Parson
Tom’s Tomes
We human beings are sort of like Icebergs with only a tiny
part of ourselves on the surface. If we stay on the surface we think it is all
there is - but underneath the surface is this entire complex of 90% of
ourselves. This is where all the memories of all our individual experiences and
the collective experiences of all of created life are kept: in God’s economy,
nothing is ever lost. The Divine tells us that before we were born, while we were
still in our mother’s womb, God knew us and molds us in Holy Love. God meets us
before there is language and before there are rational thoughts. Indeed, as we
go deeper in our relationship with God we enter into the irrational parts of
religion in the same way we enter and remain in love with other humans because
of all the irrational love we have.
I remember in Social Work Grad School in a class of Human
Personality and Development we had an assignment to imagine and write about our
birth. I couldn’t remember a thing in my conscious mind but in my imagination I
wrote an account. When we shared our accounts I was amazed on how different we
all were in our imagination and yet, we all were born in pretty much the same
fashion, except those who were delivered by Caesarian. The theory was that the
memory of that experience was buried in the DNA of our bodies and unconscious
and influenced on how we approached new situations. Later on in life I noted
that the account I had to write during my Clinical Pastoral Experience in
Seminary on how I imagined my death seemed to have a lot of similarities to my
imagination of my birth written a decade earlier. Later on as I looked at my
dreams in these classes Pat and I are taking about dreams I noticed that some
of my dreams seemed to have similar themes. Dreams and Imagination are part of
understanding who we are under the surface.
The limits of our rational mind take us only so far in
understanding God. The Prophets, Poets, Rabbis, Mystics and Disciples in Holy
Scripture and in the history of our faith all connected with the Spirit of God
in depths of our being. The Lenten Program for All Saints will have a Soup and
Salad to nourish your bodies and an exploration of looking at Dreams to nourish
our souls.
A book that is recommended is by John A Sanford, Dreams and Healing: A Succinct and Lively
Interpretation of Dreams. This book is 20 years old but it is easily
accessible to the lay person. We will take a look at Biblical Dreams,
historical dreams and present day dreams as a way that God speaks to us through
the third of our lives in which we are asleep. Sanford in an earlier book
referred to these nocturnal visits as “God’s Forgotten Language”. We will also
take a look at how Freud and Jung helped to open up our awareness of this
resource for healing; Freud, without the God hypothesis, and Jung with. However
this is not meant to be a therapeutic process but a spiritual rediscovery.
Last month Phil Everly of the Everly
Brothers died and his brother Don told the press: "I was listening to one
of my favorite songs that Phil wrote and had an extreme emotional moment just
before I got the news of his passing, I took that as a special spiritual
message from Phil saying goodbye. Our love was and will always be deeper than
any earthly differences we might have had."
I remember a song they did: “All I Have To Do Is Dream”, one verse went: I need you so that I could
die/ I love you so and that is why/ Whenever I want you, all I have to do is / Dream,
dream, dream, dream, dream
We begin March 13th.
Please join us.
Shalom:
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