A Dream of a Cross

My daughter passed the bar. She lives in a southern border state she loves, inhabited by people of the quaintest habits. I remember her telling me that people always thanked the bus driver when they reached their stop. Men tip their hats to ladies. (I mean Mason-Dixon Line border, not Rio Grande border. We are infusing our writing with ante-bellum fragrance. And by ante-bellum I mean Civil War, not whatever war we are waging right now.)

The bar was becoming an obsession with her. We feared lest she fail it. She would have seen her life as a failure and her search for a job would have been hampered. It was a great onus lifted from our souls. She called at 5:00 in the morning.
Well done, brave heart!
She related to me a dream she had had two days earlier. She was with a friend. They went to visit another friend who handed my daughter a cross. My daughter woke up with a start and felt a profound sense of peace pass over her soul and she no longer worried about the outcome of the bar exam. The cross of the dream was the cross which hung on a necklace we had given her.

I told her never to forget the dream.

The dream is an experience of the cognitive system that informs our experience of the Holy.
Our experience of the Holy is not derived from emotions.
It is not wish fulfillment.
It is not fear, not anger, not desire.

The experience of the Holy is a complex of conscious and not-conscious behaviors, which are not derived from nor are reducible to other forms of consciousness, such as Emotion. Emotions may accompany the experience of the Holy, but emotions also accompany our experience of Music, and this does not lead us to believe Music is Emotion in its essence.
The experience of the Holy is a a part of each human being and is as fundamental as Language, Emotion, Music, Imaging - the conscious behaviors of humanity. It is very different from these, however, in a way we'll talk about later on. When God speaks, we have to try to interpret this inspiration.
We use common images and concepts and we actually dress our experiences in the vestments of everyday usage. Perhaps when we were children, before we could master language, while we were innocent, God’s words came to us everyday. As children we are innocent: when we play cowboys and Indians, no one actually dies forever. We get up and play on. The villains of play return home as children forgiven their evil deeds.

The consciousness of children is a dawn consciousness that is very different from that we use everyday. The change of Consciousness from the Dawn Consciousness to the Adult Consciousness of language, logic, and economy is the basis for the Narratives of loss of innocence, loss of a Golden Age. Try as we will, we cannot recapture it. Except when God finally pushes in through all the barriers we’ve set up. And there He is. And we are innocent again. And peace reigns. Amen.

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