The remaindered life

WE wonder rather
what our life is like!
Is anyone taking the slightest bit of notice!
or have we passed into the area that no one could care less





It is a problem that clergy, and other caring professionals face every day
who even cares about  what we say or do?

Personally it worries me a little that I am so easily discarded
I presume to think that I have quite a lot of important input to offer into the human condition.
Things like ......death is important.......kids must not be sacrificed......don't allow political  correctness to tells us that... this or that....is not important

I now have a  granddaughter....and to my mind she is the MOST important thing in the world
I think most, if not ALL, grandparents get this

More important  than my children (much as I love them),
more important than World Politics,
and more significant than theology, philosophy and any of the serious academic pursuits
If we don't get it right for our kids and grandkids
then we have most likely lost the plot!

I don't fully understand  this...but I know it to be true.

She (and her ilk) must be the focus of the world


The fact that many of us have the same reflexion is pretty great.
Our grandchildren are more important than anything


This might just save the world that is hell-bent on self-destruction

Dream a little dream!

I dreamed a dream last night of one of my parishioner's mothers who died in December. It was decidedly comforting...but what am I to make of it. M was at the former Diocesan Retreat House...and I was relieved to see her there. In life she had always been a great supporter; at times when (inevitably) I felt under siege there was always a certain type of parishioner who would remain loyal. M was one such.
I have had wild dreams during the last couple of weeks some have been bizarre and filled with fear, last night M reassured me with the prayer of Mother Julian...all shall be well and all shallk be well and all manner of things shall be well

Dream a littler dream!

Those of you in the know may be surprised to learn that today I gave away my dream therapy. At least in the short term.
As I read back through the posts tagged "dream" (here) I warn myself that giving away therapy/introspection; is always tricky because it may be happening at a time when things are just hotting up. I don't think this is the case; but H, the therapist, is suspicious.
Part of my problem is that I always think I am having a watershed experience, or that I am about to ultimately clarify my thinking. Despite the fact that I have shifted a lot of stuff in dreams, maybe I am just shuffling deckchairs.
So I am taking a little time to step back.
Maybe I will see that the 'ultimate revelation' was there under my nose all the timeQ

Putting together the broken kite

In the way that you (I) do I had a strange dream last night about trying to put together a broken kite. It was in the midst of a meeting in which I was telling everyone how to solve their problems! These people came to get their kite fixed, but I couldn't even work out how it was supposed to go together, whether we had enough parts; and all the time it was soaking up more and more time from my precious meeting!
Seems pretty straightforward to me!

Things that go bump in the night

It has been a funny old week with many disturbing things. They vary in quality, some seem serious, some seem ho-hum, some are depressing. I can do things about some of them and nothing about others. It all leaves me feeling just a little dazed about what is going on in my life.

• Sunday was my first Sunday back, everything went OK. Sometimes with a longish break your drop the rhythm and its hard work just leading worship. It wasn't so this week. Maybe that's good and maybe that's bad. It rather reminds me of the cartoon of the old woman shaking the priest's hand at the door of the Church, after one of a the new style of services (so typical of the 60s and 70s) had not gone particularly well. "Don't worry Vicar, " she said, "we'll soon be rattling all the new words off without a thought!"
• We also had a little administrative meeting after church and I came away feeling ambushed about discussions that had obviously taken place while I had been away and no one had bothered to tell me about them. The actual content didn't bother me so much, but I was left with a sense of little concern for me and my feelings.
• The weather has been dark and cold, and I was very conscious that last year this took a toll on my mental outlook. I cannot wait for it to end, but there is weeks to go.
• All this Aboriginal stuff is horrible. I feel for those communities that are so vulnerable to government whim and posturing in order to gain electoral advantage
• I was deeply disturbed after Spiritual Direction this week. I came away with a feeling that I had made no connection at all with my Director. And I wanted to go back and say "This can't go on!" and yet the thought of having to find someone else is too much to bear. The irony is that (as those who know about Direction will testify) that such a strong response inevitable means some powerful sort of movement within.
• Despite my previous bemoanings that my dream analysis has been pretty lacklustre, I have really been having a series of dreams which have quite disturbed me.
• I was more than a little spooked by the Religion Report this week (here) An awful story of alleged systematic child abuse within a 'respectable' religious order, where almost all of the serving brothers have had allegations brought against them. I am not involved. I don't know any of the people. But it has saddened me greatly. Perhaps it confronts an overly idealistic vision of the religious life, which the world sees through all too readily but which I have clung on to. What if, as the fiercest critics say, it is all just a sham and a cover for evil and neurosis? A case could be made.
• Yesterday, I saw my 89 year old friend. In the process of great decline. He is sad and depressed and will die sometime. His spirit is almost defeated. His body is packing up. His active mind is understimulated. There was little I could do or say to address any of this.
• This morning in my prayers I realised how fed up I am of all this.How angry with the God who seems to be playing "Yes Minister" with me!...yes this is what I call the Appleby effect. . I have noted it before when I have watched.. as I have this week.... ten episodes of that hilarious but bitterly cynical show which I got on DVD for my birthday
  

I am prepared to admit that all this might have some greater meaning...but enough is enough!!

Dream a little dream

I had a conversation last week with a colleague about CG Jung (the psychoanlayst some would say the PSYCHO analyst). In his refreshingly blunt way W said...."The trouble with Jung it's all crap isn't it?" [Does one expect more of a PhD than "it's all crap"] I tend to respect his point of view as it's likely that even in areas where I am quite well read he is likely to be better and more extensively read and to have synthesised it better (in fact Yes! I hate him for being so smart!).
But I think he is probably wrong.
The trouble with Jung, I suggest, is that he has been picked up by so many New Age wierdos that it looks like Jung is whacko himself. In fact I think he is more seriously scientific than that.
His writing and life's work extend well into the modern era, which makes him rather different than Freud who died just as the Second War was breaking out. So while Freud seems like psychology (rather like Darwin is foundational biology) from which we have moved on, we are still enaging with Jung as someone who continued to adapt and change, and that change has continued for good and ill as the work of others, some of whom have hung their whacko work on Jung's shingle to give themselves a respectability which they otherwise would not have.
Maybe I am one such!

My present round of reading and study is about Jung's understanding of personality and the process of the maturing psyche, about self-awareness and the process of growth that he calls individuation.
Part of his way of looking at things focusses on dreams. Not so much the interpretation of dreams (as the whackos want to have us believe) as the understanding of our dreaming.
He has certain key principles (which I won't bore you with here) and there is an encouragement to record your dreams and review them, in order to try and discern what they reflect about our lives.
As people we are fascinated by dreams, they just have that mystery about them which is enough to suck us in to believing that they may be bigger than they are.
This is where we might be invited to get (as W puts it) sucked in by the crap. Not all dreams are of the calibre of the sort Joseph and Daniel interpret in Holy Writ.
But as with life maybe our ordinary dreams are as important as the extraordinary, if not more important because they are ordinary.
Any way, I finding it helpful at the moment to try and record the dreams I have.
I struggle a bit with how far I create dreams so that I have dreams to record...Catch 22...but I am like that.
The question for me as I encounter Self (Jung suggests that Self with a capital S is not God, but that part of us which knows God...that seems to me a tantalising idea) is how does this invite me to be more free....which is what individuation is about

The detours of our lives

Yesterday we detoured, got lost, reminisced and all in all had a jolly nice day. We ended up in Kendal which used to be in Westmorland (which no longer exists) but is now a part of Cumbria which now takes in all of what was Cumberland where I grew up, Westmorland and part of Northern Lancashire.
Any way Kendal is famous for Kendal Mint Cake as every hiker will tell you an absolute must when hiking in England's Lake District.
Removing the wrapper immediately I thought it didn't have the same sharp white colour I remembered as a child. There was a certain inspidity about it, the taste was OK. But a lot sweeter than I remembered.
Sue grinned and bore it. The eating of ethnic food is always a trial to those who have not grown up with it! And we Australians forget that there is is as much disgusting English ethnic food as there is Sauerkraut in Germany, frog's legs in France or dogs in Korea.
There is of course brawn, made from pig's head, black pudding made from pig's blood...and of course sausages are just an excuse to eat anything that you shouldn't really eat!
Many times I have found that the fond memories of the food of my childhood have been tempered by the fact that we now eat next to no animal fat if we can avoid it, our children have never known vegetables cooked with a handful of salt. And everything these days has a quarter of the sugar it had in the 50s.
This I think was the Kendal Mint Cake shock, it had the sugar content of my childhood rather than the plastic content of today.
Food is an interesting example of our distorted memory, but perhaps not the important one (We often seem to trivialise ethnicity back to food and music and dancing...when really it is about the ways people relate to each other).
So one has to be careful talking to family you haven't seen for decades, or to whom you are genetically connected but with whom you have little or no shared experience. I watched my cousin wince as my wife deflated an image of one of my closer relatives...did he really want to know what she was actually like or did he prefer the sharp taste and stark colour contrast of childhood.
It's good stuff, as we make these detours into our dreams. But we are reminded by Yeats:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

All you ever do

A previous post would have revealed to you that I am undertaking a course for my Master's degree in Jungian psychology. Jung's major focus on being in touch with the unconscious is an interesting idea and fruitful (I find) for personal growth and development.
But I did find when I started to look at this last year and to note my dreams that I became much more aware of the dreaming that I do. Indeed one thing I was concerned about was that in providing this framework of the revelatory dream: was I beginning to exaggerate this whole process.
Seeing, as it were, dreams everywhere;was I seeing too much?
Well it's started to happen again!
One interesting thing to note is that when dreams are viewed (albeit as sources of rich treasure) rather matter of factly, or routinely as the unfolding of the unconscious they lose some of their terror. One can well understand why the ancients did indeed find dreams o'erwhelming, though I was struck (as I often am about him) when thinking about Joseph yesterday (St Joseph's Day) how remarkably measured a man he presents himself to be . And he was a prolific dreamer. There is a real sense in the narrative that dreaming kept him in touch with himself. When we first encounter him(Matt 1:18-21) he is in deep poo! This happens to him over and over again, (we all have periods like that I suppose...I certainly have).
It is the dreaming that seems to release him to act freely and creatively.
I feel aghast that I have tended to dismiss or ignore this point for most of my life.
So I am trying to be a little more in touch. Try noting your dreams down for a week. See if you find it illuminating, alarming...godly, human.