The Dream

‘There is a dream dreaming us’, is a saying of the people of the Kalahari. I take
it to mean there is something far greater than we can imagine accompanying us
on our journey. ‘I will plant a noble cedar on the high mountain of Israel’, says
Ezekiel, ‘and it will sprout branches and bear fruit.’ We are hardly conscious
much of the time about what is happening within us and around us. Yet we are
part of a drama, a cosmic one!
A priest, who had become the first locally born pastor of a rural mission, was
telling us during the week of his experience when he was no longer able to
afford the wages his foreign-born predecessor used to regularly pay the workers.
They took him to court and gave him a gruelling day trying to answer questions
before the magistrate. Having ‘tortured’ him till sunset they nicely came to him
and begged for a lift back to the mission! His comment was, ‘nothing they had
been saying all day entered into them.’
It was as though they lived their lives in compartments which could be lived
separately. They felt no inclination to relate one area of their lives to another.
One could push for what one wanted without any consideration of the
implications on others. This fragmented morality has implications which always
surface later. Our decisions always have an effect on others whether we pay
attention or not. I may think it harmless to throw a plastic bag out of a bus
window. But somewhere along the line my decision will have an effect.
So much for the negative aspects of our decisions. There are also the positive
ones and there are ‘gentle’ parables that speak of the long-term good effects of
what we do. ‘A farmer throws seed on the land. Night and day, while they sleep
or are awake, the seed sprouts and grows; how, they do not know…’ We have
all had experience of being told, ‘something you said, something you did, had a
great effect on my life.’ We have no memory of saying or doing anything. But it
made an impact, an impact that will last.
We are part of something far greater than the little world we think we inhabit.
We may be insignificant but we are part of a dream, a dream of God, God
wrestling with us as he did with Jacob, God ‘groaning’ with us (Paul in Romans
8) to build a better world.