I admit that constructing a sermon last minute is not perhaps the best of plans. Googling bible passages, writing in a trading center where the electricity flickers after a hard day of being active for 5 hours, staying late where electricity at least flickers, and having to take a bicycle taxi in the dark over questionable bridges, reminds me of the risks of procrastination. I didn’t know what to write this sermon on. I wasn’t really thrilled with my last one and wasn’t particularly inspired for the next.
What I had: My favorite Yeats poem, a conversation with a friend on the difficulty of expressing love, and the idea that Malawians should dream more, dream deeper. So I pulled from journals, berated myself for not having an actual bible, and thought on the fact that if my Unitarian Universalist church back home had focused just slightly more on religions scripture and less on the spirituality of coffee hour, I could at least recall something useful from the practices and messages of Jesus. But spirituality growing up for me was more about collecting wisdom from a variety of spiritual leaders and practicing faith with one hand in the air at a protest and the other wrapped around a latte. A fair trade brew, of course. Not that I am complaining. I am a full believer of protests and lattes as long as practiced and drank from a place of grounding and passion.
However, the UUism of my youth was not giving me any biblical bits to recite. At the end of the day I still didn’t have very much in terms of a sermon. But I had to go home and drop something off at my translator’s house. So I dropped it off. On the ride home watching pieces of dark mountain explode in burst of flame feeling both discouraged by trees burning and my lack of words, I thought back on something. When I was talking with my friend on love he was saying the word ‘love’ in the local language or in English wasn’t really felt in Malawi, at least through the word. But when is love really expressed through any words? Maybe sometimes, but never as well as when it is instead acted on, felt, or believed.
My friend had suggested doing a sermon on examples of love. Create a sermon where love is felt. You know something simple…ahhhhhhhhh….I knew that wasn’t going to happen. And I thought of how my words on dreams that I wanted to deliver, my usual talking of god that includes spaces and sustainability and people, seemed lacking. But just because I can’t always articulate these ideas I always stand by them, and believe in them heart and soul, in dreams and in the people that carry them out. So maybe the solutions was just saying the words I had with the feeling that I knew went farther than any words. So much gets lost in translation here anyway. So I should just use the words as a guide and speak the feeling. So I didn’t even practice what I had written. I went to bed. In the morning like any good preacher I got up, went for a run, shaved my legs, and gave myself enough time to walk ½ km of dirt road in heels.
And then I said this:
‘And they dreamed a dream both of them, each man his dream in one night.’ Genesis 40:5
‘In a dream a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men, doing slumbers upon the bed.’ Pslams 33:13
He wishes for the cloths of heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
It’s difficult when following any religion, creed, truth, belief, or dream which choices to make in order to follow them. It’s complicated to know the steps to take in order to sustain these beliefs or these dreams. Regardless of whether you wish for ‘cloths of heaven’, everyone will inevitably make choices involving their own dreams and how these dreams are carried out, created, and who we all allow to tread on them.
Choices are always caught up in and greatly affect all relationships. In the context of Christianity and in most religions, people work carefully and dutifully to build and carry out a successful relationship with god.
This relationship can be challenging if you feel god is not speaking to you directly or as directly as the people around you. The people who will also be creators of your dreams and assist in this creation.
For me praying is how I relate to god. And I pray through people. Relating to god is living out my dreams with conscious choices that try not to negatively affect others, and instead include others. My prayers are a building of my dreams that in their construction, work to house the dreams of others, searching out how my work relates to the work of others and how this work can create god spaces.
Building my dreams, creating dreams that include the dreams of others, opening dream spaces, is a building, creating, and opening of my relationship to god.
Some people believe that relating to god is relating to someone or something high above. But we can all relate to a god that exists when we practice our dreams with a kindness, compassion, and empathy, that is inspired, unprejudiced, and full of grace, a grace of god.
People in Malawi, communities in Malawi, communities of the world, often work towards and wish for ‘development’. Sometimes it is unclear what exactly this term ‘development’ means and how this term figures into people’s dreams and the perusal of these dreams.
To me, often it seems that people want development, of course for a bettering of communities and countries, but sometimes it seems the want is just so outsiders will acknowledge a country, will acknowledge a community, for the worth this community, this country knows it holds. True development will occur when people work for the betterment of their country by working for the betterment of each other. And with this betterment comes formation, recognition of the god in all.
People can create development through a loving of their dreams. A loving that consciously must be acted on by loving people and the god that appears when this love is acted on, when this love is dreamt.
‘Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when dreams come true, there is life and joy.” Proverbs 13:12
And this joy, this life can be tapped, can be drawn out, acknowledged, from the core we all contain. And can be lived out through a god between people, a god in us. A god that can be felt, a god that can be practiced through a careful, conscious, quilting of dreams.
I don’t know if it worked, it definitely worked for some parts, but as for most things I probably need practice. One of my advisors when I was in college once told me how often when he was speaking or preaching, there were certain words that he loved saying, that he relished. At the time I assumed he was talking about that verbal satisfaction of reading the words that sound so good coming from your mouth. Words that just click and bounce around your mouth tuning themselves on teeth until they are ready for the tongue roll. And maybe he was, but I think he could have also meant that sometimes there are words that because they come through you, not only do they sound good, they feel good, and for a brief moment the word and its meaning are one, and this is felt by all who hear and say. Equipped with a vintage pin my dad found and sent me in a package, with biblical quotes texted to me from my mom, with promptings and discussions from friends and a sister, I was able to make a few words carry out the feeling. With some heart and of course with more than a dash of soul.
