Dreaming up reality

Everything in this human made civilization of ours started out as a dream.

Everything in this human made civilization of ours started out as a dream. Even the most seemingly solid entity we can imagine, is a patchwork of human ingenuity, creativity and collaboration. It’s all been us making up stuff over and over and over again. We might say that God has been involved in each step of the way, as the inspirer of dreams, the giver of life, AND it has been the physical hands and feet and hearts and minds of human persons that have knit it all together as it stands today.

I find this very important to remember, especially in relationship to church.

We seem to like to live as if this wasn’t true. To think of the holy texts, church buildings, liturgies and traditions as things that have “always been.” I suppose this gives us a sense of safety, a sense of feeling that what we are up to is right and good. AND the pitfall of this, seemingly harmless illusion, is that we can fall into a sense of complacency, forgetting that our ancestors dreamed up this current reality and we are responsible for dreaming up what comes next.

What might you like to dream into being?

When church is alive the dreams of the present build on the dreams of the past. We are shepherded by elders who lived their dreams, taught how to love by their example, and encouraged to be faithful to the dreams that emerge within us. AND this process gets interrupted. As far as I can tell it goes through stages of birth, growth and death just like all other living things, some generations responsible for the building up of things, others for the breaking down.

Swedenborg talks about these stages of the church a lot. Curtis Childs, of Swedenborg Foundation’s Off the Left Eye, recently created a great video “The main reasons churches die.” In it he uses great props like “the red bowl of love” and “the spoon of disagreement” to illustrate how churches die when the love and joy that gets them started dissipates, leaving only doctrine, and then routine, and then empty buildings that can’t hold people together when disagreement inevitably arrises. (Definitely watch the whole video it’s totally worth your time!)

The thing is it's always, always, always about love. Everything that ever has been created has been inspired by a dream that was motivated by love. A desire to make life a bit better for those we love. AND the forms created from love by the previous generation rarely fully meet the needs of love that exist in the present one.

What are your needs of love? How might you like to love others? How might you like to be loved by others?

For many of my generation and younger the traditional forms of the church are seen as quaint, nice to visit from time to time, good to have around for a wedding or funeral, but not vital to life, not vital to love. While this may be an okay attitude for some, as a human who has committed her life to the work of church this stance does not work for me. I do not want to spend my life maintaining something quaint or tangential to life. AND worse as these forms become less and less resonant with people they tend to become more dysfunctional and at times even harmful. (Again, watch Curtis’ video.)

The church can be anything we want it to be. If the forms that we are maintaining aren’t working, aren’t resonating with love and life, and worse perpetuating harmful practices or attitudes, then it’s time to let them go. Our ancestors did not build these buildings and write these liturgies so that we might suffer through them unhappily. We are in a time of discontinuity and that’s difficult. It’s probably not how any of us wish it was. Some of us so very much wish for this not to be the case that we carry on the traditions of the previous generation come hell or high water, not wanting to acknowledge the break that has occurred and is occurring. But denying the truth does not make the truth go away.

We are in a time of discontinuity. And a lot about that sucks. AND, just like winter is just as important as summer, there exists opportunity in this moment. Perhaps enough has broken down, enough has decayed and composted to fertilize the seed of what is coming next. Maybe it’s already germinating under the ground and ready to sprout if we can just turn our attention towards it long enough to clear out the weeds and make sure it gets enough water and light. Maybe if we give our attention to each other, our love to each other, and to the dreams inside each of us, we might start to discover the next form of the church right here in the midst of all that is breaking down.

My hope for Be Love, Be Honest, Be Useful and Be Love the Podcast is that these forms might help us to listen more deeply to ourselves and to one another. In this time of discontinuity it seems so important that we spend time listening to each other.

As old forms break down what wisdom might we carry forward in new ways? Those who have been a part of the church of the past what did you love about it? And those adrift what kind of a church do you long for?

The church can be anything we want it to be. It’s not a time to be complacent. It’s time to dream.