INTRODUCTION
The title of my homily is, "Reading Dreams."
One of the great ways of
interpreting scripture is to imagine what you are reading or hearing is a dream
you had.
Some people like to write out their
dreams. When they wake up from a dream, they turn the light on and jot down
what they experienced. It makes the dream more memorable, more reflectible,
more message laden – that is - if you can read your own writing from 2:45 in
the morning.
TODAY’S TWO READINGS AS DREAMS
This dream approach doesn’t always
work too well with a lot of scripture readings, but today’s two readings are
good ones for this dream process.
Image you had a dream where you were
in a big boat and the whole world was flooded and you had no place to land and
you wanted to land somewhere, anywhere. You’re sick and tired of water, water,
everywhere. Rain. Rain. Then more rain. If that was a dream you had and you
woke up and wrote it down and then read it in the morning, what would a dream
like that tell you about yourself and the world you live in?
Or imagine you had a dream about
yourself as blind and Jesus comes into your life and heals you. And now you
see! How would you feel about yourself after waking up from such a dream?
How would you feel about yourself if
they were two of your dreams in your dream journal?
HOPE AND HOPELESSNESS
For the want of a better way to
categorize dreams, there are two kinds of dreams, good ones and bad ones,
nightmares and good dreams.
The good ones give us hope; the bad
ones give us feelings of hopelessness.
It’s as simple as that.
Today’s two readings can be seen as
stories and dreams of hope.
And we human beings need to have
dreams about hope. We need signs of hope, stories of hope. We need images and
symbols of hope – especially when we are down or when we are feeling hopeless.
When things are going well, we don’t
worry about hope. We don’t notice signs of hope as well. We don’t need stories
of hope as much.
It’s like the old cliché. We don’t
notice and appreciate our health till we are sick. Then we hope for health and
recovery.
So we hope for hope a lot more when
we are feeling hopeless.
We hope for light a lot more, when
we feel like we’re in the dark.
This message of the need for hope,
to have dreams of hope, when we are feeling hopeless, hit me when I read
today’s readings.
Take the story in the first reading
– the story of Noah’s ark – lost at sea. They are caught in a sea of
destruction and they are filled with fear. They are sailing in a sea of terror
and they are hoping to see the shore. When the dove returns with the olive
branch, Noah and his family have a great symbol of hope.
Take the gospel story. It tells the
story of a man who is blind. He can’t see and he receives his sight. Like
everyone, he has to make the journey from darkness to light. It can be a story
of hope.
HOMILY MESSAGE
So my hope for this homily is to
present a message of hope – to get that message across – in the midst of
hopelessness.
And I hope you can see today’s
readings as stories of hope
Now sometimes we have heard
something too many times and as a result we don’t hear it.
Today’s story about Noah’s Ark is
something we have heard 50 to 100 times. It’s like an old commercial. We heard
the story before, but we still enjoy it.
However, we don’t get the old impact. It’s like an old movie or an old
joke or song. We know the ending.
But imagine if we never heard the
story before? Imagine it wasn’t in the
bible?
Imagine it is a dream you had one
night. Imagine you have a dream where you are on one of those big cruise ships
and it’s filled with couples – two by two – like in Noah’s Ark – and you’re
having a great time, but it starts to rain, and rain, and rain, and rain, and
rain, and all the earth is flooded and you begin to notice when you look over
the side of the ship’s railing floating bodies and dogs and cats and debris,
dead people, children, ugh. Animals. All died. The captain announces over and
over again, “Thank God we are on this ship, because there is no longer any
land. The whole world is flooded out.”
And you wake up and you feel yucky.
Yug. Oooooh. You feel rotten and you feel that way for a week and you wonder if
it’s you or if it’s the world that’s headed for destruction and you wonder
about your dream.
And a few weeks later you have
another dream and this time you are on that same boat and this time you send
some birds out to see if they don’t come back – because if they do come back
they haven’t found any place to land and one comes back – with an olive branch
in her mouth.
What a sign of hope!
And you wake up, feeling right,
feeling hopeful, feeling better.
One dream was a nightmare and the
other was a dream of hope.
FLOOD DREAMS!
Have you ever had a flood dream?
Carl Jung in his book, Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, tells about some dreams he had in 1913 and 1914. They
remind me of the Noah story.
Let me let
him tell what happened in his own words.
Toward the
autumn of 1913 the pressure which I had felt was in me seemed to be
moving outward: as though there were something in the air. The atmosphere
actually seemed to me darker than it had been. It was as though the sense of
oppression no longer sprang exclusively from a psychic situation, but from
concrete reality. This feeling grew more and more intense.
In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly
seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the
northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came
up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect
our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the
mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned
bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision
lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my
weakness.
Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions,
even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized. An inner voice
spoke. "Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot
doubt it." That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political
prospects of the world in the near future. I
replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.
I asked
myself whether these visions pointed to a revolution, but could not really
imagine anything of the sort. And so I drew the conclusion that they had to do
with me myself, and decided that I was menaced by a psychosis. The idea of war
did not occur to me at all.
Soon
afterward, in the spring and early summer of 1914, I had a thrice-repeated
dream that in the middle of summer an Arctic cold wave descended and froze the
land to ice. I saw, for example, the whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen
and the entire region totally deserted by human beings. All living green things
were killed by frost. This dream came in April and May, and for the last time
in June, 1914.
In the
third dream frightful cold had again descended from out of the cosmos. This dream, however, had an
unexpected end. There stood a leaf-bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of
life, I thought) , whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the
frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and gave
them to a large, waiting crowd.
At the end
of July 1914 I was invited by the British Medical Association to deliver a
lecture, "On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology,"
at a congress in Aberdeen. I was prepared for something to happen, for such
visions and dreams are fateful. In my state of mind just then, with the fears
that were pursuing me, it seemed fateful to me that I should have to talk on
the importance of the unconscious at such a time!
On August
1 the world war broke out. Now my task was clear: I had to try to understand
what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with that of
mankind in general. Therefore my first obligation was to probe the depths of my
own psyche; I made a beginning by writing down the fantasies which had come to
me during my building game. This work took precedence over everything else.
OURSELVES
Haven’t we all had dreams where we
felt trapped, caught, lost, being attacked. Aren’t they connected to the world
we are experiencing every day?
Haven’t we all watched TV and then
gone to bed and somehow what we watched got into our dreams?
Well, doesn’t the same thing happen
when we watch the world and our everyday experiences? Don’t they get into our
dreams?
A FORTIORI
So if we feel hopeless in our
dreams, trapped, caught, the world we experienced must feel that way. Maybe we
have to make some moves. Maybe we need to move away from hopeless situations.
Maybe we better plug into good stuff. Maybe we better reflect and meditate on
stories of hope so that we will dream hope stories.
When we feel sorrows deeply in our
dreams, maybe it should move us to pray for the world. Not just ourselves.
Maybe we need to be a sign of hope for
our world, not just for ourselves, but for all those around us, who hopefully
dream of a better world and then we will have the dreams of hope as well.
TODAY’S GOSPEL
Take today’s gospel. Imagine if you
never heard this story before and you have a dream of yourself as a blind man
bumping into people, and the stuff around you. And you meet Christ and he sees
you and your blindness. He stops everything. He has time for you. He then takes
you outside of where you are and puts spit in your eyes and heals you and then
Jesus says to you, “Go home now a new person.”
CONCLUSION
Interpreting dreams can be a very
powerful way of raising our consciousness, so too the scriptures. Not everyone
writes down their dreams for later reflection and meditation. However, various
people have taken the time to write down the scriptures for our growth and
development. Amen.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Painting on top: Noah's Ark by Edward Hicks, 1846
