2024-10-04 A Meditation on Dreams

“26 The vision of the evenings and the mornings that has been told is true, but seal up the vision, for it refers to many days from now.” 27 And I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days. Then I rose and went about the king’s business, but I was appalled by the vision and did not understand it.” (Dan 8:26-27 ESV)

Dream logic makes plain the fact of calm: a salient point or an observation, these may apply on some grand level, but they may also simply relate to what we’re about to have for breakfast. God is a god who cares for every detail of life, to the point a detail in life aligns to a detail in a waking or sleeping dream, a word in mind, which serves to reinforce: God is all-patient, prophecy is real, humor is owned, mimicked, by the Divine. The Divine knows: sir, ma’am, you are rampant and Really Dutiful these days, but too, you are called to live Normally. Each act of simpler Trust plays out as an arrow in the Master’s quiver. See we have a stranger and stranger bargain with life: I can dig it, I can live into the Tomorrow, I can be content and patient and all these things, but only because—not of some Grand Societal Vision—but because my playground is blessed, my housing is holy, my bedrock is rehearsed each and every blessed morning, for time flies, but my bedrock is rehearsed and the simple joys are endemic.

To be engaged in Tomorrow’s War here and now is to have some lack of contradiction in the fact, we are those literally hurling those rocks at a fiend, at a foe, but we are doing so without jibing against our Faith. Our Faith has not placed physical peace as tantamount to Spiritual Peace: life is not the final arbiter. We rather risk our own hide, and defend a society and civilization we have come to know as the Cradle, the Bethlehem, the Sanctuary of Christ’s repose. His salient points coming together in some defended, repose of Peace. So our rocks and arms are not contradiction, only they are Necessity and Translation of what we do verbally, of what we do metaphorically and physically, our voting with our feet, our voting with our wallet, our voting with our election ballot.

The times have layered on too much faux religiosity, too much space for self-doubts, when forgetting that in the heat of battle, any and all inklings of doubt, of paradox, these become all-encompassing. They literally give false pause to the engagement, when the opposite was necessary: we needed more, not less, Certainty. We needed the dream of a hearth, of a warmth of old friends reunited, of all these daring leaps across a Jordan, across a Tiber, across a Thames, across a Bosphorus (to speak of conversion parables): it isn’t that we’ve reasoned to a casus belli, but rather that we were gamed up, heightened and Alert, to a Tomorrow Project here and now: a question, what will tomorrow’s wars look like. We are interested in Gifting, not in Penurial withholding, but to Gifting a miasma of getting-along and Thriving, to the alien man or woman, to the outsider woman or man, to the people who—let’s face it—the world is plenty large enough to contain.

Oh. Mass-scale eyes on the sky. Mass-scale deepened sense of Conviction, all will be done in the Good Name of anything serving to convict us. When we are alert, gamed up, inspired, dreamed up, then we are willing to do anything for the sake of this Lord. Not a new Lord except new to us, who pundits prophesied would trade all and sundry for the proud foot planted in the ground. Who paid little heed to warnings and peace-loving entreaties: that were too peaceful, too prophetic, too artistic, too loving, to earn the approval of the inner disciplinarian and self-loathing bundle of contradictions. Paradox, ends where bountiful Faith begins: that Patience is a gift, which gift inspires our prayers, though we’d never personally sign up for a decade or two to right a wrong. Why, O God? Why the patient track rather than the getting-down-to-business track? Yet in these things, too, we are happily contented that God gives the prophecy about a simple daily Fact rather than about big and mighty ideas.