Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica, Atchison, Kansas

December 22, 2007
Reflection for the Vigil of the Fourth Sunday of Advent 2007 (Year A)
Readings: 2 Sam. 7:8-17 and Mt. 1:18-24

Judith Sutera, OSB

When I was a psychology graduate student, a couple of lifetimes ago, we studied dreams with the same clinical eye as we cast on everything else. Most dreams are just the brain’s random shuffling of the millions of images it has seen or imagined. All its possibilities start jumping and spinning, like photos and flashcard words thrown up in the air, fluttering and flying, and assembling themselves in impossible clumps.

Then there are the dreams that come from the subconscious mind. When we let down our guard, and are without all our efforts to make the world sensible, those dreams give us images for our greatest fears, our deepest longings, our unfinished business. Sometimes you don’t even need a psychologist to separate these from the rest of everyday dreams and to know there is a message deep inside you that wants to be heard.

But there is, I believe, a third kind of dream that never got discussed in my academic training. That is the dream that doesn’t seem to come from anywhere inside the dreamer. It comes from somewhere else, bypassing both the mundane and the subconscious. The wise or the open heart, or sometimes just the unwary heart, can experience these, too. There are people in this chapel right now who understand: who have been visited by a deceased loved one, advised by a mysterious spirit guide, seen something beautiful they could not explain on waking.

Joseph had one of those hearts.
As crazy as his life felt when he went to bed, it was to be far crazier by the time he woke up.
A dream, he claimed.
The truth, he knew . . .
. . . even as his friends nudged each other and winked,
while their mothers shook their heads and made clicking noises
and their fathers argued about the right thing to do.
The righteous and humble one knows that sometimes there is something
more right and true
than what seems right and true in the daylight world.

Advent is the time for dreams.
In the darkness of winter Advent, we must dream.
Not “dreaming of a white Christmas” dreams
Not “visions of sugarplums” dreams
but the dreams where people wrestle with God and are left limping
Where angels barge in uninvited and just muddle up everything with senseless predictions.

In that dream world
angels appear to all kinds of unlikely people to give them crazy ideas:
a virgin can conceive and bring forth a savior,
angels can sing over dismal fields
and stir up the poorest from their dismal lives
to go to a dismal stable and see the glory of God,
and foreigners can set off with exotic regal gifts to see the greatest king,
only to find a fragile infant
but that baby can truly be David’s most royal descendant.

In your dreams,
you can do something that others think foolish
and know that it is what God wants.
You can follow your heart and survive the mocking and the criticism.
You can drop all your waking day logic.
You can let something get past all the guardian gates
of your mundane life and your subconscious self
and just be right and true.