In April Reverend Megan Foley gave a sermon at the Sugarloaf
Church of Unitarian Universalists called “Dreaming a Dream of Limits”; a sermon
that responds to a story I wrote a little over a decade ago and that was the
text of the first performance piece I did at Sugarloaf back when I first came
there. The sermon can be found here: http://scuu.org/site/content/dreaming-dream-limits, the text of the story, “Before There Was Time”, is
embedded. I’ll repeat the story text at
the end of this post in case the link to the sermon archive breaks.
“Before There Was Time” is
definitely my strongest piece of writing, and an aspiration of my current
writing endeavors is to find that voice again.
Rev. Megan’s sermon response is very rich and worth contemplating. Below I’ll share some of my own musings about
it as well as some on an essay on process theology that a friend insightfully
noticed has a striking connection with the story and Rev. Megan’s sermon.
Rev. Megan observes: “. . . it is limit, in and of itself, that
causes things to be, that causes particular creations to happen.” I offer a reformulation of this notion as creativity occurs in response to limitation. I know that this is true in my own creative
life. When I sit down to write and I can
write about anything in any way, when the page is a blank slate, I cannot write
at all. Nothing comes to my mind. But throw in a limit, like the constraint to
write in a specific meter, or to express a specific image or set of images, a
memory, my affective response to a piece of music etc., and typically words
come to me. I often have the sense that
I can feel my unconscious humming away creating a response. A poem (or story), not any poem, but a poem
with specific requirements, has been called, and it comes (usually). Of course, the unconscious has its way of interpreting
the requirements, of co-opting the project to suit an agenda of its own. That’s part of the creative process. But whenever I’ve appealed to my unconscious with
something like “oh, just make something up so I can post the damn daily poem”,
I get nothing. The genie grants wishes,
but you have to wish for something, something specific (i.e. limited).
Of course, in the story, things go terribly wrong. The wonder and beauty of the limited universe
becomes war, rape, murder, on a massive scale.
Rev. Megan observes : “And then the Dream Dot dreamed of the limits of
Joy, and that, it seemed was where the trouble began. The particularities
created by limits came to believe, like we humans believe, that their own
limited viewpoint was True Reality. They came to see that they were one way and
others were another, and they began to fight. War, murder, oppression, armies,
kings and congresses were the result. The unintended consequences of
limitation. The creation of the matter, of the particularities, comes with it
an inescapable conflict, an original sin, if you will.”
I think this is insightful.
The very fact of individuated beings implies the possibility of conflict
between them. But there is another
factor at work it seems to me, the insidious poison of one tiny little mad
idea, perfection. The dream dot dreams
that is “perfectly limited, extending not at all”; but the intrinsic tendency
of its nature, Joy, is to extend, so the dream of limit keeps extending,
creating more limited realms of beauty.
Damn Joy! This isn’t the perfect
limit the dream dot wanted. Somehow it
manages to hit on the idea of fear (called dread in the story), with fear’s
tendency to contract, a counteraction to Joy.
But now what becomes limitless is dread itself. From “cutting remarks and hurt feelings”
dread reaches the holocaust in only sixty six words. What was the holocaust about anyway? To embrace an ideal, like pride in being
German, is one thing. Individuated
beings will embrace ideals that are less than the All from which they come and
which they really are, and only by doing this can they explore the
possibilities of individuated being. But
throw in the tiny little mad idea, decide that the chosen ideal has to be
perfected, and then anything at variance with the chosen ideal has become the
enemy and has to be destroyed.
Rev. Megan reaches this horrible of horribles in her sermon in the
form of the torture chamber. Her
response to Reverend Bill Schultz’ claim that “torture obliterates the very
face of God.”, her rejection of the equation God = Love, are well worth the
reader’s time to explore and reflect on.
I’m gratified that a story channeled into the world through me helps her
to unpack her thoughts on these things for us.
I have one contribution to make here, and I’m not clear whether it
relates to Rev. Megan’s sermon or not.
It’s a disturbing thought and I don’t really like having it, but here
goes:
Roy (me) screaming in a torture chamber is OK with God.
For God, it seems to me, the torture chamber is as legitimate an
outcome of the big bang as any other.
It’s dukkha (sometimes rendered “suffering”) we Buddhists might
say. If you’re fully enlightened you
don’t even mind it (nice work if you can get it). This thought (that God is OK with torture) is
repugnant of course to those of us used to thinking of God as a protector (“The
Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . .”).
I’d love for someone to prove me wrong, I really mean that. And at some level I accept that God feels my
pain even more than limited I does, and unwaveringly intends my wholeness, my
abiding happiness, never doubting that I am Joy in eternity, however I suffer
in time. But that’s the thing; my agony
is just a temporality to God, but my delusion that it’s all there is when I’m
in it is hellishly hard to let go.
A friend who heard Rev. Megan speak was struck by a sentence in an
essay he’d been reading that runs “God offers novelty and also limits,
thus making growing complexity possible”. The
essay, a kind of primer on process theology, can be found here: http://www.ctr4process.org/about/process/GodUniverse.shtml. I’ve never known
much about process theology, but reading this essay reminded me of a
conversation I had with a friend in recovery years ago. In talking about God (and God is a big deal
in twelve step recovery programs) we found that we both thought of God as a
pervasive pressure or influence always tending to move life toward health and
wholeness. I learned in recovery, not to
believe in or have faith in God, but to keep faith with God by seeking to
participate in my own healing as a co-creator of my life, as well as to help
others with their healing.
And here perhaps is some kind of
escape from my disturbing thought. God
may be OK with my suffering, but God is always about influencing life away from
horror and toward wholeness/happiness, even in the torture chamber where God’s
influence is so muted by the dream of dread that we can’t perceive it. God is always about awakening to Joy.
May we all be blessed
Before There Was Time
© 2001 Roy Mueller
Before there was time, there was Joy. Joy knew only Joy and Joy did not know
limit. Now there was no one to see Joy,
but if there had been, Joy might have looked like shiny patent leather, very
black and very bright, extending limitless in countless directions
forever. Joy silently rang and
sightlessly radiated Joy; so sweet that song, as if it vibrated on an endless
harp string of vibrant green, crisscrossing Joy as countless strings, ringing
with the ancient song silent and sweet forever.
And one green string of Joy dreamed a dream of limit. It dreamed it was a dot, perfectly limited
and extending not at all. Now that dream
dot was made of Joy, for there was nothing else of which it could be made. And being Joy, its’ dream of perfect limit
extended to limit an inside from an outside.
The inside dreamed within itself hosts of limited structures; membranes
covered with sphericals and membrane bound organelles, all dreaming insides of
their own dreaming of inner worlds, dreaming of inner worlds. The outside dreamed without itself a sky
strewn with stars. And the stars dreamed
without themselves a galaxy of shining stars dreaming of whirling groups of
galaxies racing ever faster into an outer beyond that perhaps dreamed a dream
of that without itself.
And the dream dot perceived that the dream of perfect limit
was limitless. And hoping to recover
perfect limit still it dreamed that it has a before and an after; so that even
if perfect limit had not been achieved in the before it might yet be in the
after. And the before dreamed that it
had a before of its’ own as well as an after, dreaming of its’ own before. And the after dreamed that it had an after of
its’ own as well as a before dreaming of its’ own after. And the dream dot perceived that the dream of
before and after too was limitless.
Now the dream dot reasoned that the dream of perfect limit
always extended into limitlessness because it was made of Joy, and Joy did not
know limit. So the dream dot began to
dream of alternatives to Joy. It dreamed
of indifference, but indifference was vast.
It dreamed of dread, ahhh, now
here was a dream to counteract extending Joy, for dread ever contracted,
seeking to make itself small and hide from what it dreamed it feared.
And the dream dot dreamed a dreadful dream.
It dreamed of cutting remarks and hurt feelings, of faces
slapped, dogs kicked and children shamed.
It dreamed of judgment and of guilt, of trials and punishments, of
hierarchies and kings and courts and congresses. It dreamed of armies swarming over landscapes
like locusts burning towns, raping women, murdering children, and slaughtering
one another; of whole peoples shipped off like cattle and sent up chimneys as
thick billowing smoke. It dreamed of the
righteous punishment of the evil by the good, and of evil’s insidious revenge.
And yet, in every war in the dream of dread some soldier
looked into the face of his enemy and saw himself. In every burning town
someone risked their own life to care for a neighbor. In every strife torn relationship moments of
forgiveness spread like a fan to soften two hearts; and in every political
struggle someone, at some point said “there has got to be a better way than
this and I am going to find it”. And because
of these awakening ones the dream of dread was also a dream of hope; the hope
of awakening to Joy, before there was time.
