I learned half of a lesson in my sleep last night and the other half at Easter service. This morning I was in a school auditorium in a borrowed church, seeking a moment of faith and community on this special day. The pastor was talking about how grateful we should be that Jesus died so that we wouldn't have to. For a while now I've had the nagging feeling that fearing death so much that we have made a whole religion around avoiding it is a little too earthly a culminating truth for the God I've heard whispering in the winds. Resurrection, as the robed ones of my childhood promised, bought us another life on high once this one is spent. I am not debating the existence of heaven, but my lesson today helped me to settle something. I think that it is another death that we have been saved from, one that allows life to end as a symptom of hate and conflict and neglect. One that we choose while we're still breathing.
In my dream there was a great mountain with the head of a man. It was covered in snow and I walked to the top to ask him a few questions. I saw his head resting in brown soil with an ear to the clouds and asked "What is it like to be a mountain-man?" He lifted his head to look at me and said "Sometimes I cover my face with dirt and lay down to rest, then everyone thinks that I am a mountain and they let me be. Other times I am filled with great insight about what it is to be a mountain and a man, but when I speak no one listens." Amazed and upset at such a waste of wisdom I took these words with me to the base of the mountain.
A mass of people were assembling there to hold a church camp. A priest stood at the foot of the snowy mountain where the mountain-man's head could not be seen. The people were gathering on an iced-over pond that was leaking through cracks. "This is thin ice." I said "This is not the best place for all of these people to sit." But the priest assured me that all was well and carried on. He was directing people to put little square pictures of their faces into baskets. Everyone there was to sift through these pictures and decide who would go to heaven and who to hell. The big gamble was that on judgement day, whoever had guessed most accurately would win. It was like the door prize.
The service began with communion. Everyone was sitting in rows on the leaking, groaning ice with their destiny sorted out in piles of damned and divined. They started passing around bread. It was french bread still in the plastic sleeve. I watched as people gnawed at the bread through the plastic, then reached in and pulled out a hunk of bread to eat. "Why don't we just break bread together with our hands?" I asked. "We use the plastic to keep us safe from each other's germs." they whispered urgently.
This is as far as the dream went and I forgot all about it until my spirit started to quake in the school-auditorium church. Where my mind and heart have been quarreling there was suddenly a red thread tying the resurrection to the mountain-man. The death we have been saved from is one that happens walking, when we lose what we were born with: our vision, compassion, connection. When we learn to live on thin ice, judging one another and choking down an antiseptic communion. When we stop listening to the mountain-man and shape our faith around our fears. May the resurrection give us hope for new life on earth where we can invigorate our stories with choices and grace. Where we can be inspired to be alive while we're here and be spared the death of spirit that too many of us have suffered.
