Thursday, January 29, 2015

An Experiment in Preaching Using the Dream Work Approach



An Experiment in Preaching Using the Dream Work Approach
A Paper for the Haden Institute Course in Dream Group Leader Training
Spring 2015
Thomas E Wilson






Contents:
Paper                                                                                      page 2
Appendix 1               Poems                                                 page 8
Appendix 2               Sermons/reflections Blog sites      page 15
Appendix 3               Questionnaire and Response          page 16











The English author, playwright and actor, Peter Ustinov, had a routine about how diplomats from different countries would do things. One was about how a German would tell a joke. It went: “I vill now tell you a joke! Then you vill laugh! Then I vill explain the joke- line by line!” 
Essentially that is how I was taught to be a preacher. Seminary taught me to study the lessons, to translate and exegete the passage using tradition and reason, so I could convey an understanding of the time, people and place in which the Biblical stories took place, to exegete the congregation and community in which I serve, to be a prophet and expose the places where we as individuals and societies had fallen short of the mark, and to give pastoral direction and encouragement in living a spiritual life. I would approach scripture prayerfully but also analytically searching for the “one sentence” of two thoughts held in dynamic tension which would be the basis of my presentation on the “real meaning”. I saw myself as the resident theologian with a piece of paper which declared me a “Master of Divinity”, who could answer all questions with my expertise. 
However, I was haunted by a book by Urban T. Holmes, Spirituality For Ministry (Harper and Row, 1982). While I had met Terry before, but unfortunately he died in 1981 the month before I arrived at the seminary where he was the Dean. I am called back to it from time to time. About preaching he said:
The most intentional – yet still symbolic –function of the ordained person enables the inner dynamic of the mind’s illumination by God, which is the hermanutic process. A symbol as hermanneut possesses an active passivity . . .  It comes from the name of a Greek God, Hermes, who was the messenger between humans and the gods. . . . Hermes was the trickster (and). . . the hermanutic function of the priest and pastor may well begin with the task of subverting the assumption of people.  . . .Christ was weird; he did not fit in. And those who would be “other Christ” should draw a clue from him.”(p.34-5)
Later, as I moved to fellow seeker moving down from my lofty perch as “expert” and I lived into what Holmes wrote: to “ultimately stand before the primordial abyss that lies within each of us and through which God speaks.” (p.134)..
When I started working with dreams I had to divorce myself from the task of prayerful analysis to find the one sentence which would encapsulate the dream. I learned that the dream is my guest sent by God and I was to prayerfully and playfully encounter it rather than dissect it. I started to understand the idea “dreams are private myths and myths are public dreams” and approached the mythic structure of scripture as I would approach a dream which has not one meaning but whose every symbol is over determined – having multitudes of meanings.
As a preparation for starting a Dream Group I facilitated a Lenten Evening Study Program “Dreams: God's Forgotten Language” where we looked at Dreams as a way of encountering God. This led to my leading a six week Dream Group.  After the Summer Dream Conference in May 2014, I warned the congregation that I would be doing a series of experiments with the sermons for the summer months, I started a series of sermons (See Appendix 2) using that approach with the Sunday after Ascension sermon using the Gospel lesson, the Pastoral Prayer of Jesus (John 17; 1-17), as a lead into the summer series. In the sermon I referred to Robert A. Johnson’s Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, where I said Jesus could be seen as having a conversation with his deepest self and doing Inner Work with the heart and mind of God. In fact I think that all prayer, all worthwhile prayer and not just braying out loud at religious gatherings, begins with an encounter and internal dialogue, Inner Work, with the one God, the ground of our being, who is the very fabric of our DNA and our soul. I suggested Jesus is facing, literally, the crossroads in his life as he will have to leave his friends behind who are going to have to go on without him. He calls on the God inside him, that Spirit dwelling as part of his very being, to hallow the space between him and them and be there wherever they will go in their new journeys..
I followed that up the next week on Pentecost where I looked at the Acts story of Pentecost as a revisiting the Tower of Babel Myth where I said a way for me to understand the concept of a myth is by defining a myth as a public dream and a dream as a private myth. 
The next Sunday was Trinity Sunday where the first lesson was about the creation myth . I started off the sermon with a Cosmic Clock analogy which I had stolen from Jerry Wright. The next week (June 22) I launched into a three part reflection on the nature of creation using the Abrahamic Myth Cycle as a basis.
I then moved to a tetralogy on the Jacob Hero’s Journey which I called Despising Birthrights and I said the Jacob saga was the mythic structure of a public dream for the descendants of Jacob/Israel, where Jacob comes into who he was created to be. 
This trilogy and tetralogy, while influenced by dream work, kept the usual structure of a sermon. Then  I attended a Dream Group Leader Training Intensive and we again were exposed to the use of poetry and I recalled Terry Holmes writing when we pay attention to the abyss we see scripture as:
poetry- the language of deep memory . . . the negative evaluation of poetry and imagination is the contemporary illusion. The imagination is vital to our spiritual growth and poetry is fundamental to our awareness of the experience of God. It is true that poetry raises more questions than it provides answers for, but that is what we should expect from the scriptures. Read as poetry they draw us ever deeper into the mystery of who God is.(p.135-6)
Poetry and I have had a checkered past. As a teenager, I loved reading poetry but when I tried to write it, my inner critic kept attacking my efforts and I was hesitant to show or keep any. My poetry had turned into a measure of my worth and when I re-read it I declared them worthless and that label I applied to myself. There was another influence as well; Ernie Kovacs. .Kovacs, whom I admired for his comic style, was an actor and television comedian  in the 50’s and had many characters but one was called Percy Dovetonsils, who appeared dressed in a zebra stripped smoking-jacket drinking a Martina, wearing fake cross-eyed glasses, lisping bad poetry.. Every time I would read my poetry out loud my insecure masculine persona would flash the image of me as Percy “thpeaking” my “poemths” and my inner poet would beat a hasty retreat. Kovacs died when I was 15 but “Percy” stayed around much longer.
As I grew older and became much less worried about (a) my masculinity and (b) what others thought of me, I became less threatened but the inner critic warned me not to share my doggerel. I wrote a prayerful creative imagination reflection called The Old Man and the Lake based on an experience during a break about paddling on a canoe on the lake at Kanuga while I was at the conference and distilled the story into a poem using the French Pontoum style. I was struck with how deep I was able to go in my soul with the story and especially in the poem. While it is far from publishable or “good poetry”, I had to get over the inner critic and accept that it was not the art which I wanted to use to impress but the poem’s purpose was in order to invite me to go deeper. I thought I should try it looking at the series of Moses experiences/myths/stories for the coming weeks through the act of prayerful creative imagination. I resolved to see myself as the persons in the story and write dialogues between the characters, write a poem to distill it, then deliver the story and poem, and place the poem in the bulletin. .( See Appendix 1 for the poems).  I began each title in the series with The Old Man and . . .
Instead of falling into the role as the answer person and expert, I attempted to encounter the story as I would a dream by living into it, feeling it with my body and soul, live into it and to speak to the poetry of scripture with the poetry of the experience. While I explained what I was doing before I did them, the parishioners were still used to a “Father Tom explains it all in today's sermon” mode. It seemed to be disconcerting for them to have more questions after the encounter filled with reflection and poem which called for them to claim the myth/ dream/ story as their own. 
I had some enthusiastic responses from some of the congregation and pleasant responses from others, but I knew that most people liked me in this parish and have a knee-jerk reaction to support me and those who hated it would not want to hurt my feelings. I wanted to see if this experiment was effective in helping them in their spiritual life. Therefore I devised an opportunity for anonymous response. (see Appendix 3). The Response Sheet on Preaching Experiment was handed out at the services for two weeks and included as a link in the electronic weekly communication to the parish. It was disappointing to find only a dozen responses returned or approximately a 5% return.
About a third of the responses were positive and stated that they had found the experiment helpful and would welcome more of the same. A couple found that it was a good Bible Study on the Old Testament but missed focusing on the Gospel. Several reported that they were confused at what I was trying to do with the poems and spent time trying to figure out the structure instead of listening. .About a third of the people found the experiment went on for too long and would like it only occasionally as I had gone “overboard” on the whole dream bit. Several wanted the old style back.. One comment titled “Time for some tough love” went on for a while about “incessant interpretations revolving around dreams. . . if we wanted to listen to amateur poetry – we would go to a middle school poetry day  . .  rather than ten minutes of rambling claptrap, what we do want is two minutes of inspiration to get us through the week.

Things I have learned;
·        Encountering the myth as I would a dream is helpful for me and brings an excitement to my sermon preparation.
·        I have been at my current church for over 11 years and there has been an expectation of what the different parts of the service should look like by parishioners. They have given me a great deal of latitude before they start to grumble but they have fixed ideas of what a sermon “looks like”.e.g. I stand up in front of them –I identify main point- expand- confront – give hope. I have been doing what Holmes called “subverting the assumption and living into being a trickster and there is a price to pay for being a trickster. 
·        A Poem is meant to be read out loud, but it can be confusing to the listener to make the shift from listening to prose to listening to a poem, unless the poem is a published poem by a recognized poet and identified as such, e.g. Shakespeare, Milton, T.S. Eliot, Wendell Berry, Ogden Nash, and even then for only a couple of lines.
·        The process of distilling the dream, story or experience which I encounter to poetic form is helpful for getting in touch with the other side of my brain and to open up other images as I encounter the dream, story or experience as my guest and go beyond just explaining it.
·        If I write a dialogue I need to set up two different people to act it out after rehearsal rather than rely on a read narrative which renders it flat. Plus, since I have a background as an actor the messenger would become the message.
·        Weekly focus on dreams draws it out too long as most people just shut down when they hear the word “dream” and sigh “Here he goes again!” Since a dream is a surprise for healing and health from the unconscious; a prolonged frontal attack is self-defeating.
·        .Poetry feeds me as an INFP  but  we are only 3-5% of the US population- to expect to reach the majority of a random group that shows up on Sunday is unrealistic. Yet, as Carl Sandburg wrote a free verse reply to Robert Frost’s comment that “writing poetry without rhyme and meter is like playing tennis without a net”, it went:  Recently a poet was quoted as saying he would/   as soon play tennis without a net as to /   write free verse. This is almost as though a /   zebra should say to a leopard, "I would/   rather have stripes than spots," or as though/   a leopard should inform a zebra, "I prefer/   spots to stripes."
·        Preaching in a Liturgical Church lends itself to one way communication of the Preacher’s understanding from the pulpit to the people based on the authority of the office  to speak from his/her education and questions or interruptions for clarification until after the service are a breach of etiquette, whereas Dream Group Work is by its nature dialogical where feedback is necessary and each seeker is her/his own authority.
·        While I pose as a person who says he preaches in order to provide people better questions and to live into the mystery of God, many parishioners come to church for answers and inspiration.











Appendix 1   Poems  

The Old Man and the Lake             August 2014
The Lake calls and the Old Man answers
J-Stroke paddling to other side
Through waters of Memories
Deep dark Mud nourishes Lilly roots

J-Stroke paddling to other side
Frogs on downed drowned trees
Deep dark Mud nourishes Lilly roots
Worshipping Diana’s waning diadem

Frogs on downed drowned trees
All the waters returning
Worshiping Diana’s waning diadem
Pregnant Virgin Lake giving life

All the waters returning
Through waters of Memories
Pregnant Virgin Lake giving life
The Lake calls and the Old Man answers

The Old Man Crosses the Nile
On the island where bricks are made
Seeing contempt from the other side
I hear the cries of the people
As the truth spoken out of pain

Seeing contempt from the other side 
Your competing tricks of competing Gods
As the truth spoken out of pain
Being an illusion which seems to happen

Your competing tricks of competing Gods
The consequence of the problem
Being an illusion which seems to happen
Meeting in sacred space between us

The consequence of the problem
I hear the cries of the people
Meeting in sacred space between us
On the island where bricks are made



The Old Man Walking Through the Water

Pulling out of the water
Standing like a wall on either side
Carrying their heavy burdens
Differing between complaining and changing

Standing like a wall on either side
Imagining remembering what it was like
            Differing between complaining and changing
Having not been asked to be born

Imagining remembering what it was like
Creatures of God sharing curiosity
Having not been asked to be born
Horse and Rider tossed into the sea

Creatures of God sharing curiosity
Carrying their heavy burdens
Horse and Rider tossed into the sea
Pulling out of the water

The Old Man and the River of Complaints
On the river of complaints
Flooding me with whining
Even without the outward chains
Not thinking they have enough

Flooding me with whining
About what their hands wanting
Not thinking they have enough
Bound into slavery for appetites

About what their hands wanting
Praying for changing hearts
Bound into slavery for appetites
Does not end but begins

Does not end but begins
Praying for changing hearts
Even without the outward chains
On the river of complaints.

The Old Man Drawing the Water Out of the Rock (poem)
Knowing that God is with me
I am stopping and listening
Coming to talk to the Rock
Deciding on asking questions

I am stopping and listening
Touching the depth of being
Deciding on asking questions
Sharing the same star dust

Touching the depth of being
We are not meant to be alone
Sharing the same star dust
Having living water deep within

We are not meant to be alone
Coming to talk to the Rock
Having living water deep within
Knowing that God is with me



The Old Man and the Ten Words of Living Water
Responding to your awe-filled words;
What do you want from me?
Your fire setting me free for you
Without wounding your very being?

What do you want from me?
Can I keep my hands from grasping,
Without wounding your very being,
Holy time, talent, treasure, neighbor?

Can I keep my hands from grasping
Ten carved words on my stony heart,
Holy time, talent, treasure, neighbor
For a new day, a new will, a new soul.

Ten carved words on my stony heart.
Your fire setting me free for you
For a new day, a new will, a new soul,
Responding to your awe-filled words.


The Old Man and Aaron (Poem)
God singing, “No Golden Calf”
No getting away from yourself
Into wish fulfillment fantasies
Rather into worship of the Creator

No getting away from yourself
Not worshipping your creations
Rather into worship of the Creator
Going deeper into my very soul

Not worshipping your creations
But finding one’s true self
Going deeper into my very soul
Dancing together in the valley

Finding one’s true self
Without wish fulfillment fantasies
Dancing together in the valley
God singing, “No Golden Calf”.


The Old Man and Joshua (Poem)
Feeling the end of my days,
Spending years running away
But She always gets there first.
We humans are so God-haunted

Spending years running away.
Every time I breathe Her spirit enters,
We humans are so God-haunted.
I ask Her to show Herself to me.

Every time I breathe, Her spirit enters
But all I could get were glimpses.
I ask Her to show Herself to me,
She in third person is blasphemy

All I could get were glimpses
As She always gets there first.
She in third person is blasphemy
As I feel the end of my story.


Singing With All of the All Saints

Singing with all of the All Saints,
We schmucks filled with empty longing,
Not for religion but for the loving God,
Knowing our own strength is lacking.

We, schmucks filled with empty longing,
On days we cannot manage ourselves,
Knowing our own strength is lacking.
But unearned mercy pours over us

On days we cannot manage ourselves.
Our divisions more apparent than real 
With unearned mercy pouring over us
Cramming for finals by singing God's song.

Our divisions more apparent than real 
In our religions, but not for loving God.
Cramming for finals by singing God's song
Singing with all of the All Saints


As For Me and My Family
Joshua said when we talked, that
He and family would serve the LORD.
Suggesting I put away those other gods,
Failing gods in whom I ship worth.

He and family would serve the LORD
Not grasping what they had or done.
Nor hoarding the opinions of others,
 Nor failing gods in whom I ship worth.

Without grasping what I have or done,
Today help me to place trust,
Not hoarding the opinions of others,
Nor leaving non-controlling serenity behind.

Today help me to place trust,
Putting away those other gods,
Not leaving non-controlling serenity behind.
As Joshua suggested when we talked.

The Summons
Coming to Palm shade
Hearing sighs and murmuring
God’s breath spirit call.










Appendix 2     Sermon/reflections Blog site
Pentecost 2014                        http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/06/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html
Trinity 2014                             http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/06/in-beginning.html     
June 22, 2014                          http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/06/all-are-created-equal-part-1.html
July 13, 2014                           http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/07/despising-birthrights-sermon-for-july.html
July 20, 2014                           http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/07/despising-birthrights-jacob-saga-part-2.html
July 27, 2014                           http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/07/despising-birthright-jacob-part-3-love.html
August 3, 2014                       http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/07/center-of-labyrinth.html                                                       
August 31, 2014                     http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-old-man-and-burnbing-bush.html
September 7, 2014                  http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-old-man-crosses-nile.html
October 5, 2014                      http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-old-man-and-ten-words-of-living.html
October 12, 2014                    http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-old-man-and-aaron.html
October 19, 2014                    http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-old-man-and-joshua.html
November 2, 2014                  http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/10/singing-with-all-of-all-saints.html
November 9, 2014                  http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/11/as-for-me-and-my-family.html          
November 16, 2014                http://pasontomstomes.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-summons.html



APPENDIX 3:   Preaching Experiment Questionnaire
Response Sheet on Preaching Experiment
(June 1- October 19, 2014)

The experiment began on the Sunday after Ascension Day and continued through 19th Sunday after Pentecost. During those 20 weeks there were 4 times I did not Preach –August 10th [I attended a High School Reunion] when Ted preached, August 24th [I was attending Dream Group Leader Training], when David preached, September 21 [Pat and I were on vacation in Maine] when Bob preached and October 5th   [Stewardship Sunday] when I did not preach but read the poem and posted the whole Reflection and Poem on the church’s Web site and Facebook pages and my Blogsite. The first 7 weeks of the experiment focused on using a Jungian understanding of Dream Work to encounter the lessons from Genesis while maintaining my usual expository style approach (e.g. “This story means this and therefore this is what we are called to do in response). On week 10 I switched from doing a deductive rational style sermon to sharing an intuitive imaginative reflection by telling a variation on the story as if it were my dream story with a poem distilled from the encountering of the Exodus stories. These reflections were titled variations of “The Old Man and . . .”,  where through prayerful and playful imagination the Old Man (me) and Moses became one. I justified that shift by saying that Jesus was a story teller.

1)   I found the reflections :           __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________          ­­
2)   I found the poems: __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
3)   I was able to respond to the reflections and poems by:                __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
4)   I recommend that future sermons be:   __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

5)   I recommend that future reflections and poems be: __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
6)   My use of the church websites, blog sites and Facebook to read the sermons, reflections and poems was:           __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
7)   I learned:   __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
8)I thought: __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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