Advent Dreams

 



I have come to understand and accept that a disturbing dream or vision might actually be constructive...like criticism?! So when I found myself on the edge of a precipice looking out on a not Grand Canyon like chasm but a dark and jagged and foreboding one, I tried in a sleepy state to remain there and lift my gaze. That is where the struggle was felt. Similar to being unable to move when being chased in a nightmare, I was unable to lift my gaze, from whence cometh my help! Then I woke up!

So processing began and I realized a possible interpretation: We are on the verge of Advent which this year feels a bit like a frightening precipice. And the journey upon which we are called to embark is a dark and murky one. Uncertainty has eclipsed “normalcy” and disease (dis-ease) has infected any sense of peace. 

So I am indeed disturbed! In my waking as well as my sleeping!

Yet unlike my dream I am somehow able now that I am awake to lift my gaze! I am able to avert my preoccupation with the enormity of the task with a curiosity about hope and faith. That may be all I can know! 

Some use the phrase active waiting for Advent to distinguish it from the kind of numbed waiting we have displayed in the past. Unlike the paralysis I felt in my dream I am incorporating hope and a deepening faith to step over the threshold and into a liminal numinous space which is real! Guide us waking and guard us sleeping...


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Living the Question of Prayer

Image
Blessed be God who animates our lives and calls us through prayer to empty ourselves of preconception and delusion that we might grow into the fullness of the Kingdom promise.   Rilke writes to the young poet: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. One of my good teachers reminded me this week when pondering the arrival of the presence of beauty that when the student is ready the teacher appears And one of the overwhelming messages of the Gospels is that when we prepare our souls, empty them of extraneous matters, and orient ourselves toward God we receive abundance. Much comes from nothing. All of these aphorisms are, like parables, inversions and subversions of societal expectations. They ...
Read more

Sacramental Language

Image
I dedicate this little book to the mountain that ever visits my window. Sometimes the sun sears it, Sometimes the sun caresses it. Often the rain scourges it. Now and then the snow gently envelops it. I have never heard the mountain complain about the heat of the cold. It has never charged anything for its majestic beauty. It has never even asked for thanks. It simply gives of itself free of charge. It is no less majestic when the sun caresses it thank when the wind lashes it. It does not care or get upset if people scrutinize it or climb it. The mountain is like God. It supports everything, endures everything, welcomes and shelters everything. God behaves in the same way. That is why the mountain is a sacrament of God, revealing, reminding, pointing to, sending us back to. Because the mountian is like that I gratefully dedicate this book to it. This book attempts to speak the sacramental language that the mountain does not speak but...
Read more

The Glory of God is a Human Fully Alive

Image
Blessed be God who animates our lives and send us the Spirit of Glory that we too might live in holy union. AMEN Scripture is saving me during this pandemic. And while the Gospels are always salvific, I am finding new life in the psalms, the first testament especially the prophets, and letters. Letters or as we know them epistles seem to meet me where I am and perhaps where we all are in this radically strange time! They are personal and direct. I am reminded again and again that this time of isolation and anxiety is not unlike the time after Jesus walked on this earth and people began to organize what we know as religion. In many ways we too are involved in reorganizing religions! Or as the word religion suggests: re- ligamenting.   Anyway, when we find ourselves in times like this and the ground beneath us seems to shake and wobble, it is often consoling to be written to by wisdom itself. Letters from our ancestors often evoke memories of the central tenets of life...
Read more