Dreaming our faith
Dreams are an unavoidable part of our life. There are good dreams and bad ones and nightmares. There are those that give us good and restful sleep, and those that leave us quite wrecked.
There are those that are a product of our own desires and effort, and there also are those that simply come to us from mysterious causes. As persons who strive to be in control of our own lives, we should always try to train ourselves to dream well. We should little by little distance ourselves from being at the mercy of the in explicable causes of dreams and start to shape and direct our dreams.
This can happen if we learn to dream our faith. Our Christian faith is actually the richest and the happiest dream material since it gives us the whole picture of our life, not only of the here and now but also and most especially of the here after.
Dreams actually expand our world, and stretch our consciousness, enabling us to enter not only into far distances or into the past and the future, but also into the spiritual and supernatural world. They not only recall or project personal events and experiences but also give us a share of the experiences of others.
Dreaming our faith is not dreaming fantasies which we should try to avoid and prevent, if we can. Nowadays, this distinction is very important to realize, since we are aware that we often are carried away by the many false and deceiving charms of our own discoveries and inventions. We don't realize that they also come from God and should be used according to God's plans and never just on our own whims and caprices.
On the contrary, dreaming our faith is projecting before us the ultimate reality of things, where all the loose ends of the things we don't quite understand in this life are properly resolved. Dreaming our faith will give us the proper perspective that would give the proper meaning and context to every event, good or bad, in our life.
We should do all so that our dreams be dreams of faith. When we dream our faith, we can be sure that our dreams will happily fall short, since our faith gives us much more than what we can dream of.
So, we have to learn to dream and dream. This is the ideal for us. St. Augustine described this truth in this way: "The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire." A holy desire can be interpreted as a holy dream.
He said that since we don't see heaven now and yet long for it, we need to keep on desiring or dreaming to prepare ourselves for it. That dream not only has to be maintained. It also has to grow as time passes. The time of our life, the time of waiting to see our ultimate end, God, is a time to cultivate our holy dream to the max.
We will soon see that this practice of dreaming our faith will give us true joy and peace that in turn will help us to work for God and for others better. Dreaming our faith will make us persons who are always on the move. There will never be a dull moment because our dreams of faith will convert our ordinary daily events into exciting adventures.
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