Brian’s Reflection: Monday, Dec 28, 2009

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life,
but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

Susan Sontag, artist, philosopher, who died on
this date, 2004, age 71


In some very profound way, to my mind, Ms. Sontag’s thought is the baseline of religious life. Of “being religious”. She has gotten the proverbial horse before the cart.

I dream a lot. I read what people say about dreams. They tell us that dreams are our unconscious working through the events of our life. And, while we may not understand the symbolism, that we must dream because it is the making sense of our experiences. Dreams reveal our engagement with Meaning. If we did not dream, we would go mad.

I do in fact think that dreams, if we pay attention to them as our Scriptural ancestors did, help us to interpret our lives. But that is not what is ultimately important and critical. It is only Step One. Just as “practicing religion” is only Step One. There is a reason for both. And they are related.

Dreams and Religion structure the Vision we develop and eventually choose as the pattern for our Life. It may seem that Religion does this is a more orderly and comprehensible way than dreams – but I do not believe this to be so. It is only so when we have emasculated our religious Life, when we have boxed ourselves into a desperately poor understanding of the vast dimensions both of Life and of “God”. We would do well to remember what many mystical theologians have said: that when we have said everything we can possibly say about “God”, we have only minutely scratched the surface.

Sontag is, I think, absolutely correct. The critical point to reach in Life is to understand that, once or as we have “learned” something about Life, it is of no value whatever until how we live becomes an “interpretation” of that learning. Dreams, Theology, are useless until they become the power of the active living of who we are.

What have you learned about the beauty of who you are – about the “dream” that was implanted in you? How, tomorrow, will you “interpret” it in Life? How will you be authentically You? This is what makes us alive.

Brian+