Another reflection on a dream from Jeremiah

A Reflection for XVI Pentecost (proper  18)             All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. September 8, 2013                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 18:1-11     Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17       Philemon 1-21         Luke 14:25-33

I warned you last week that I would continue looking for dreams in the lessons. Next month I will begin a series of classes where we will look at 14 dreams in scripture and how God used dreams as the way of communication with people. We will use a book by the Rev. Robert (Bob) Haden, a retired Episcopal Priest, who, after 30 years as a Parish Priest, left to become a full time Pastoral Counselor and Spiritual director using his Jungian training and Christian mystic exposure.

 

In Unopened Letters From God: Using Biblical Dreams To Unlock Nightly Dreams, Bob takes a look at 14 dreams and visions from Scripture, from Jacob’s ladder to Revelation, and invites readers to use the book as a beginning workbook to look at their own dreams. Bob considers dreams to be letters from God that we need to open to find out what the Divine has in mind for us for wholeness and healing. This class will be an opening for people who want to look at their own dreams in a group setting to uncover messages from God in their daily lives.

When examining dreams in such a setting, they are looked at within the context of a group of basic assumptions. Jeremy Taylor offers the following insights from his DreamWork Toolkit

(http://www.jeremytaylor.com/dream_work/dream_work_toolkit/index.html) :

One:    All dreams speak a universal language and come in the service of health and wholeness. There is no such thing as a "bad dream" -- only dreams that sometimes take a dramatically negative form in order to grab our attention.

Two:   Only the dreamer can say with any certainty what meanings his or her dream may have. This certainty usually comes in the form of a wordless "aha!" of recognition. This "aha" is a function of memory, and is the only reliable touchstone of dream work.

Three: There is no such thing as a dream with only one meaning. All dreams and dream images are "overdetermined," and have multiple meanings and layers of significance.

Four:  No dreams come just to tell you what you already know. All dreams break new ground and invite you to new understandings and insights.

Five:    When talking to others about their dreams, it is both wise and polite to preface your remarks with words to the effect of "if it were my dream...," and to keep this commentary in the first person as much as possible. This means that even relatively challenging comments can be made in such a way that the dreamer may actually be able to hear and internalize them. It also can become a profound psycho-spiritual discipline -- "walking a mile in your neighbor's moccasins."

Of the 14 dreams and visions, the one we have today in the book of Jeremiah is not in Bob’s book. The first step we must take is to understand what is going on in the dreamer’s life. As I told you last week, everything is falling apart for Jeremiah. The country he loves is being dismantled, the holy places are being ripped apart, and the people of Jerusalem wonder why God seems to have deserted them. It feels as if they are all alone. Jeremiah feels that way especially when he wanders over the ruins of the Temple and when he is tossed into a pit. Part of him wants to give up - and I’ll ask you to stop for a moment and try to remember if there has been any time in your life when you felt discouraged and that there was nothing but emptiness in this religion stuff.   Was there a time when you really understood the words of that old Don McLean song American Pie:

I went down to the sacred store
Where I'd heard the music years before
But the man there said the music wouldn't play
And in the streets the children screamed
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed
But not a word was spoken
The church bells all were broken
And the three men I admire most-
the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost-
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died
And they were singing

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
Them good ole boys were drinking whiskey in Rye
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die

You got an idea of how it feels to be in that place? Jeremiah wants to just lay his body down and die; get it all over with. He sees no other option. God comes to Jeremiah in his brokenness and speaks to him in dreams and visions, which Jeremiah unpacks and presents to the people. 

In this dream God takes him to a house of a person who fashions pots. Some of you may have seen a potter at work at a potter’s wheel - the wet piece of clay is placed on the center, and as the wheel goes around, the potter guides the clay into the shape of a pot or bowl. There are two things the potter needs to do: (1) keep control of his or her  own hands, as every move is deliberate and gentle as the clay is manipulated to create something new, and (b) the potter needs to know, understand, and respect the clay for it is a partnership in creation. 

I remember in Seminary when I was trying to “throw” a pot on the wheel in one of those vain attempts to get me out of my rational left brain mindset and into the right brain creative view. I would get so upset because I could never keep my hands perfectly aligned, and I wanted to get it over quickly to prove mastery. Except the more I would rush, the whole thing would get out of balance and turn into a mess. My instructor would smile and I would apologize, but he said to me, “Just dampen it down and start over. Messing up is how you learn.”

In the dream, the Potter messes up. Remember, the point of looking at the dream is not to analyze it as an object to be studied, but to form a relationship with the dream and the sender of the dream, I am taking Jeremiah’s dream and making it my own; living into it. If it were my dream, in the dream I hear God saying; “We can start over again and I will help guide your hands. As we work together to shape a new life, a new community, a new relationship.” The potter is gentle and has all the time in the world, for all things are redeemed and the potter knows the clay. The Psalmist for today hears God singing to her in a dream and writes,

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

2 You trace my journeys and my resting-places *
and are acquainted with all my ways.

3 Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, *
but you, O LORD, know it altogether.

4 You press upon me behind and before *
and lay your hand upon me.

The Psalmist’s dream informs me about Jeremiah’s dream, that God knows me and wants what is best for me. In my dream, I would see all of the bad things that were about to happen as part of the labor pains of a new birth. Whenever I louse up in my life - and I do it often - there are consequences for my actions, for there are never actions without consequences. This dream helps me hear that God is constantly working with the lump of clay that I am, and gently, lovingly transforming me into a work of art and useful vessel. I feel God’s hand laying on me, pressing me behind and before, and as God knows and loves me so intimately, so may I also know and love God intimately.

Everybody’s dream is their own, and it has meaning for them.  One of the things we don’t do in dream groups is tell someone that their dream definitely means this or that. What we say is, “If this were my dream, this is what it would mean to me.”  Jeremiah has shared with you a dream he had 2500 years ago. You have heard it. You know what is going on in his life, living in a time when everything seems to be falling apart. This dream may resonate with you. I ask each of you to take a look at this dream and enter into relationship with it, and go through an exercise where you share with God and another human being, “If this were my dream…”

A Reflection on living into the dreams we share with God

A Sermon for XV Pentecost (Proper 17)                    All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC September 1, 2013                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Jeremiah 2:4-13    Psalm 81:1, 10-16     Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16        Luke 14:1, 7-14

I just got back from the five day Dream Group Leader Training, the first training intensive session that will stretch out over the next two years. The training for Pat and I is being paid for by the money that was set aside for my Sabbatical which I should have taken four years ago. I want you to get your money’s worth, so you know I am going to see a dream in the lessons for today. Surprise, surprise; I find it in the first lesson from today’s lectionary.

Jeremiah had a dream, a vision, where God speaks to him and he shares an overview of that dream. Everything is falling apart for the Southern Kingdom - the rich have corrupted the whole society, justice is a joke, the poor are oppressed, and the country, rotten to the core, is an easy target for an aggressive adversary.  And that adversary appears - the Babylonians. The destruction is in two parts; first is the military victory over the demoralized army (you cannot expect your army to defend you if you exploit most of the soldiers and their families), then the Babylonians set up a puppet government and continue to crush the people. The occupiers have looted the Temple, and when the puppet government tries to revolt, the Babylonians totally destroy the temple and tear down the walls of Jerusalem as they take the people into exile. The people enter into deep darkness and in their well of depression ask, “Where is our God?”

Jeremiah has a dream, a vision, and in the dream he returns to the shared sacred memory of his people, the Exodus experience seven hundred years before. In the Exodus, the Hebrew children went through the wilderness, finding that the Divine was living in their daily lives, so much so that they considered themselves God’s people.  God’s spirit was in every breath they took as they walked in the wilderness toward a promise of being totally united with the Divine. But as they came to the Promised Land, they put the Divine to one side and said that they “could take it from here”. They made God a religion that they could put into use in certain “Holy” times and places, and they got around to doing the business of putting themselves in the center of the universe and the Divine at the periphery. The memory of who they were in relation to God was repressed.  They kept the outward trappings but ignored the heart. As Jeremiah remembers, the people and the leaders all stopped asking, “Where is God?”, because they had made God so small and irrelevant that they no longer really felt God’s presence. Jeremiah hears God say:

But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the LORD, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.

Jeremiah’s dream is God asking God’s people to remember who they are - they are people who have a relationship with God that is readily apparent if they would only open their imaginations and hearts.

The darkness of the people of God in Jeremiah’s day is similar to our darkness in our day. We have squandered our relationship with God and relegated the Divine to buildings and schedules. Yet, we can begin to rebuild if we, like Jeremiah, can return to our imaginations, our memories, and our dreams. Since we are already in darkness, the way we find light is to really enter the darkness. There is a poem we looked at during the Dream Leaders Training- I told you I would bring it back up. The poet is David Whyte an English Poet who lives in Washington State.  The poem is called Sweet Darkness and it comes from one of his collections called House of Belonging

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:

the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

When our eyes are tired from busily looking at the world through the narrow center of our personal universe, we need to close them to dream and see vision in order to hear the Ground of our Being. 

One of the exercises presented by one of our instructors, Jerry Wright, a former Baptist Pastor and now a Jungian Analyst, was to imagine the past 14 billion years as a 12 month cycle where each month was 1.25 Billion years. Why 14 Billion?  We think that is when the Big Bang happened, (let’s say in January) that explosion of energy out of which the creation we know began. In that energy explosion, our scripture tells us that God spoke and let creation be in that first hour. Our science tells us that all the atoms in our cellular makeup, in every piece of matter, carry the fingerprint of that expression of power. Our faith tells us that all matter coming from God contains the Spirit of God within it, as we proclaim when we say: “All things come from Thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”  The scientist Carl Sagan echoes “We are made of star stuff.” The Paleontologist/ Priest/Mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."  We, the world, the universe, are spirit-filled. The problem is that we tend to make a distinction between this “real” (in quotes) world and the spiritual world, between soul and body, between heaven and earth, when they are really distinctions without differences.

Using the monthly calendar metaphor, February is when the “allurement” of gravity causes galaxies to form. In the month of September, our Galaxy, the Milky Way, one of a hundred million galaxies, is formed. In the metaphorical month of December, where each day is 40 million years, on December 31st, at 11:53 PM, the beginnings of human reflective consciousness bring us to see ourselves not as controlled by our instincts but as part of something deeper as we have the development of Homo Sapiens (Sapiens meaning wisdom), about 250,000 years ago. 40,000 years ago these homo sapiens in the Ice Age reflect on the nature and meaning of their existence in drawings on the cave walls, not of the food they eat which was reindeer, whose bones are found in the cave, but of realistically painted buffalo and horses which they did not eat but held in some regard outside the daily struggle. At 11:59:53 we have the beginnings of religion with rituals and codified approaches to the numinous. 

At 11:59:55 we have Jeremiah in the 6^th century BCE - in the middle of that time that historian Will Durant called  “The Shower of Stars” and Philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age” - with Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah in Israel, Heraclites in Ephesus, the Buddha and the Upanishads in India, the Tao in China, Plato and Aristotle in Greece,  when we moved away from local Gods and tribal spirits to universal energies, which we differed in name, but were approached in awe and humility.

Jesus, at 11:59:56 cited in the Gospel lesson for today, reminds of the need for humility when the people at the banquet try to separate themselves based on social rank. This reflects the core of his ministry in which he shows us how to live fully into the material and spiritual at the same time and calls us to live in the Kingdom of the Heavens right here and right now. He invites every one of us to live into the reality of all of us, being fully human and fully spiritual, children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ.  Luke remembers Jesus in his confrontation with the Pharisees “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

Guttenberg’s Printing Press comes to us at 11:59:59 so all of us could read the scripture for ourselves, and we are reminded how many dreams God uses to speak to us. However, reading takes us to the left side of the brain where our rational mind takes over and, as a result, we got used to preforming the great heresy of seeing God in the third person as he, him, it, as if God was not present but somewhere else to be studied and picked apart rather than the 2^nd person subject of you and thou with whom to form a relationship. With only of a quarter of a second of metaphorical time to go until today, Freud and Jung, a hundred years ago, start studying the unconscious. Jung posited that we are all connected to each other from the beginning of time until today in what he called the “Collective Unconscious.”  He said: “The Collective Unconscious” contains the whole spiritual heritage of (hu)mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.” We believe that the divine is calling us out of that collective unconscious and speaks to us in symbols and archetypes. As Jung wrote: “In each of us there is another whom we do know (who) speaks to us in dreams, and tells us how differently it sees us from the way we see ourselves.”

Dr. King in his “I have a Dream” speech fifty years ago last week said:

We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.” 

The writer of the Hebrews lesson for today speaks of entertaining angels without knowing it. Angels are messengers from that which we call God, and we think they are “out there” some place, but I would suggest that we entertain angels every day when we change our vision to see ourselves “tied together in the single garment of our destiny” in the sacred space between and in us, and every night when we dream and make a plan to welcome God’s messages from the depths of our Psyche where spirit and matter are one, and to honor and remember our nightly guests. As the Psalmist for today sings: Oh, that my people would listen to me! * that Israel would walk in my ways!

Dream, painting and poem

We were at Kanuga Conference Center for Dream Group Leader Training and started the whole business of learning how to help people invite the dreams to help them hear God speaking to them through the Collective Unconscious. Training is based on using Jungian Depth Psychology and Spiritual exercises to interact with the Right side of the brain where we move out of the rational analysis to more of a encounter with the language of symbol, myth and art. Instead of just writing notes for the Right side of my rational brain- I tried to write a poem and paint a picture. I am not a good poet and I have less talent for drawing but I have to stop the critic and welcome the vision.

The painting is of a section of a dream I had where my father and I were driving at night through the North Carolina Mountains- which we never did together in his life. The road was all torn up and I was driving the way I did when I lived in Boone- too fast as a way to impress the “ flatlanders”.  There was a bright blue barrier and a pale buckskin horse that ran across the road. The horse had a yellow blaze on its flank with what looked like a softened square root sign. My father said he needed to paint that scene- and I took it as since everybody in the dream is me I was being invited to paint. It was so helpful since when I painted it and then asked the painting questions, I found that my unconscious had a whole different reaction than my rational mind. It opened the dream up to whole new insights. 

 

Kanuga Dream 2013

 Also I had some free time and as an introvert needed to get away from all the talking with other people and then went out to canoe on the lake and wrote a poem about it. It goes;

Kanuga Sabbath 2013

Paddler wore a hat to keep

Burn away and doctor happy

J- stroking canoe while sun reflected

Paddle dipping in lake cool water

Lilly blossom bursting on pad

Turtle sliding into deep watery safety

Woken from turtle dreams, that’s if they do,

Off fallen logs sodden in place.

Yet the canoe glides on-

Glides on

Invading the quiet as paddler

Flees the noise to share

Presence with selves in non-language,

Tongues, gills, and bills unknown to

Yet bouncing beyond tympanic membranes

Beneath shared sub-persona sharing.

The paddler retreats to center in greater power

To find true self

September Tomes Perseid Meteor Shower

Parson Tom’s Tomes

In August the Persied Meteor Shower visits the earth and usually hits about the 12^th of the month, which is also the birthday of my wife, Pat. The Meteors are the debris from the Comet, Swift- Tuttle, which last visited in 1992 and will visit again in 2126, as opposed to orbiting Jupiter every 11 years. The debris is hurling through space and is warmed up by our sun which melts the ice and then when it enters the earth atmosphere the small rocks burn up in the atmosphere as they fall in the gravity. For years Pat and I celebrate her birthday by looking for the meteors- on good years 50 to 60 an hour fall. Last year on the Blue Ridge Parkway with the clear darken sky it was perfect. This year Pat, Yoda and I walked down to the Chicahauk crossing on the beach but because of the ambient light from the Hilton Gardens and spotty clouds we saw only about 20 between 3:00 and 4:00 AM. We are in awe that we are hurtling through space on this large piece of frozen rock and fire we call the earth and have a rendezvous each year with other parts of the Galaxy. How we are all connected in the mind of God!

not our picture

Pat wrote a poem this year which I want to share with you.

Waiting for Stars to Fall.

My annual birthday Shower in the sky

Swift-Tuttle of days gone by

Passing through on the way to Infinity

leaving behind lighted trails

Traced in the blue/black sky.

Sitting by the end of the world

on a bench overlooking the sea

Waves crashing mid-ocean

ker--thunking on the beach below

Wind kissing my face

ever so sweet

with ocean mist and spray

Loved ones beside me on either side

                Warm skin – warm fur!

Celebrating 76 years

of life on earth.

Waiting for stars to fall

in the fullness of this night

Time – but a drop in this bucket of

                water and sky and earth and wind-

But blessed by the

spectacle of stars falling.

August 12/13 2013

Shalom