I was chatting with the rector of a neighboring Episcopal church, dishing and talking shop and sharing about our ministries. She thought for a moment, and then told me her dream.
That dream that recurred, popping up like a bad penny in the churn of her subconscious mind? It was essentially the same as mine.
As it happened, the evolution of our dreaming was the same, too. Her specific dreams were hers, so I ain't gonna share what ain't mine to share. My dreams, though?
When I started in ministry, my dreams were essentially a riff on the "I'm-back-in-school-and-haven't-prepared-for-the-test-and-I'm-not-wearing-pants" dream.
I'd be up in the dream-pulpit, but couldn't find my sermon. Or my printed dream-sermon would be in disarray, sheaves of numberless pages, with no evident start or finish. It was "printed," so you know I'm "old." Or there was no musician or music. Or the service was starting to fall apart, because I didn't know the order of worship. I'd be failing, publicly, in front of an increasingly impatient and muttering throng of strangers.
Fear of crowds, fear of judgement, fear that I lacked competence, all woven up together into one tidy little package, wrapped about with the bitter bow of anxiety. That dream showed up a whole bunch in the first five or six years of pastoring.
But as the years passed, that changed. Discipline in practicing public speaking in all of its forms changed me. In my actual ministries, I preached with a text, with a deck, with only an outline, with nothing but my memory and a timer to keep me on track...and the hold of that fear was broken. The dream would surface, and even in that dream state I could spin up an impromptu riff on the heart of the Gospel. The daimons of anxiousness beat a tactical retreat.
Anxiety, once defeated, regrouped and returned in another form.
In the new dream, it wasn't that I didn't know what I was doing. Instead, it was that no matter how well I did, no-one cared.
I'd preach with passion to a room where my voice was of less interest than the music playing in the background at Harris Teeter. People would chatter over me. Get up and wander about. I'd call for the worship to begin, and people would just muck around on their phones. And then, eventually, everyone would just...leave.
I would be speaking to no-one, because the message I shared meant nothing to them.
For my Episcopal colleague, that was her anxiety dream, too.
That the message of Jesus...of grace, of selfless love, of mercy, of justice...just wasn't something that mattered at all to anyone any more. That the purpose we'd devoted our lives towards was irrelevant and meaningless to those around us, and by extension, so were we.
And I got to wondering...does anyone else have this dream?
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