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At 6:10 A.M., I awoke with this affirming dream:
Advent will soon arrive and our group plans our annual project. Instead of buying holiday gifts for loved ones, we will bake pastries in each other’s kitchens, Mondays after work—Of little concern that no one knows how to bake.
After our first Monday gathering, we step back from the mess: sinks filled with soiled pots and utensils, counters crammed with half-opened ingredients and stained cookbooks, floors pastiched with icing and brown sugar. What looks like a plate of chocolate chip cookies sits near the oven. My crocs make stickery sounds as I join the others with a bucket of water and mop; disheartened, we clean into the night.
On subsequent Mondays, some progress brightens our moods: Pastries are beginning to resemble the pictures in the cookbooks.
Our final Monday yields holiday boxes of pastries, unique in taste, design, and decorations. We’re glad to share.
I liken this dream to my daily practice of recovery found in Recipe for Recovery: A Guide to the Twelve Steps of Chronic Pain Anonymous (cookbooks). Its format resembles a cookbook, with Ingredients, Description, Directions, Preparation, and What It Looks Like. Working this program requires willingness to reeducate our psyches from less-than responses learned earlier in life. Such conscious work also benefits others.
The dream opens with the season of Advent, a four-week arduous preparation for the Christmas mysteries. Similarly in CPA, the penitential climate of Advent informs the practice of the Twelve Steps, a lifelong practice.
Our group symbolizes the spiritual fellowship that consciously takes on this challenging project, with Higher Power’s help. Kitchens represent CPA’s website and the varied sites—phone or Zoom—where meetings are held. Our first Monday gathering reveals deep willingness in the group’s initial efforts to mix/blend/simmer ingredients which flop. Even more is this willingness demonstrated in cleaning up the kitchen. No matter that my crocs will be soiled; they can be hosed down, and I’ll return the following Monday with the others.
The mess stands for Step One, the powerlessness and unmanageability of our lives. Some progress speaks to the beginnings of changed behaviors and attitudes that keep us humble and teachable.
Thus, Holiday boxes of pastries represent the joy of living with Higher Power, now and even more so in the next life. And the final Monday, the last day of this mortal life.
My gladness is deep
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At 7:10 A. M., I awoke with this dream of laughter:
I have joined a small mixed group of retreatants for a weekend of prayer and meditation in the forest, the sounds of the river, nearby, humming with frogs, insects, and badgers. One of the women cannot contain her laughter most of the time we are together; at any moment her blue eyes giggle, her toothy grin sets off anyone near her, even the director. It is now Sunday evening and the time for departure has come. No one wants to leave here.
In the dream the small mixed group of retreatants recalls my annual Gloucester retreat; though silent, its camaraderie warmed everyone’s spirits, with our sinfulness dissolved in recognition of our foolishness and lightened by tears and laughter.
The forest, the dream’s setting, suggests an unknown place filled with challenges that scour the insides of honesty. Change is demanded. No one frequents such a place without being forewarned of its dangers. And the river is critical for deep psychic cleansing.
One of the women sets the tone for this retreat, like none I’ve ever attended. Her perspective on life differs from those around her, and from her depths emanates an authority supporting her sense of humor and inviting participation. So compelling her range of light-some sounds that no one can long resist. Initial hesitancy crumbles like week-old cake with discolored icing. Hearts, long moth-balled in dank attics, expand and dress in the new clothing of relationships. What was a prickly group has become a community with meaningful ties, ribboned with colorful laughter of many tones. No one wants to leave here.
My takeaway from this dream is to excavate my humor, long buried beneath the woes of transition work. I’m not the only human being ever to lose her body.
“Hey, while you were napping it happened—just like we told you,” said the bronzed counselor, standing in the screened doorway of the log cabin, his toothy smile, still taut with braces. We turned over on our damp mats, then rubbed sleep from our eyes, then stood up. He waited as we put away the smelly mats, then followed everyone outside. This was Camp Sebago, 1941, long since, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.
In front of us grew The Magic Tree that seemed to increase its height and girth, from one day to the next, especially noticeable on Mondays, our return to camp. Some wanted to spend the night at its base and watch it happen. If you stood beneath it, it was impossible to glimpse the sky; it just went up and up. No other tree was like it in the world.
For weeks, we’d been reminded that if we continued being good, the Magic Tree would give us a surprise.
Dusty T-shirts and shorts and sandals formed concentric circles around our talisman as excitement mounted like flashing fountains reaching for the skies.
Then, the Magic Tree’s treat slowly unfolded as counselors put together the story: they, alone, were privy as to how it all happened. While we were sleeping, the Magic Tree gave birth to the watermelon secured to that upper limb lest it fall. So, that was it! We marveled. Everyone gasped as other counselors lowered it with ropes, then began cutting into the sweet meat. In no time, my chubby hands, juiced with my slice, engulfed it whole and wanted more.
In later years theologians superimposed the Tree of Life upon the Magic Tree; the Messianic Banquet, upon the watermelon. From whatever angle I view this experience, it was all gift from Precious God. In many ways, I’m still that hungry child who wants more…
Heart Whisperings 