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Dreaming God’s Dreams
Fiction and Non-Fiction on Visions and Dreams
I’ll give to you a box of visions. . . -- Tom Russell, “Box of Visions”
Reviews by John Leech
Visions: The Soul's Path to the Sacred
by Eddie Ensley (Loyola Press of Chicago, 2000)
Eddie Ensley presents an interesting conundrum. The author, like many people, experiences what he interprets as extraordinary insights into a scene beyond dreams. But unlike many people, he experienced brain damage in infancy and childhood. Are his visions still valid? Why not? Either everything is a miracle or nothing is.
Visions, moments when “the human is embraced by the transcendent Other” (von Balthasar), are accessible to everyone. We all see visions; they have a place in our faith-life. This book offers guidance in approaching and responding to visions, showing how to invite them into our lives and incorporate them into our spirituality.
In sixteen chapters, Visions draws together insights from Catholic and Native American traditions, psychology and medical research, and historical studies. Ensley recounts and reflects upon his own and others' personal experiences. He offers us distillations of wisdom, thoughtful meditations, prayers, and practical exercises -- guided visions, writing -- to guide us in learning how to see differently. He explores vision as a healing agent -- in our lives, in our world -- touching on such themes as grief and dying. Finally, he offers an understanding of the place of visions in the larger scheme of spiritual life today.
“We can learn to dream again, to have visions,” Ensley assures us. “We will dream again God's dream.”
Healing Dreams:
Exploring the Dreams That Can Transform Your Life
by Marc Ian Barasch (Riverhead, 2000)
Eddie Ensley's vision is benign, positive, optimistic; Marc Ian Barasch is just open. He confidently expects the universe to conspire in our favor. Healing dreams are faithful guides, and should be followed where they lead. “Big” dreams, as he calls them, give us a new image of someone we love, or deepen our self-understanding. They show dimensions to reality beyond the blandishments of ordinary life.
Drawing on experience and research, Healing Dreams explores such questions as: What do dreams mean? What do they symbolize? What do they want from us?
Barasch offers a new systematic approach to dreamwork, showing how to interpret and appreciate these vivid inner experiences, and allow dreams to transform our work, relationships, health, and spirituality.
Promising integration, acceptance, courage, and wisdom, he provides a map for the adventure, bringing us to a new hope of wholeness.
Lying Awake
by Mark Salzman (Alfred A. Knopf, September 2000)
In this novel by the author of Iron and Silk, Sister John of the Cross, a cloistered Carmelite nun in Los Angeles, enjoys ecstatic visions. They come on the heels of headaches -- migraines says the doctor -- which she sees through to a release into glory. The visions get greater, the headaches worse. A specialist examines her, and after an MRI Sister John is diagnosed with epilepsy and a brain tumor. The visions, it seems, are a byproduct of disease. The tumor is operable. If she gives up her visions, she can live.
Live, for what? for whom? After years of dryness, she has finally been graced. What she wanted she finally has got. And yet, she has been “bought with a price”; is it any longer she who lives? Does the community have a claim on her?
During one vision, her sisters tell her, while she was exclaiming at the beauty and glory of what she saw, what they saw was somebody stumbling, about to crash, a danger to herself. Not so pretty from their point of view. Deftly handled, with not a foot out of place (well, except when footwashing is performed yearly on Good Friday instead of Maundy Thursday), this spare novel evokes with sympathy and insight the strange world of contemplation and devotion. Like The Old Man and the Sea, it is an economical parable, no wasted words, seeming perfection. And the issues it raises -- self and sisterhood, health and disease, accidents and the real substance of devotion -- sustain interest far beyond the cloister.
Of similar interest is Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (1991). This novel, more ornate than Lying Awake, tells the story of Mariette, a young novice in the time of the Little Flower, whose unearned graces are the envy of her sisters in an ascetic convent upstate in New York.
Maurice and Thérèse: The Story of a Love
by Patrick Ahern (Doubleday, 1998)
Ahern traces, through introductory material and recovered correspondence, the spiritual friendship between an all-too-ordinary would-be saint and the young nun he discovers through her letters and prayers. She encourages him and prays for him, not revealing her own physical state but sympathizing with him in all his trials, as he progresses from faltering seminarian to struggling missionary priest. She was dying of tuberculosis; she was the Little Flower.
Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life
by Gregg Michael Levoy (Three Rivers Press, 1997)
This helpful book by Gregg Levoy provides a journalistic, humanistic, personalistic coaching in discernment.
One rainy summer night at Ghost Ranch I took refuge in the library and met the author of this book. At the time I was beginning a journey of spiritual discernment, which continues to this day. I was glad for his guidance then -- as I was interested in making a living as a writer, his book This Business of Writing was the perfect prescription for me.
Describing how others on the journey have found signposts for themselves, Levoy, in Callings, acts as fellow traveler rather than omniscient guide. A variety of techniques is presented without judgment, and some of them may repel as others appeal. Openness to guidance is characteristic of this book, and advice, however strangely proffered, is welcome.
John Leech is a writer and editor. Born in Marin, he grew up and was educated in Belmont, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley, and has worked in the book business and lay ministries. An avid reader of mysteries -- holy and genre -- he lives in the Valley of the Moon. Learn more about John at his website.
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