Dream of Paul: return

It is the ending of the dream conference and we are getting ready to leave to go back home. I have these fragments of dreams in the early morning before I awaken.

In my dream I am standing at a ceremony when Paul, my older brother who committed suicide years ago, is walking down the carpet. He is dressed in his Marine Dress Uniform with medals on his chest. I see that he has lost one arm. He looks uncomfortable for he was always uncomfortable being the center of attention. I are trying to fill out light blue forms to send to the government stating that he is really alive and not dead as we suppose.We have a lot of trouble filling out the forms and Paul seems uninterested in filling them out but I am the one who is frantic with frustration..

At a reception later on, we are standing in a room which floor to ceiling glass walls that over looks the thunderous waves of an ocean. We see a rescuer jump into the ocean to save  as struggling child. The child is saved but  the rescuer  drowns.We are saddened but not surprised.

 Next fragment is when I am walking in a procession and I realize that it is the path to the Columbarium in the clearing beside the church. I realize that I am barefoot and can feel the ground under my feet. I also I am aware that I am naked and everyone is clothed for this is the internment of my ashes after the Memorial in the church. We are walking past the  outdoor Labyrinth as I awken.

Preliminary thoughts:
---The blue forms that we are trying to fill out come from the movie Black Orpheus { http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053146/ }(a French film in Portuguese by Marcel Camus in 1959 set in Rio during Carnival and a retelling of the Orpheus myth which I saw in the 60's and loved). In the movie Orpheus follows missing persons forms blowing tin the breeze as he descends a long circular staircase down into the underworld to reclaim his beloved. I realize that I am in the role of Orpheus to reclaim my brother and try to bring him back to life.
--- The medal are the recognitions of the people whose love Paul touched for our lives are not measured by the stuff we have but the love which we gave away. 
---The arm is missing comes from the Biblical injunction in Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount about cutting off the hand if it causes you to stumble.
---The rescuer who dies is me for I am always putting myself as a rescuer and I think that the dream is telling me that we already have a redeemer and I don't need to fill a position that is not vacant. 
---The barefoot walking is a metaphor that there should be nothing between my life as I stand on the earth and the ground of my being and the rescuer shoe costume is not necessary  and in fact will drown or overwhelm me.

My prayer is this dream is sent by the divine dream maker for health and wholeness.

Reflection on a dream of the Runaway Car

This week I am attending the Haden Institute Summer Dream Conference - Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language at the Kanuga Conference Center in Hendersonville, NC. This is my second Dream Conference I have attended and I find myself ever more drawn to look at dreams as messages from God- or from the Ground of Being to use Tillich’s phrase. I am still a novice at understanding Jung- most of my training about dreams were influenced by Freud and his sense of the Id’s attempts to seduce us into a fuller life. Dreams are attempts to get around the Ego’s defense mechanisms to keep the world in manageable choices but the Jungian perspective is the core of the deeper unconscious is spiritual rather than sexual, while the goal is the same of living a fuller life, within the Jungian view, the Self, or what I like to call, the Christ within us, keeps trying to communicate with us to call us into deeper relationship. The purpose of encountering dreams is to be faithful and to bring more of the unconscious into the conscious. The dreams can be the results of things we ate, or the working out of things that happened during the day, or they could be messages from God  to call us into deeper relationship – not all Spirits are Holy Spirits so discernment is necessary.My first night at the Conference Center I had this dream.

The Runaway Car:

I’m back in school as a Drama Major and in a series of sketches with the help of Ben Affleck. We are trying to create something profound but I the critic in me suspects that it is pretentious.

The performance is to go on at 7:00 but I step out to run a small errand. I drive my car back to the apartment and get out to run inside. The car, my old white Rambler, continues without me and starts to go up and down hills. I run after it.

But then my dog gets hit by another car. There are three scummy characters with Balkan, or Trans Caucasus, accents who help me with the dog. The leader of the three reminds me of a character I saw in a Macedonian movie who was a burned out soldier who has seen and done too much killing. I hold the damaged puppy in my arms and argue with them to help me get my car. 

I realize that they are going to take advantage of me but I go along with them in order to track after my car.

As we drive along I see Mountain lions on the sides of the street which the head of the group says he does not see but I think he is lying.

We go through tunnels and I don’t know if the car is even on this road or going up and down streets. One of the characters, nicknamed the “Shark” is getting sick and throwing up in the back seat.

We get to a bridge area where are stalled cars and I ask people if they have seen my car. I have a conversation with a woman who says she saw my car earlier but that doesn’t work because the car she saw left an half hour before my car left me. Looking at thre time I ralize that there is no way I can get  back to the play in time.

Still holding on to the dog, I rush into the stalled line of traffic at the bridge going through busses and trains to get to the other side of the stalled traffic so I can get a good view of the runaway car. The “Shark” is right behind me.

The bus I am going through  starts up and we start to cross the bridge. The character of the “Shark” is still with me. In panic I pull the cord to stop the bus.

The character of the “Shark” is coming up behind me and I am scared as he come up behind me. The bus is coming to a stop and the space between the “Shark” and I is closing. I am pulling on the cord to stop and

I wake up and sit straight up in bed.

I worked the dream out in group a couple days later, yesterday afternoon, but I had been thinking about it intensely and on yesterday morning I had a fragment of a dream where I was told I was pregnant and I saw that this was a follow up to the earlier disturbing dream. 

I had come to the conference to look at dreams to help me make some decisions on how to deal with a dear friend’s depression and with my own sense of direction of my ministry as I have been at my church which I love for almost 10 years and wonder if I am giving them their money’s worth. At first I thought the dream was a warning of depression with the damaged puppy being my concern for dear friend, the car being myself wandering without direction and the three character being the dark forces of violence and anger within me overwhelming me with depression as a substitution for anxiety about future.

On reflection I think it is about direction in my life and a call to go deeper into dream worlds. The three scummy character might be the Trinity, for Death is always a symbol of Transformation and in the collective unconsciousness ancient religions the predator is usually a metaphor of the God, e.g. Lion, Bear, Bull, and in the South Seas the Metaphor is the Shark.

Still working on it !

A Reflection for Pentecost

 

A Reflection on Pentecost                                          

 All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC 

May 19, 2013                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 2:1-21                 John 14:8-17

Since we already have heard from two speakers about their mission trip, you will hear a short reflection from me rather than a homily or a sermon. From my misspent youth in theatre, I have learned that you need to leave before people ask you to leave.

One day this week, as part of National Hospital Week, and for the third year in a row, I was asked to spent  almost four hours at the Outer Banks Hospital, hanging out in the chapel and wandering the halls during the two major shift changes, being available for blessing the hands of hospital personnel and praying for their ministry of healing. I blessed the hands of doctors, nurses, technicians, orderlies, clerks, administrators, janitors, hospital security persons, and basically anyone who agreed. Individually or in small groups I would anoint their hands with oil that had been blessed and pray for their work with them. The underlying message of the prayers was for them to know that God is blessing them so they can live into being a blessing to others.

The prayers came from my heart, not from a prayer book, and were appropriate for the person, the team, or the time. I love the prayer book with its beautiful prayers for all occasions which share the thousands of years of experience of prayer, but if you have only two hands and are holding another’s hands and anointing, there really is no hand left over for a book. I am pretty sure that the prayers I said were not masterpieces of prose and I impressed no one with my erudition, but they were heard by those who opened themselves up to listen.

Spiritual conversations have three dimensions:

1)                  An opening up of a spiritual heart to speak in response to God's invitation.

2)                  An opening up of a spiritual heart to listen in response to God's invitation.

3)                  The claiming of the space between the two hearts as “sacred and holy ground” in    response to God's presence.

Those dimensions of the spiritual conversation is what I think is going on in the Pentecost experience in the Acts of the Apostle lesson for today. We usually want to analyze the event and ask things like “What language were they really speaking in order to be heard by all? How does one get the gift of tongues? Is it limited to only a few? Is it a sign of an unbalanced mind? - for indeed there is always a thin line between the spiritual and the pathological, as both are outside the narrowness of a busy life doing all things to get along in this culture.  Are tongues gibberish, or unknown languages, or a special spiritual prayer language said by angels, or does it come from a deep in our DNA of pre-conscious and prehistoric memory of when our common ancestors were evolving as human beings?  The answer to all of those questions is probably “Yes”.

We want to explain it, domesticate it, making it into one more tool and talent for spiritual athletes in their competition to be more spiritual than the rest of us. However, what I see happening is ordinary people opening themselves up to God, as connections between people are filled with a depth of knowing that surpasses understanding, a living sacrament  that participates in the divine, an intersection where the vertical and horizontal of the divine and human meet, cross, and are held in dynamic tension.

Pentecost was a singular event happening years ago but it is also an icon of how everyday can work today. I see ordinary people opening themselves up to be filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking words and sounds they have heard from the interaction of the divine lover, beloved and love of the one God. I see ordinary people opening themselves up to hear God, stopping and listening without trying to filter things though their usual barriers. I see ordinary places where ordinary people meet to speak and listen, where something extraordinary happens and we enter into God's time of holy space.

For lack of a better definition, we call it a miracle, but I call it ordinary life when we let God in.

reflection on Jack Mann

A Homily on the Occasion of a Celebration of the Life of Jack Mann                      May 16, 2013 All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C.                                                    Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Lamentations 3:22-26, 31-33  Psalm 139:1-11.          2 Corinthians 4:16--5:9                       John 14:1-6

“All will be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" (http://www.umilta.net/showinglove.html )

Jack and Dottie

 

I cannot tell you the number of people who wanted to speak today because of their love for and admiration of Jack. They wanted to talk about how he had opened up doors;  moral doors for them into a deeper dimension of service in this world to our fellow images of God, and/or practical doors into a better way of finding our way through the pitfalls of this life, and/or spiritual doors into the spiritual journey to the heart of God.

I have this understanding of why we are all here; we all have something in common, and that is that we are friends of Jack Mann, and we are ticked that he is dead. We want to make sense of his death.  After all, there are plenty of people we could name that the news of whose death we would rejoice, but God - why Jack Mann? 

There is an old Yiddish word for the kind of person Jack Mann is - I’m not going to use the past tense – Jack is a Mensch. It means someone who walks with integrity, who makes the world a better place because he is in it. Jack knows himself and the world he lives in quite well because he allows God to show him the mystery underneath both.  He is a man who echoes the opening line of the Psalm for today;

LORD, you have searched me out and known me; *
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar. 

I first met Jack ten years ago when he was the head of the search committee which recommended to the Vestry to call me here. My wife was a bit intimidated by him because he was polite but a bit stand-offish, this tall, slightly stooped figure, straight from central casting - all he needed was a long black frock coat and a Bible in his hand - he was taking this religious task so seriously. Jack has penetrating eyes that looks deep into your soul. He clears his throat to speak and starts off with a sigh to send a message that his listening silence is broken to say words you might consider well. He seems to have a built in BS meter which does not suffer fools gladly, and my on our first meeting my wife was so afraid I would blow the interview and that buzzer would go off if I relied only on my limited charm. We had been in the Episcopal Church for years and were leery of the outwardly Christian pseudo-spiritual people who insisted on prayer and use words like “listening to the Holy Spirit”, but who were narrow and judgmental and there was nothing loving inside. My first impression was that Jack might be one of those people because he seemed too good to be true.

Boy was I wrong! Yeah, he has a tendency to be sarcastic sometimes, and he does use the BS meter effectively on friends and foes alike, but underneath it all is a spirit of pure love, which is not trapped in cloying sentimentality but with the penetrating focus of claiming the space between him and another person as holy space. Jack does not waste time. I referred many people to Jack who were struggling with addiction, because he knows what it was like to spend half of his life with that demon and the other half in recovery to sanity. He figures that he had wasted too many years wrestling with his demons where people were turned into objects to be used to reach his own goals. The second half of his life he devotes to help cleaning up some of the mess that people who had that similar habit created.

I did not know that Jack; that Jack who lived in a hell on earth had died, for when I met him he was now living into the resurrection where God is present. Our faith tells us there are two deaths, and when we go through the first, the death to ourselves as the center of the universe, the second death holds no fear for us. For Jack, the first death brought him into a deeper sense of freedom and joy, into a deeper consciousness where he lived into Paul’s words from the lesson for today from 2^nd Corinthians:  “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day”.

I have two visual memories of Jack during worship services here. One was of his singing with full throat. He could sing so well - he may not hit the right notes or tempo - but he could sing with joy, which is all that matters. I also remember his head constantly moving during a sermon because he was listening and he would smile, look puzzled, frown, tear up, nod in agreement, or shake his head because, for him, listening to a sermon or a conversation was never a spectator sport.  It was a dialogue, and what was going on in his mind was reflected in his face. I always like the fact that the outside of Jack is congruent with his heart and soul. He has no need to hide.

I grew to depend on Jack as my social conscience and spur to deeper spiritual journeys. Jack knows that only the Inner Journey into the spiritual depth would take him to the Power that was greater than himself to do the Outer Journey of changing himself and the world. He warned that, without the honesty of the Inner Journey to hear the Holy Spirit’s call, all he would do is get worn out and bitter from chronic undifferentiated busy work.

When I came here Jack introduced me to his two friends, John Schultz and Dick Buchanan. John, Dick, and Jack were like the three musketeers, and they were the fathers of most spiritual study or servant ministry outreach in this church. Jack missed them both terribly when they both left their dwelling places here due to ill health in order to be closer to family and both died soon afterwards. But he continued their work for them. 

When Jack first started to talk about moving, I did not want to see him leave. I warned him about what happened to those two amigos who left their houses on the Outer Banks. I even suggested that I would put a curse on his house so it could not be sold. It is a good thing I am in the blessing business instead of the cursing business because it doesn’t work.  Jack by his life showed us we are called to walk this lonesome valley giving blessings not curses. He loved his work with Interfaith Community Outreach (ICO) and it works as a memorial to him, following the lesson for today from Lamentations:  "The LORD is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will hope in him."

John’s Gospel for today remembers Jesus saying, “In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”  Dwelling places are not on geographical maps; they are intersections of the human and divine which are here in this world after the first death and in the world to come after the second death. Jack lived and lives in what Julian of Norwich, a 14^th century English mystic, called the “ground of our beseeching”. 

Last week, Wednesday, May 8^th was the Feast day of Julian, and I remember a class Jack taught on Dame Julian years ago. But in my memory it is like yesterday, as he smiles broadly when he recited her favorite phrase she heard from God: “All will be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well".  Jack has died and in my imagination he recited that line the moment after he died. TS Eliot reflected on the impact of Julian on later generations in Little Giddings, the last of his Four Quartets:   http://allspirit.co.uk/gidding.html )

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

When Jack left for Florida, the congregation gathered around him to lay hands on him to bless him on his way to continue his ministry. He was leaving this house to move to a different dwelling place. I believe that the animating spirit never dies but it leaves a residue behind with wherever and whomever it dwells. Jack’s legacy stayed behind in the Outer Banks, in this church and with us his fellow laborers in the Lord’s vineyard who love him. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Monk, in his The Art of Letting Go; Living into the Wisdom of St. Francis says,  “The common metaphor is that the liquid world is moving to solid, then to vapor, and eventually back again. Just wait a while. It looks like a death, a loss in each case, but in fact it is a becoming.”

oday we gather around the remains of Jack’s body and we bless him on his way to a new ministry, a new becoming. Jack’s body was defeated, but we who were touched by him inherit his spirit and are heartened by the knowledge that “All will be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”

 In my imagination, when Jack died, the Yiddish angels in heaven saw him coming and said, “Oy vey, what a Mensch!” Jack continues his “becoming”, more and more a Mensch in this life as his spirit gives us an example and an experience of love in action. Thank God we still have him and he is free to be a Mensch with God.