Dreaming a Dream of Limits

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.