whether I should feel put off because Jesus ditched me to go talk to someone else. Oddly, I didn't really feel ditched. I milled around the pier for a few minutes, not sure what I was going to do next, and then I woke up.
At first, I was rather puzzled by the dream. Why have a dream with Jesus in it, in which he didn't really say anything to me that was informative? Why get a chance to ask any question, but not have the question answered? I puzzled over it for a moment or two, but then I went off to do my daily morning routine of Morning Prayer plus hymn singing. The hymn I opened to, unplanned, happened to be: "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy" by Frederick Faber. After I sang through especially verse 3, I knew exactly why I had dreamed the dream. The meaning of the dream was threefold: One, that Jesus is far more human than I believe him to be, two, that Jesus is far kinder than I believe him to be, and three, that Jesus "speaks my language".
The dream was meant to be corrective of the kind of "gnostic" or overly-spiritualized intuition I had about Jesus--that he was "god in a bod" (Apollinarian heresy)--God's mind in a human body. The Jesus I spoke to actually had to think about my questions and process them and respond to me in a human and therefore limited way. What I was really surprised about in the dream was how sharp and incisive Jesus' question was: the way he began to consider my question showed that he could more than keep up with me intellectually, and I've always been a little paranoid about the fact that the Jesus in the gospels doesn't seem to be a nerd, so how could he really relate to me. (More on that in another post.) I was being myself and Jesus seemed to be being himself when he asked a nerd question about my nerd question. Fascinating.
But the dream was also corrective in that I tend to think of God the Father and the Son as strict disciplinarians, partly because of my own upbringing. It genuinely hadn't occurred to me that the first thing Jesus would do with John was just give him a hug instead of, say, scolding him for acting like a baby. In the dream, I felt some degree of compassion for John, but I didn't expect Jesus to. I expected him to demand that John grow up and behave more sensibly. That Jesus is so naturally and casually compassionate and kind . . . that really hadn't been a part of my image of God.
The Jesus "speaking my language" bit now reminds me quite a bit of the Luke 5 text wherein Jesus goes fishing with Simon and basically says, "You think I don't know how fishing works? I know how fish work so well they just do what I want." When I read that text, I see Simon confronted with the fact that he's honored by this rabbi's interest in him, but he really doesn't know what Jesus has to do with his life. But then Jesus says through his actions, "I own this, I own fishing, I know how it all works, I know and have mastered your livelihood--so why don't you trust me, and moreover, why don't you just come follow me already?" In my dream, Jesus was telling me, "You know, I really get the life of the mind. I really have that down. You don't actually have to worry that I won't understand you or we'll run out of things to talk about or I won't be interested in you or your life. Actually, I own all this, and I made it all up and it's all beautiful and fascinating--so why don't you stop dithering and come, follow me?"
Anyway, that's the impression I get about the dream and one of the reasons I rather like dreams, and rather like when Jesus walks into one.
than the measure of man's mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
If our love were but more faithful,
we should take him at his word;
and our life would be thanksgiving
for the goodness of the Lord."
~Third stanza of Faber's "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy"
Monday, September 24, 2012
Dreamform
In my second year of seminary, I went to a conference at the Falls Church on dreams and healing prayer. It was led by one Russ Parker, who is something of an Anglican guru on dreams and healing prayer. Healing prayer has always been an interest of mine, as emotional healing and contemplative prayer has always been a substantive way in which God has shown himself to be Lord to me. I had always been curious about dreams, as is probably anyone with half a mole of imagination, but I had not had any particular reason to take them seriously or believe that dream interpretation was anything more than a gift sometimes but not frequently given by God to help his people. At that conference, I was persuaded otherwise and have come to believe that dreams are a valuable source of spiritual insight and that they are more often "written" (as Russ Parker says) by our own minds than by the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks to us in special visions, but more often God speaks to us through our own imagination and the normal processing of dream work.
Since then, I have had an unusually rich dream life. Partly that comes out of concerted effort to remember my dreams--I've spent a few weeks here or there writing down every bit of every dream I can remember, mostly as an exercise to develop my skill at remembering dreams. (I'm told one only remembers dreams if one wakes up during a dream.) I've also spent a fair chunk of time praying through dreams and have found that it is one of the most reliable ways I hear God speaking to me. If I am having trouble hearing God's voice because of my own anxiety or distress or doubt, I oftentimes ask him to tell me something in a dream. I find--not surprisingly--that the medium of narrative is a medium I understand well. It is easy for me (and I imagine, for lots of people) to understand the point or morale or even the nuances of a story I read.
I find there are two or three kinds of dreams I have that are valuable. There are "normal" dreams in which I normally pray about how the emotional resonances of a dream match up with strong emotion in my life, and discover what that has to tell me. Sometimes this is as simple as, "Gee, I didn't know I was anxious about that!" Or, "I had no idea I was feeling resentment toward this." There are also dreams that are heavily "plot-driven" in which I generally do pray about the emotional resonance, but the plot of the dream itself mirrors something that has happened in my life, but not in a way that is immediately obvious to me. (Partly, that's because I dream mostly in science-fiction as a language of metaphor--space ships, other planets, apocalypse, unidentified bizarre objects I assume are alien . . . so far none of these things have shown up in my waking life.) Sometimes when I pray about those dreams, it isn't long before an "Aha" moment occurs. I often have plot-oriented dreams after I have prayed for discernment for something specifically, and also prayed to have my answer come in dream form. A third type of dream--or perhaps it is a subset of plot-oriented dreams--are dreams that are plot-oriented with strong enough emotional resonance that they bother me or continue to bother me as I have prayed through them. At that point, I have either been prompted or decided to take Russ Parker's advice and invite Jesus into the dream and imagine him there. His actions are always surprising!
I will be writing a few synopsis or descriptions of some dreams I have had. Partly I do this because some dreams I have had are so vivid and creative they might as well be stories, and partly because I think this is an overlooked part of our humanity that God has always intended to integrate into our life with him. Enjoy!
See also Russ Parker's website for more information. I do believe he is leading a conference in Eastern PA this October on healing prayer.
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