Delaware Dream

“The singers and the dancers will say, * ‘all my fresh springs are in you.’ “ Psalm 87:6

Dreamed a few days ago, most disturbingly, that a familiar stretch of the Delaware River had dried up, leaving only occasional patches of water across a wide expanse of gravel and larger rocks. Water still ran freely in places, but only in hollowed-out pockets, trenches depressed into the ground three or four feet with a few inches of running water at the bottom. I carried a fishing rod, but the water was nowhere deep enough to provide habitat for anything larger than a minnow. At a place upstream there were buildings, headquarters for some kind of Park, and tourists were meeting in seminar-like groups. I think they were listening to presentations about the River, but no one seemed alarmed that it had virtually disappeared.

I was alarmed, and in the days since that sense of alarm has widened out and become a sort of chant, a drum-beat throbbing on the horizon of every thought or word.

That River was, in waking life, the scene for family vacations all through my childhood, and became as I have often preached and written, a place “where things were as they should be, and people were at their best.”  It remains a mighty living force, carving a path for itself through walls of rock as well as through memories and dreams.

In the dream, I recognize this ruined relic of a mighty stream as representing Christ, crucified in Jerusalem, shot down in Connecticut, strip-mined in Alabama, everywhere violated, drained of power, reduced to a trickle. I write this while renouncing any attempt to apply a veneer of religiosity to reality, because for me, the River was “christic” before I had a “religion”. For me, there was a sacred presence inhabiting the world before I had a name for it, or any rituals or prayers with which to invoke or appease it. For me, there was a cross before there was a Christ, and this dream proceeds from that same primal place.

To know Christ it is necessary to become alarmed, to feel the outrage of an empty river bed or a strip-mined Alabama hill. To know Christ it is necessary to dry up and blow away like dust, to be burned to a crisp and reduced to ashes. To know Christ it is necessary to go deeper than religious formalities, to see Christ disappear into the earth, leaving behind abandoned cathedrals and giant gaps between the mountains, relics of a mighty power that has gone.

To know Christ it is necessary to stand beside the dream and feel it all: the loss, the outrage, the alarm, and, most of all, the love, and if there is to be a resurrection it will have to happen in waking life, because there is no happy ending within this dream.

In the Daily Office on the morning after the dream, the psalms appointed for the day included Psalm 87:6: “The singers and the dancers will say, *’all my fresh springs are in you.’ “