Dreams

NO MATTER HOW PROSAIC, practical, and ploddingly unimaginative we may be, we have dreams like everybody else. All of us do. In them even the most down-to-earth and pedestrian of us leave earth behind and go flying, not walking, through the air like pelicans. Even the most respectable go strolling along crowded pavements naked as truth. Even the confirmed disbelievers in an afterlife hold converse with the dead just as the most dyed-in-the-wool debunkers of the supernatural have adventures that would make Madame Blavatsky's hair stand on end.

The tears of dreams can be real enough to wet the pillow and the passions of them fierce enough to make the flesh burn. There are times we dream our way to a truth or an insight so overwhelming that it startles us awake and haunts us for years to come. As easily as from room to room, we move from things that happened so long ago we had forgotten them to things lying ahead that may be waiting to happen or trying to happen still. On our way we are as likely to meet old friends as perfect strangers. Sometimes, inexplicably, we meet casual acquaintances who for decades haven't so much as once crossed our minds.

Freudians and Jungians, prophets and poets, philosophers, fortune-tellers, and phonies all have their own claims about what dreams mean. Others claim they don't mean a thing. But there are at least two things they mean that seem incontrovertible.

One of them is that we are in constant touch with a world that is as real to us while we are in it, and has as much to do with who we are, and whose ultimate origin and destiny are as unknown and fascinating, as the world of waking reality. The other one is that our lives are a great deal richer, deeper, more intricately interrelated, more mysterious, and less limited by time and space than we commonly suppose.

People who tend to write off the validity of the religious experience in general and the experience of God in particular on the grounds that in the real world they can find no evidence for such things should take note. Maybe the real world is not the only reality, and even if it should turn out to be, maybe they are not really looking at it realistically. 

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words  

Doubt

WHETHER YOUR FAITH is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don't have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving. 

There are two principal kinds of doubt, one of the head and the other of the stomach.

In my head there is almost nothing I can't doubt when the fit is upon me—the divinity of Christ, the efficacy of the sacraments, the significance of the church, the existence of God. But even when I am at my most skeptical, I go on with my life as though nothing untoward has happened.

I have never experienced stomach doubt, but I think Jesus did. When he cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!" I don't think he was raising a theological issue any more than he was quoting Psalm 22. I think he had looked into the abyss itself and found there a darkness that spiritually, viscerally, totally engulfed him. I think God allows that kind of darkness to happen only to God's saints. The rest of us aren't up to doubting that way—or maybe believing that way either.

When our faith is strongest, we believe with our hearts as well as with our heads, but only at a few rare moments, I think, do we feel in our stomachs what it must be like to be engulfed by light. 

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Doctrine

NO MATTER HOW FANCY and metaphysical a doctrine sounds, it was a human experience first. The doctrine of the divinity of Christ, for instance. The place it began was not in the word processor of some fourth-century Greek theologian, but in the experience of basically untheological people who had known Jesus of Nazareth and found something happening to their lives that had never happened before.

Unless you can somehow participate yourself in the experience that lies behind a doctrine, simply to subscribe to it doesn't mean much. Sometimes, however, simply to subscribe to a doctrine is the first step toward experiencing the reality that lies behind it.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Disaster

ON THE EVENING OF THE DAY the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists, a service was hastily improvised in one of the largest New York churches, where crowds of both believers and nonbelievers came together in search of whatever it is people search for at such times—some word of reassurance, some glimmer of hope.

"At times like these," the speaker said, "God is useless.”

When I first heard of it, it struck me as appalling, and then it struck me as very brave, and finally it struck me as true.

When horrors happen we can't use God to make them unhappen any more than we can use a flood of light to put out a fire or Psalm 23 to find our way home in the dark.

All we can do is to draw close to God and to each other as best we can, the way those stunned New Yorkers did, and to hope that, although God may well be useless when all hell breaks loose, there is nothing that happens, not even hell, where God is not present with us and for us. 

-Originally published in Beyond Words  

Angels' Music

NOBODY EVERY TRIED harder at making God hear surely.  He called on him till the veins on his neck swelled and his face went black.  He kept at it till one eye got sucked deep into the socket and the other bulged out like a berry on a stem.  He gaped his jaws at Heaven till his lips peeled back from his teeth and you could see down to where his lungs and liver was flapping like fish in a basket.  Up out of the point of his head a jet of his heart’s blood spurted black and smoking.  That’s how he told it.

“There came angels at last, Finn,” he said. “They were spread out against the sky like a great wreath.  The closest were close enough to touch nearly. The farthest were farther than the stars.  I never saw so many stars.  I could hear the stillness of them they were that still.”

I see his pinched face go silver watching. There’s silver in the hollow of his cheeks.  He has silver eyes.  His shoulder-blades cast shadows dark as wings on his bony boy’s back.

“Lofty and fair beyond telling was the angels’ music,” he said.  They heard me cry and they answered me.  They weren’t singing to me of the mercy of God, Finn.  Their singing was itself the mercy of God.  Do you think I could ever forget it even if I tried?"

-Originally published in Listening to Your Life