We just watched the movie Inception about a group of people who are able to in effect live into each others’ dream worlds …and as the dream world goes, one through imagination and projection is able to extract knowledge and manipulate reality, skew it towards our own perceptions and projections as to the way life should and could eventuate according to our own will. Of course we manipulate reality every day of our lives with our engaging events and decisions; and, in particular, in our modern world in which the self seems, and indeed is extolled as supreme, we tend to believe that we have power to control our destinies and the destinies of others. The movie offers several different layers of reality…the conscious, and the various levels of the unconscious mind. Freud didn’t differentiate among the layers of the conscious and unconscious realities as having any more validity than the other…that each inform each as to the whole of what we can know about our world, inner and outer, one symbiotic reality. This movie accentuates the notion that the lines between consciousness and subconsciousness are blurred, if even they exist at all…Artists know this… The Christian faith and religion in general, post Freud, has been interpreted and reinterpreted through the lens of the discovery of the unconscious mind: Carl Jung, Paul Tillich, John McQuarrie to name just a few…. Jung’s theological metaphor for God was the “Self,” that deep reality at the heart of our being…Indeed Plato as early as the fourth century B.C.E. posited as much, that to know the Self is to know God. Tillich referred to God as the ultimate ground of being…the ultimate concern that we bear as humans…that when all semblance of reality is stripped away then we are left with only one reality and that is God, the solid ground upon which we as individuals stand…upon which we stand for meaning at last against the post world war insanity his readers faced. McQuarrie holds the same premise for the Christ…that it is the notion of God incarnate…God come to earth among us that grounds us in a post-modern world full of conjecture and doubt as to ultimate truth. All three grasp at reality as if it is known, or can be known by the individual… But now, in post-modernity, it seems the more we think we know, the more we doubt what we know. Certainty now is quite out of the question for the contemporary religious consciousness… the all powerful individual of the twentieth century with quantifiable knowledge of conscious and unconscious reality is now adrift, and dare we say frightened.
Scripture, and an enlightened interpretation thereof is our friend on this matter….not for certainty, but for a way forward in a confusing and increasingly uncertain and fragmented world….The ancients had no concept of the singular power of the individual…power for the ancient meant living as enlightened community, practicing the art of living together the tried and true ways of their ancestors…tried and true ways facing changing circumstances, new knowledge, new challenges…which meant new interpretations of their sacred lore… but they faced these crises as neighbors helping neighbor for the good of the whole, the good of the whole the way of the ancients….The ancient had no term for the unconscious mind….but they minded their dreams, their dreams intimate companions to their waking life….Scripture is rife with the dreams of our ancestors of the faith….we are told of the dreams of the patriarchs, matriarchs and the prophets…some utterly fantastic… visions of their hopes and what they believed God inhabiting their dreams prompted them to hope for….sight for the blind in both worlds, inner and outer…the universe entire.
We are never told by the New Testament scribes of any dream of Jesus….Perhaps it may be that Jesus’ very life and ministry is God’s waking dream for the world….A dream of inclusion and embrace…a dream of nonviolence and living justly together…a dream that compassion and mercy and forgiveness are the means of a life brimming with reality…..a dream that the dignity of every human being matters most in our world. a dream in which healing and well being are the way of things… It has been a hallmark of the twentieth century to seek for certainty, quantified reality….but ours as people of faithful conscience is to make the dream reality….To give the dream flesh and blood…It is ours through the power of the imagination, which Coleridge named as Spirit….through the power of the imagination, the Spirit, to make the dream real, so that others may dream of this grand commonweal on earth as well….that they may dream of a world in which there is enough for all in a peaceable, graceful existence….a dream plain and simple, but still opposed and manipulated by the insidious structures, the collective brokenness of our world that would kill the dream.
Let us dream God’s dream for this world God loves still…and may we awake one day, one day soon , and find it truer than we ever dreamed.
