Only a Dream?

It was only a dream--or was it? Something or Someone was stripping away--destroying actually--the landscape of our lives. All the places and activities that fill our schedules and occupy our time and energies were disappearing, one by one, systematically. It was frightening to watch, almost scary. Commerce and industry, traffic jams, metrodomes and megamalls--our temples for sport and acquisition--were all crumbling before my eyes. So were the walls that divide the rich from the poor, the halves from the have-nots, and sacred institutions from the secular.

All the terror notwithstanding, half-way through the dream (?) a certain calm took over. One could see distant things again, hidden earlier from view. Distractions now being destroyed were bringing perspective to life, freeing one somehow from what earlier seemed so essential to it and now no longer was.

How prone we all are to lose life's essence by missing its meaning. Striving to be winners and make names for ourselves we become only losers until, stripped of our illusions by the God who made us, we open ourselves finally to his love and grace.

Dreaming, clearly, is not only a nighttime activity. Tragically, we often engage in it by wishful thinking when fully awake. Last night's dream (?) stripped away many daytime illusions for me, transforming fear of familiar things being destroyed into the calm that only comes of realizing more fully the essence of life and therein its glory.