I'd taken friends to church with me to hear a friend of mine preach--Newell Bishop, who was as close to a mentor as I've ever had. Newell died earlier this month, though in the dream I had no awareness of this. The thing I did notice, though, was that Newell's hair and beard were pure white. The church looked more like a high school auditorium, rectangular, with a screen and stage at one end, padded metal seats bolted to the floor. Newell was giving some kind of a farewell sermon, and he talked about the search committee that was doing the work of finding his successor. As he spoke, people were setting up projection equipment for some kind of presentation. One man brought in canisters of what looked like movie film. I assumed the committee would be watching videos of their finalists preaching while the rest of us went to coffee hour following the service. Newell finished by directing everyone's attention to the screen, and all of a sudden we were watching a film that introduced the finalists. This is really odd, I thought. The whole congregation doesn't get to see this.
Then everything shifted and rather than being on film, the people were there in person. I must have changed seats, because I was right next to the communion table as the first finalist led worship. She was giving a sermon, sort of, but was overwhelmed by having to marshal her three young children into something like a cooperative state. All the while she was talking with the congregation (they seemed more like an audience), and I remember thinking this isn't a sermon at all. It was more of a monologue on how hard it is to be a single parent. She had my sympathy, but I was thinking this isn't a very good way to present yourself to a search committee. There was something about the interplay between her and her kids, though, especially her adolescent daughter, that was intriguing and beautiful. When she finished, I realized I was wowed by how musical their interactions had been. They hadn't been singing, but the pitch and rhythm, the counterpoint of their voices, even their subtle movements and shifts in position, could only be described as inspired. How did she get them to do that? I wondered. It looked completely unrehearsed, but was so amazingly well coordinated that it had to have been. That was what I wanted to tell her, rather than how it was lacking as a candidating sermon, when afterward she asked me what I thought. But things were changing quickly on what had become a stage that I didn't get a chance to say anything meaningful.
Then the next candidate came out, and the whole scene bore no resemblance to a church. It was clearly a theater, and four people came onstage in costume, onto a set that was a living room. They were ready to begin, but I was in their way, lying down on the front of the stage and blocking others' view. For some reason, that seemed to be my assigned "seat." I shifted to the side of the stage, near the curtain. All was very friendly, though, and the actors, the people behind me, and I all joked about how I was kind of like their footlights.
And then my alarm went off and I woke up.
Several years ago I was talking with Mary Ann Mattoon about dreams and what they might mean. Mary Ann (some of you will remember her) was a Jungian and a distinctively practical one. A dream probably means whatever you think it means, she said. I'm not sure about all of the details in this one, though I do think some of the particulars are simply trace elements of things I've been thinking about in my waking hours--Newell's death, the search committee looking for whoever will be the next principal minister at the church I left when I moved to London--but on balance the dream seems to reflect the transitional process going on in me, away from the pastorate and toward something that at least uses the tools of theatre, or is in that aesthetic world. I see my dreams not so much as predicting things to come as reflecting what's going on inside, the mind continuing to deal symbolically with things I think about, usually more analytically, in the daylight.
I still don't know where this exploration at Lispa is leading me. I don't even know what language to use to describe it. Is it leading me at all, for example, or is it completely up to me to chart the course? Where between the two does the balance lie? I have this image of balancing a long stick on its end in the palm of my hand. There's a back and forth between being able to stand still and being able to control which way I can walk while balancing the stick, and corrections in course that I have to take because the stick isn't completely in my control.
And so on it goes. Hoping (and praying) for a fertile year as I move from what I did before to what possibilities I may yet step into--and help to create.
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