Tuesday, February 18, 2014

March Tom's Tomes: Invitation To Dream



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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