Robert Johnson, Joyce Rockwood Hudson: Dreams Again

Robert Johnson, Joyce Rockwood Hudson: Dreams Again

“If we go to that realm (the inner life or unconscious)  consciously, it is by our inner work: our prayers, meditations, dreams work, ceremonies, and Active Imagination. If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.”Robert Johnson, p. 11, Inner Work, Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, Harper&Row 1989.

My spiritual director best helps me and others connect with God through dreams. Dreams are certainly one way that God, the dream maker, speaks to us. Working with our dreams is like studying a new language. It is the symbolic language of the unconscious. We connect to the unconscious with dreams, imagination, and incidents of synchronicity or coincidences or serendipity.

We study our dreams learning about personal symbols that may be specific to us like sea and trees for me. There are collective symbols which may be universal, such as water representing the unconscious, light being our consciousness, a child being the creative part of us, animals representing instincts, vehicles representing energy or how we get along with a car representing our independent energy and buses, planes, trains being collective energy.

Dreams also speak in the language of mythology, fairytales, religious rituals, music.

Consider learning about dream work as a spiritual practice. Join a dream group, for the gold in dreams can be so much richer with the help of others. Two books to start with to learn more about dream work are Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. by Jungian analyst, Robert Johnson, and Natural Spirituality: A Handbook for Jungian Inner Work in Spiritual Community by Joyce Rockwood Hudson. Both are also good books to read together in a group.

If this spiritual discipline interests you, just start by keeping an electronic or old fashion notebook by your bed and write down your dreams as soon as you awaken, and see what happens!

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Waiting for God

Waiting for God

“O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,

My eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But, I have calmed and quieted my soul,

Like a weaned child with its mother;

My soul is like the weaned child that is with me.”

Psalm 131

I remember a recent Sunday when I came to early church with all the concerns of the day and the present week and the past week. I am not playing the harp because I am having difficulty putting in two new strings that have recently broken. It was the first meeting for discernment for the Daughters of the King at St. Mark’s. We have a wellness forum during the adult formation hour that I have been working on. There are some pages missing in the Eucharistic Prayer for the next service in the Altar Book. I decide to go and sit at the back of the church and try to quiet the busyness about these concerns and more. The church is absolutely quiet. The short green season hangings are more calming and simplistic with a hint of the ornamental. The candles are lighted and flickering. The spring flowers are in honor of the mother of a friend.

I am in a beautiful place built to bring us closer to God, but my head is still a mess. How can I see or taste a glimpse of the holy before the service starts? Must I wait for some moment during the liturgy, at the scripture, in the prayers, the sermon, the music, the Eucharist? I pray for guidance, actually for help. The message comes. Start intercessory prayers. You have not said your private prayers this morning before church. Too busy. I start praying for those I am committed to pray for each day. If I know them, I imagine them with Jesus. Almost immediately, I feel that peace that passes understanding, a calm.

Time after time this is my experience. I begin to know a peace whenever I can get out of myself and my world and my concerns and send love to my neighbor by visiting, calling, writing, serving or a multitude of other ways, but especially in intercessory prayer. I rarely know how these prayers affect those I pray for, but with each prayer, my mind and my body also take my heart to find Jesus as I try to connect others to that healing love.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Kayla Mueller: God in Suffering

Kayla Mueller: God in suffering

“I will always seek God. Some people find God in church. Some people find God in nature. Some people find God in love; I find God in suffering. I've known for some time what my life's work is, using my hands as tools to relieve suffering.”

Kayla Mueller (1988­–2015) letter to her father on his birthday 2011. Synthesis, Today Quote June 28, 2018 synthesispub.com.

Kayla Mueller was a twenty-six-year-old Christian human rights activist and aid worker from Arizona who was taken captive by ISSIS in 2013 in Aleppo, Syria, after leaving a Doctors Without Borders Hospitals. Kayla had been involved in the United States with Food not Bombs, in India with Tibetan refugees, in Israel with African refugees, and in Turkey assisting Syrian refugees. She died in captivity in 2015 after being a hostage for 18 months and subjected by all reports to torture and sexual abuse.

Many have called her “the best of America” and the “best of the millennials.” Those who escaped who knew her in captivity when she was subjected to great suffering would agree. She certainly should be considered a present-day martyr, even trying to relieve the suffering of others who were imprisoned with her. She refused to escape with another young Yazidi girls, telling her, “No, because I am American. If I escape with you, they will do everything to find us again.”

God promises to be with us in suffering. We see many who suffer who seem to sense God’s presence with them while others talk of being estranged or abandoned by God. Our world so desperately needs more people like Kayla who have the gift of seeing God in suffering. I think we can do this by showing God’s love more in actions than words as we care for and let those who suffer know they are loved. In time, those who suffer and feel they have lost God may see God in this neighbor. Then in time they may even see God in themselves again, the God within them. This indeed is our ministry as spiritual friends to each other.

Some of us may not have the overpowering courage and selfless gift of empathy of Kayla, but there are so many ways to let others who are suffering know they are loved. We can sit and listen. We can help with daily tasks that their suffering keeps them from doing. We can visit. We can call. We can volunteer. We can hug. We can read to them. We can feed the hungry. We can be aware of and reach out to and support those who are sick, lonely, poor, weak, homeless. So much more.

Joanna joannaseibert.com