Dreams & Docility

The approaching days bring many things to a close, which is just another way of saying that we are on the brink of so much that is uncertain and new. When a man finishes dreaming, it ultimately means he is awake, which compels him to move forward into life. For what is life, but being responsive to the ebb and flow of reality, to moving about and turning every moment from the old and growing into the power to embrace of the new.

The Christian life is a call to conversion, a call to constantly be moving from closing to opening, from old to new, from sinner to saint. “To live is to change,” as Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman explains; “And to be holy is to change often.” For many of us the impetus for that change is the power of dreams. I don’t mean dreams as in the uncontrollable images that dance in front of our minds’ eye while we sleep, but dreams that we construct by a simple exercise of looking at where we are and then juxtaposing it next to where we would like to be. A dream, one of my philosophy professors once told me is nothing more than the discrepancy between objective ontological reality and our hopes. The place that we find ourselves becomes our footing to move toward the place we want to find ourselves in. This is what accounts for the change in the lives of so many. We envision and then we act. We imagine and then we do. We construct and then we move.

This particular method of life seems quite rational and prudent. We don’t budge until we know what it is we are budging toward. And often we know what it is we are budging toward because we dreamed it—we painstakingly brought the thought to life. It would seem baffling to meet a traveling man on the road who when you asked, “Where you headin’?” he responds, “I don’t know.” So then you wittily reply, “How do you know you’re goin’ the right direction?” And he says, “I’m just goin’ with the flow.” Free-spirited-hippie-hobo would likely be the uncharitable thought that would come to my mind for such a soul. Who moves without knowing where?! Who packs their bag and takes to foot without an inkling of an idea to what all this footwork leads to?!

Well, Christians do. Sort of. Like I said when I began this diatribe, many things are coming to a close. Easter is approaching, which means Lent is winding down and it means my rookie year as a Catholic is ending. I wonder what the next step is—tenure? Speaking of tenure, the academic year is closing, too, which means my first year of teaching goes in the history books. Also, April is ending, which bears a personal significance and has for the last seven months. For the last year, I have trod upon a path that has lead to this hub. And toward what now does one move? Does the path ending mean a dead end? Certainly not. But it does invoke a moment of crisis. It asks us to deal with unfamiliar bends, hills on the horizon, directions whose immediate destinations we know little about.

It is the approach, I think that matters as much as anything else. You see, as one meanders toward the end of a straight path, it isn’t like it is all that surprising most of the time. One can easily look ahead and see the bends or the uncharacteristic obstacle blocking the path. Hopefully none of us approach travel by constantly looking down at the ground, fixated solely on our toes only to suddenly be shocked when we step into a thistle patch after having walked straight for so long. Too, we don’t necessarily pick up speed and foolheartedly try to hurdle the obstacle. Instead, we diligently move forward with a profound reverence—not a reverence toward the bend or the blockage or the end, but reverence toward the accompanying new beginning that each end presents. Crisis so often prompts panic, but, oh, it ought provoke praise. The bend is an invitation to live! To change!

Each moment of crisis produces a requisite amount of fear and trembling. Some quake because they are scared because they feel a burden to construct, to imagine, to envision. They see the bend that is the crisis as one more task to take up. Dreams, after all, are difficult. It means, among other things, making choices and engaging and evaluating the rigorous calculus of the “best possible scenario.” We approach the bend already having taken bids in our head as to how we are going to blaze our own path from this point, pay for it, pave it, and travel it. When one road ends, our dreams provide the cobblestones to just keep going in the direction we see fit. These travellers will not be without a reasonable answer when you ask them where they are going. They will have a dream to tell you about—a constructed reality they are just waiting to make concrete.

Our wayfarer, however, the free-spirited-hippie-hobo, just might provide a better example at how to approach the endings and engage the new beginnings. If the last ten years has taught me anything (in particular the last year) it is that God is to be trusted and that my dreams are grotesquely inadequate for this life. Try as we may, we can all try to imagine the miracle of our own life. But if we try to influence the unfolding of that miracle we have foiled the divine synthesis and in a single moment sell ourselves far-short. This is precisely the difference between dreams and docility. Who is moving who? Are we self-propelled or God-propelled. Are we moving toward a where or a who? Dreams take you to places. God brings you to Himself. And God holds the trump card on amazement and dazzle. He can beat even the best dream—because he can work miracles in us, while all we can do, alone, is work.

I am often taken aback by the story in Genesis 2 when Eve is created from the side of Adam. It was deemed by God that Man should not be alone, and so Adam is given the whole array of created things to choose a helper from. So, Adam, given front-row seats for the most extravagant circus come-to-town, the Parade of Eden, (the ringmaster, mind you, was God) is faced with a moment of crisis. He is permitted to see everything, literally, every thing, he could choose from and found nothing, literally no thing, that would suffice. So what is a man to do? Dream? Begin pointing out to God the particular qualities of the zebra that he would like to see combined with the giraffe combined with the lion combined with the gorilla? Does he commence to approach finding a helper by constructing a Miss Potato-Head which would only result in a rival to the platypus?! No. He does nothing, in fact. God knocks him out. He puts him to sleep. And just to ensure that in his unconscious stupor that he doesn’t get the wild idea to start dreaming about what a woman ought to be, God puts him into a deep sleep and begins working in his life, from his life a great and marvelous miracle. He takes from his side and creates a suitable helper for the man. And she doesn’t look anything like the zebra/giraffe/lion/gorilla Frankenstein that Adam’s dreaming would have at best manifest. No, she is a perfect fit, a miracle, the handiwork of God, alone. And upon awaking, Adam sees this—he “exclaims,” (not ‘says’), “This at last,” (not, ‘well there you have it’) and marvels at God’s work in his life and the life of his newly formed wife.

We, as Christians, must be more willing to trust God. To let Him knock us out, to put us in deep sleeps, to rest our results-oriented-driven minds bent on the American mantra of forging our own destinies. Our destiny is Heaven. If we wish to fulfill it, we must recognize the miracle it will take. Then we must realize that it will be Him that must work it. God, your Father, will provide. He will fill you with all good things—Himself, through the life of His Son who is the Life and the Resurrection. This is the Truth. The Truth that you will know, that will set you free, and ultimately, as O’Connor says, the Truth that will make you “odd.” Odd like a whacked-out wayfarer who is going somewhere that he doesn’t even know. He is just going with the flow (of the Holy Spirit). That is what docility is.