 BETWEEN THE DREAMING
AND THE COMING TRUE
The Road Home to God
‘There is a Dream dreaming us,’ said an African Bushman to Laurens Van der Post.
One assumes that the Dreamer is the same one who looked at the darkness and said, ‘Let there be light.’ The same Dreamer delighted enough in that one act to choose to let there be light every twenty-four hours ever since, as though he cannot get enough of it himself. Can it be that the One who imagined the sun rising over the dark edges of the world each day imagined me in the Dreamer’s own image in my own place?
‘Imagine that,’ I hear someone’s old aunt say in wonder. ‘Yes,’ says the one who prays the Psalms.… ‘Yes,’ says the Story.
Do God’s dreams come true, say I.…
Why didn’t God just keep us, instead of sending us here to wander through all of this stuff that we call our lives? Would God really run the risk of some of us not making it home again? What is the object of the exercise here, and what are our lives about? Selfish creature that I am, what am I supposed to be about while I am here?
‘I do not know even now what it was that I was waiting to see,’ says a character in one of Eudora Welty’s stories, ‘but in those days I was convinced that I saw it at almost every turn.’ I too have been looking, waiting all my life to see something that I am not sure I will recognize, but know for certain is there. ‘You are traveling a new road with which you are very familiar,’ a friend once said to me at a critical juncture in my life.
I need to see why it is that we are here to see anything at all. I have caught only fleeting glimpses of it from time to time — as through a glass darkly, one might say — no matter how fiercely I watch. I hear a rustling behind me or a whisper on the wind, detect a smile or a gesture between friends or lovers or strangers, touch a stone or a blossom or the hand of my children — and it is there. I watch and listen with a fierceness reserved only for this search.
When I was younger, I worried a great deal about whether or not I was going to make it home to God.... What I fear now is that I will somehow miss what it is that I am supposed to learn here, something important enough that the Dreamer dispatched me, and the rest of us, here to learn. What I fear now is that I will somehow miss the point of living here at all, living here between the dreaming and the coming true.
Excerpted from Between the Dreaming and the Coming True by Robert Benson
(Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam, copyright 2002, ISBN: 1585420883)
|
