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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 woke with this corrective dream:
A senior myself, I decide to move into a Jewish apartment complex, shabby in appearance, its property split by the rails of the Metrolink. In the lounge, the mixed residents share hilarious stories and games: among them, the mating game that requires participants to identify their mates using other names. I decide to join them. After I mastered several tasks, I discovered my mate, elderly, smiling, and wearing steel spectacles. I’m overwhelmed but know I’ll adjust in time.
In the dream, I am elderly, but healthy, as I make decisions that reflect behaviors foreign to my present values—evidence of little-to-no forethought. Something else must be going on.
The Jewish apartment complex…its property split by the rails of the Metrolink suggests a noisy, congested living space that aptly describes my self-generated distractions. The split, a wound of sorts in my psyche, prevents deep listening in prayer; it keeps me rigidly attached to my daily routine lest I lose ground and cave in to the active process of dying that will complete my transition—thus my need to control this process rather than surrender it to Precious God.
And the playful mixed residents, appropriate under other circumstances, increase my anxiety, deepen my longing for solitude, and exacerbate my pretense of game-playing. I certainly don’t need a mate, of any age.
Like angry flood waters barreling me where I have no need to go, my instincts have had their heyday with me. Such is the dream’s message and cry for more practice of Step XI: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve out conscious contact with God as we understand him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry it out.
At last, I’m in my real home, I prayed, adjusting the weight of my knees upon the wooden kneeler in the 1878 Gothic Revival chapel of the community of nuns I’d chosen to enter. From the choir loft wafted ethereal strains that deepened my consolation and assured me of having made the right decision.
But it had not always been that way. Only the nuns’ scholarly teaching, their contemplative attitude, their joy in living spoke of the depths of their vowed commitment, its observance hidden behind cloister doors. Only after entering religious formation in the noviceship would I know how they lived. Clues from the trousseau list also repulsed me: for instance, using Birdseye towels instead of Kotex, man-sized handkerchiefs, galoshes, etc.
With the entrance day, September 7, 1957, fast approaching, terror of the unknown assailed me; it was only assuaged by binging, my empty stomach empowering me with a sense of control, until the next emptying. But all the arrangements had been made, even the pasteboard steamer trunk shipped to Albany, New York, my destination. I had to go rather than disappoint many. So, tearfully, I went. The initial wrench numbed me.
Since then, there have been other unknowns, but not the existential terror of that one. Another unknown, the death of my body, looms ahead, perceived, now, as the great adventure to another “home.” Most everyone that I have known are already there.
I wait and pray, in gratitude.
Heart Whisperings 