It Begins With a Dream

As we celebrate the 14^th anniversary of Sacred Journeys, let’s talk dreams. Jack Kornfield, in No Time Like the Present, wrote, “When you understand that your lie is your canvas, your dreams can open and become bigger or more modest, more playful, genuine, tender, caring, or intense… Acknowledge your circumstances, then step back and let your vistas open. Do not look at your life as something forced upon you, but see it as the screenwriter and director, and dream where the plot will go from here.”

Have you have seen the movie Flashdance? It’s about an 18-year-old young woman named Alex who is a welder during the day and a cabaret performer at night. Dance is her passion, her soul, and her dream is to be a professional dancer with the ballet. The application process to audition is daunting, she has been working hard for years to teach herself to dance, but she has no formal training. There is little chance of being granted an audition. Then her dear friend and mentor (a retired ballerina) and Alex seems to give up; the light inside her appears to be fading away. The pivotal line in the movie is when Nick, her boss and boyfriend, tries to encourage her not to let her circumstances and fears diminish or limit her dreams. He says to her, “Don’t you understand? When you give up your dream, you die.”

Nick pulls some strings to get Alex an audition with the ballet. She almost doesn’t go but taking his comment to heart she sets aside her pride and fear and goes to the audition. Her dancing is amazing, but unconventional, raw and risky, even including breakdancing she has seen on the streets of Pittsburgh. It is unlike anything the judges have seen from the others. The board responds favorably, and she joyously emerges from the Conservatory to find Nick and her dog, Grunt, waiting for her with a bouquet of roses.

We’re left not knowing what really happens, but we know that she painted her dream on the canvas  of her life. And that line – “When you give up your dream, you die” - has the power to touch something in each of us. A life without passion, or the pursuit of a dream is essentially over, empty.

Jesus, too, was a dreamer and a disrupter of the expected status quo and norms.

In Mark 2:15-22, we find Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners. He’s criticized by the religious scholars but stands his ground and says to them. I have come to call sinners, not the righteous.” Basically, I’m not here for you, you stuffy, rigid scholars. And then he goes on to talk cryptically, but accurately about wineskins. Everyone knew that if you put new wine into old wineskins then when the grapes fermented and produced gases, it would break the old dried out skins. So new wine was put into new wineskins that would stretch.

What if what he is really saying is, “I have come not to call the religious who are rigidly set in their ways and convinced they have the answers to everything. I have not come to call the self-righteous, the old wine-skin folks. Instead, my dream is to find people whose minds can be expanded, I’m looking for new wineskins into which I can pour the new wine I offer.”

Just like Alex who had new dance moves she dreamed of pouring into the old framework of professional ballet, Jesus had new ways of understanding god and spirituality that he dreamed of pouring into the Jewish people, but he found out very quickly that the old wineskins couldn’t hold his dream.

Jesus’ dream was radical in his day. It was about a God who loved all people equally and could be found within each person. It was about putting compassion before rules, nurturing a spirit of love and grace, caring about the poor and oppressed, loving your enemy, setting people free from old mindsets, and accepting that to be truly great one must be a servant of all.

This was his dream, his passion, his vision. And he could not, would not, give it up.

Fourteen years ago, Sacred Journeys Spiritual Community was born of a dream, a dream of a new wineskin into which we could pour new wine. Truthfully, I’d been trying to pour new wine into old wineskins for many years, fourteen to be exact. In the end it was met with fear, ignorance, rigidity and no desire to grow or change, and we almost literally burst at the seams. Given the canvas of circumstances we were given, a handful of us dreamed of a place where faith could be spacious, daring, deeply justice-filled and compassionate.

About a week and a half ago I had coffee with a young woman who came from a very evangelical, fundamentalist background. After talking for a while about God, theology and Sacred Journeys, she looked at me oddly and asked me, “Well, if your purpose isn’t to save souls, then what is it?”

As we move into the future, I think this is a great question to ask on our anniversary. Who are we? What is our purpose? What is our dream?

In The Exquisite Risk, Nepo shares this story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

Somewhere, in a time like our own, a father is pensively trying to solve the world’s problems when his little boy comes in and says, “Father, I want to help.” The weary man appreciates the gesture but only feels the child’s presence as a hindrance. But the boy persists. So the father takes a map of the world and rips it into little pieces, gives them to the boy, and says, “I know you like puzzles. You can help by piecing the world back together.” The boy protests, “But Father, I don’t even know what the world looks like!” His father laughs, “nonetheless, this is how you can help,” and he sends him off, expecting that this will occupy his son for days.

And so the pensive man returns to his weary reflections. Two days later, his son comes bounding in, shouting, “Father! Father! I’ve put the world back together!” And sure enough, all the torn pieces are taped into a beautiful whole. His father is stunned. “But how did you do this?”

The boy is eager to show him and turns the map of the world over, saying “on the back was a picture of a person, Father. I put the person back together and then turned it over and the world was back together?”

For me this seems like a really good dream for Sacred Journeys. To dream that we will be a place where people can be put back together, healed, renewed, made whole a little bit at a time. And the more this happens for each of us, perhaps the less broken and the more whole the world will be.

Love & Light!

Kaye