Thursday, March 27, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Dreams
If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
In my dream I was at camp, a combined 4-H camp at Allerton Park and Transforming Community retreat at Marytown. At times I was a boy, then I was a man. Friends from grade school came and went. I was both helper and helped. I was the speaker, and part of the audience. I felt happy and content, then I felt worried and anxious. In my dream I moved freely around the country of time.
I slept on the lower bunk of a camp bed. I awoke in the middle of my dream to pee, and as I fell asleep again I re-entered the dream and woke up in that bunk bed, too. The dream continued until I woke up again an hour or two later.
In the morning I felt strange but whole, as if my experiences of 70 plus years had merged into a piece. I did not want to pull the memories apart again but rather allow them their own kind of harmony with each other.
My monkey mind rested for a bit. Awake and dwelling in the waking dream, I felt no desire to plan the day or week or month or year. It was enough to be quietly alert and experience whatever came next. Taste it, touch it, listen to the warm. Feel my way along, nothing to fear.
Listen to my voice: then I will be your God and you shall be my child. Walk in all the ways that I command you, and you will prosper.
Yesterday afternoon after picking up Miles and Jasper from school I held Finn for a few minutes. Finn was sleeping, part of his 18 hours of sleep a day for the first two or so months of his life. On Monday he was two weeks old.
Finn is a beautiful baby boy daily discovering the world of air and light after his removal from the safe place, growing for nine months in Andi’s womb. Andi adjusted her diet for his sake, sang to him, held him close every day and then the next for those many months, for most of a year. When she holds him now, the boys call it magic when he quiets himself. Finn is familiar with Andi’s feel, her touch, her smell, her sound. Gradually he will grow accustomed to her face. Ah, sweet baby boy, how I love you. He doesn’t understand the words, not yet, but he knows it’s true.
Being in the midst of Andi’s family allowed me a moment to rest in the midst of five personalities, five children of God meshing (more or less) with each other. Our family years ago was like this, Andi, Marc and Chris together with us, five individuals each with a beginning and an end, five notes seeking harmony, yearning to be one. As I grew up in Lincoln, Illinois, alongside Mary Kay, John and our parents, we too made up an organism of five parts.
In my dream a sense of harmony prevailed over the separation that seems mostly normal to me now. That feels like a cause for celebration. And Finn does not yet know that differentiation, where he is the “subject” and all around him are “objects.” What can be called his “spiritual awareness,” which seeks harmony rather than separation, is all he has. And that too is a reason to celebrate.
Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, for I am gracious and merciful.
(Hosea 14, Psalm 81, Matthew 4, Mark 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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