A Touch of Religious Grace Through the Dream Window
When growing up in England, I would always give up meat for Lent. And most of the rest of the year! In post-World War II London, ration books were still being issued more than a decade after the war, almost guaranteeing our waists remained slim and the pickings thin.
As I’ve aged, I have practiced, thought about, carried and fought my Catholic religion in various ways. After my father’s death when I was fifteen, I felt great sadness and an unspecified relief. Later I would come to realize his death freed me from his very severe Irish Catholicism with lots of room for physical punishment as the old man slipped into his “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” anthem. With later research, I realized that my father, a product of the Irish Jesuits, picked up strains of Jansenism, a French import that cast Catholicism in a severe evangelical and puritanical light.
Into the space that opened up after my father’s death came Father Paul, a young Pittsburgh priest with fancy suits and a new car, eager to show me, this immigrant kid, the new world. My mother loved the man and didn’t mind all the time I was spending with him. She frequently said my father had a “cunning nose.” I still am not sure what that meant but my nose started to pick up something about Father Paul. In the car he seemed very interested in my groin. He spoke a lot about the basketball team at the church and how he had the uniforms designed so the young men’s privates would be most revealing. I’ll exit the Confessional mode now. I left him, the church, the town and country and sailed to the Pacific with the Navy.
Being stationed on an ammunition ship, named after a volcano, and delivering 2,000 lb. bombs and other projectiles to Tonkin Gulf to be dropped on Vietnam didn’t seem much like salvation. Officers and enlisted men actually prayed over the bombs before they were transferred to the aircraft carriers. But the narrative had already been fully developed about the Communist invasion and fear of the Other with the full support of American bishops.
Of course, I was a mainly unconscious kid who became a U.S. citizen while in uniform. I went through my patriotic phase. Then it became harder to pray over the bombs. I began to think about the damage the German bombs had done to my London homes. My family was bombed out of six. War imagery must have festered in my psyche for a long time because I could find no narrative to match my psychology until well after college. Then I wrote “That Kingdom Coming Business,” a collection of poems about what I had seen and felt about that war and other traumas that still lingered in plain sight in the shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Why I settled on “The Catholic Novelist” as the subject for my PhD dissertation had less to do with the literary value of these novelists than how religious themes influenced their work. Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac and others had focused extensively on “Maria Cross,” the intersection of Mary and the cross, the virginal and the sensual. This captures the tension in most of their books.
I would return to this theme much later in my novel, “Chanting the Feminine Down,” published a year ago. With help from Jung’s “Symbols of Transformation,” I explore how the Catholic Church had transformed libidinal energy in some remarkably creative ways that gave rise to the Renaissance and amazing art. Conversely, according to Jung, the church failed to transform itself and its doctrine as it related to the feminine. I pick up on this and make a historical, psychological and religious case for women priests.
The book wiped me out. Much of the content came from dreams, a response to the psychic upheaval I endured while writing the novel. I studied the important church councils, turned on my listening ear, imagining what was said in the corridors of power. I followed the women mystics who had been cast aside or burned at the stake. While I was writing and publicizing the book there seemed to be endless reports of priest sexual abuse from the Pennsylvania AG and many others. I looked for Father Paul in that PA report. He wasn’t there.
But he’s always there and always here, along with the weight of the patriarchy, marching shoulder to shoulder at a medieval pace. The Vatican just held another conference but the children seem no safer and women are still largely on the outside. It has been a long, painful journey. Lately I dream often that the church doors are closing behind me with a quickening finality. Lent is distant, obscure, and a retreating form. Who is it we call God?
A recent dream took a theatrical, picaresque form, projecting images of beautiful women who change shape and demeanor in dream time. There are hints of sexuality, playfulness, fears of aging, and memes that seem to come and go. Just out of reach. But through this dream haze, as a kind of counter, a reminder or perhaps an epiphany, I hear the refrain “Ephesians 4.” Within the dream I’m trying to make sense of this, understanding vaguely the biblical connotation but more concerned about how to spell this word and wonder, why this word?
Jung wrote that dreams are a product of the autonomous psyche that brings up images from our personal and collective unconscious. The key word is autonomous. Dreams are also symbolic and resist literal interpretations. The psychological question I must ask is what is a reference to Ephesians 4 doing in that jumble of anima and sexual images that might well be compensatory, a theater for an aging male?
On waking I went immediately to “The Epistle of Paul, The Apostle to the Ephesians,” learning during Paul’s time Ephesus was the fourth largest city in the Eastern Roman Empire. I also read that this epistle was thought to contain some of Paul’s best writings, though some researchers think this epistle was written later by a Paul associate.
I was struck in the dream about the specific reference to Ephesians 4. I was vaguely familiar with this epistle but not that level of specificity. I don’t recall ever focusing on the verse in such detail or single this out from the five chapters in this epistle. Nonetheless, the dream sent me there. One of the first lines I read was: “With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love.” Then a touch of the familiar: “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.”
Perhaps the dream was my Lenten tonic, a compensation for all the unconscious elements that flourish in the public square and my private life.
Perhaps my psyche is reminding me of the healing, archetypal source of religion.
Perhaps the dream took me to where the hunger is.
