Dreams & Waking: A Reflection on Miracles and Death

In my dreams lately, I empty my desks.

Five dreams I've had now where I am leaving my job, and I open my desk and anxiously make sure I have all my things: my grandfather's leather tobacco pouch and pipes that I inherited when I was eight, my pens (the wrong pen is worse than the wrong clothes, even in dreams), a small wooden cross I got when I was twelve.

I suppose this is middle age.  This is the collapse of the career, the decline of my mother, the small struggle of marriage, the great worry about being a father.

There's a danger in caring way too much when you're young: you get to be forty-something and the things worth giving a damn about can shrink frighteningly if you're not careful.

Yet these little things in your desk cannot remain behind.

Or can they?

I have spent too many hours with white people wondering how to be like Christ, unsure how to be like children of God, our energies were taken up with becoming.  I have spent too little time lately sitting still and looking for nothing.  It seems every stillness lately has been taken up with desires and redemption from the past and hopes for the future, and how to become, and the small struggle to be something I know I'm just not.

The ache of a lot of the spiritual people who hang around is to tap and sometimes to control like magic this power within us.  Healings in Jesus' name, "the Lord is saying to me," this is what God wants.

My sister and my mother's friends all want (well, they feel led) to fast for my mother. 

I think, Yes, why not.  It clarifies the self, and purifies a person, and the world changes.  And who knows, maybe mom will get better.

But sometimes it troubles me that there is so much worry, so deep a need to stir god to heal.  The older I get the more I think, Why?  I think it might be a shadow of ego, really.

Sometimes I think Lazarus came out of the tomb, resurrected and wondering, "What the hell is this for?"

Mom said the other day, after enumerating the good things in her life, "I have a lot to live for."  She does.  I hope she gets to drain that cup to the bottom, if that's what she really wants.

I'm not always sure it is what she wants.  Other days, all she wants is the pain to go away.

I have known dramatic healings that have taken place, where everyone gave due glory to the God of Israel, and then sat waiting, aching to know why we are alive, maybe dimly aware that we shoplifted fruit from the tree of life, unable either to find or to leave the things we hunt for.