Not long ago I dreamed that I was at a conference, and had gotten up in the morning and gone to the conference center lobby out of curiosity to see who else was showing up, and realized I hadn't gotten dressed yet, and was only wearing a towel, when I was told by somebody in the lobby that she was very much looking forward to my workshop which was to begin in five minutes.

So I began to scramble, to get back to my room to shower and dress. But getting there was not going to be so easy.

First there was the mud. The hallway had become mired in mud. That turned out to be no problem. Because as I looked at it closely, I saw dry spots where I could step over the mud which opened up like the Red Sea. That was nothing. It was that hole in the wall, and that stairway. In a white wall, there was a small opening, one foot high, through which I would have to pass. And there was a hidden stairway, but the floor did not extend to where the stairway started — it started in open space with no floor beneath it.

And now I remembered that I had locked myself out of my room anyway.

I stared at the little opening. I stared at the stairway. I tried to figure out how to hold the conflicting demands in some kind of useful tension: the demands of the outer world, pictured by the workshop I was supposed to do, where people were waiting for my arrival; and the demands of the inner world, pictured by the impossible passage I was going to have to make.

And I thought, isn't that, as much as anything could be, a picture of our religious life, of our religious community, of our spiritual challenge?

We are always caught between what was, where we were, and can be no more; between that and where we must go, what is to be, but is not yet. The space between is today. It might feel like nowhere, but it is not. It might seem impossible to negotiate this place, but it has a power all its own.

We may feel torn between the demands of our inward life, and our outward life. On the one hand, there is the impossible passage requiring Transformation, which is impossible.

And on the other hand, there are the demands of the outer world. They are waiting for my workshop, in five minutes. And so the tension, the conflict, between the demands of the soul for Transformation, which, annoyingly, never ceases — and hell, we have to go to work, and bring up kids, or if we are kids, do homework, and God knows what else in the course of a day. Oh, I think I have a half hour next Thursday early evening for Transformation. Or — perhaps one hour — sixty carefully counted minutes on Sunday morning.

Transformation. Nothing is static and nothing is just as it seems on the surface. Even some cosmologists are beginning to wonder if even the laws of nature actually evolve and undergo transformation and are not, as everyone always believed and as so many of those old hymns declare, are not changeless.

And this is pictured in our dreams, and the apparently impossible and the evidently unthinkable are demanded of us.

That's the first thing that confronts us. Here is another dream, depicting another transformation. This one isn't mine, but one I found in Frances Wickes' book, The Inner World of Choice.¹

Before me is a wall of molten stones that glow with a sullen orange light. Four giants, born of this same molten stone, tower up from the center of the wall where the stone reddens into a gateway of wicked sullen flame. As I look at the giants, a voice says, "Challenge them!" I shout aloud. At the sound of my voice, the wall, and the four giants who are the towers and pillars of the wall, fall as ash that dissolves into air.

And there is the second discovery, which as often as not, we never get around to making. And that is because those Impossibilities in our lives intimidate us, and we do not hang around them long enough to notice the illusions. But if you can live with the tension and the impossibility awhile, you begin to notice them.

There is something that happens in dreams, and it happens in dreams because it is the truth about our waking lives. The dreamer in Frances Wickes' book tried something. She waited around long enough to hear a voice, which told her to challenge the four giants born of molten stone glowing with sullen orange light. She did. And the illusion was uncovered.

You may want to know if I ever got through the little opening or figured out how to get to the stairs from space. I'm sorry to report that something, likely the alarm clock, woke me up and I didn't get to find out.

But I can promise you this: — all signs pointed to the presence of the gods. The tension was too great, the impossibility too impossible. A day like that is inhabited by gods. They come disguised, you know — the Nordic god Odin came disguised as a fisherman in a hut who patched his boat; the Hindu Hari dwells among peasants as a peasant; and the Greek Apollo lodges with shepherds, and Jesus is born in a barn and his twelve peers are fishermen; and this day of yours, so impossible, so full of contradiction, is inhabited by the gods. Emerson said that every day comes to us as a god, full of demands, full of power.

The very power that resides in the obstacle resides also in you, and that is because the power resides not in you nor in the obstacle, but in the moment. In the transformative passage. That is the realm of the gods.

And in those transformative moments, we are called to confront an obstacle or impossibility, to think what cannot be thought and do what cannot be done and become what we did not know we were, but it was our destiny. There is nowhere in all this universe more charged with divine power. It is the realm of power. It is an invitation to Transformation that calls to us from our deepest souls.

And religious life has to do with the intersection of something beyond, the immensity beyond silence, or God, or whatever you like to call that unfathomable whole of which we are a part — the intersection of that — and life. The intersection of transcendent and nitty-gritty everyday. The intersection between light and darkness, spirit and matter.

We know about light. We know about darkness. Goethe had a theory about them. We think of Goethe as a great literary figure, a poet and a dramatist. But he was also an odd sort of scientist. He wanted more than anything just to observe nature, to read it, to let it speak its meaning to him.

So at the boundary between light and dark, he saw the realm of color, where color comes to be.

As he saw it, there is no color in pure light and no color in pure darkness. Instead he believed that both light and darkness were necessary to call forth color. The coming into being of colors happens in the boundary territory of light and dark. It is the magic of the appearance of something else that wasn't there before. It isn't unlike Carl Jung pointing out that it is in the polarity of opposites that energy is. Or you could say where the Divine is.

When you look into the daytime sky you are looking into the darkness of space, but you are looking through the atmosphere of earth, that is full of light. This lightening of darkness is blue. And if you were to look at the sun, you would look through the dark of space and through the earth's atmosphere, and that darkening of the sun's light would be yellow, orange, and red.

It is where the light and dark intersect that the gods wait to manifest their powers.

There is a medieval religious symbol found in Christian and Buddhist art, called a mandorla, made of two intersecting circles so it looks kind of like an almond. In the middle of these things the artists would place a human figure.

But think of that symbol — formed by the intersection of two circles; the point of conjunction between worlds, the boundary between worlds: a place of almost unendurable conflict and the place where we have to bear the tension. The tension never lets up but if we can stand it, it leads to transformation."

The plain fact is that, in life, we are asked to figure out what Václev Havel has called the art of the impossible.

Usually it has to do with our own being and becoming.

It's as though our being and becoming requires some magic, a power from beyond. But there is another way to look at it that may make more sense.

Our lives are a bearing of tensions, of conflicting, impossible demands. The illimitable engines of Life Itself are manifested in those places where the tension is greatest, where light and dark converge, where the equilibrium is disturbed.

It is like this. It is like the unborn, in that place of comfort and peace, how cozy, and then a disturbance, and this birth canal presents itself

Ridiculous

Can't get through there

And on the other side is our life, unlived until we go there.

Carl Jung said that life comes to us like a confusing labyrinth or like a calculation so complicated we can't figure it out but there's a factor that keeps deciding the calculation in ways that rob us of our human possibility. He wrote, and I quote him,

The x in the calculation is predisposition."²

Our predisposition — our past, our upbringing, the culture of our childhood or education or corporate life — forms the lens by which we see things, often misperceive things. And our past is not the same as our destiny, not the same as the life and meaning that demands to unfold in us. And we are deluded by our predisposition, and we have to be transformed.

You might wonder how it is that you are here. I might wonder how it is that this former fundamentalist kid from a conservative, no, a reactionary town in southern New Jersey happens to be here today. You wanna try to account for that? And I had two choices. Get transformed, or live an inauthentic life.

The annoying thing is that, having undergone transformation, I now get to . . . do it again, and again, and again. And I need some place that understands that, and that is why I am here, more than any other reason, except that destiny or something seems to have put me here, and you, and each of us, and what fools we would be to say we understand fully what is going on, because we don't.

But I am more than I was, and I must be more than I am. And I need you to understand that, and you need me to understand that. How often we lock each other into some kind of changeless stasis. Let us never allow this place to become a force that locks us into our individual pasts. Let this be a community whose pores are open to the divine wind; — where people don't just sit around staying the same — but become.

It is by entering this world of contradictions, and by extending our consciousness of where we are and what we are, that we come to freedom — freedom as Jung defined it. It is a startling definition of freedom. Here it is: "Freedom of will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do."³

That is not the same as predisposition, or upbringing, or whatever, and it is not at all to be understood as the sum total of our past. It is the color that comes into being in this territory where the light and the dark meet, where all these forces and demands of the soul call us into being.

Frances Wickes put it this way: —

The victim who is nailed to his own dead past is crucified on the tree of death, which will never flower into a tree of new life, and the victim is a useless sacrifice to an ancient unchanging image of an untransformed and untransforming god, who has lost the power of creation and recreation.

But that is not to say that the outworn gods and myths of past ages and stages of our evolving consciousness — have no power at all:
The zealots' dreams of conquest,
the notion that it's okay and even necessary to punish and obliterate the infidels who cannot identify with your myth or don't belong to your divinely-chosen tribe —
intelligent people, people who think they're doing right — are still today tragically programmed by these outworn gods and myths, in India and Israel, in Pakistan and Iran, in the fringe religious sects that now seem able to dictate the domestic and the foreign policies of the United States. Oh yes, those untransformed and untransforming gods have not left us, and they still hang around our individual lives and our public life.

But the religious act consists not in returning to ancient dreams,

but in the dreaming.

And religion has served either as a lock on the past, or as an engine of own evolution. Let there be Vision. Let there be those who, quite aware of the world that howls without, dare to live the Vision. Let there be those who, rather than dreaming their lives, rather live their dreams.

There is a sense in which we always face these things utterly alone. But there is an equally urgent sense in which we can be accompanied, need helpers.

And here we are gathered again. For what purpose? To perpetuate an institution? That is a good thing if the institution is fulfilling its mission. And what might that be? To be a place of transformation. A culture of transformation. A place where you will be understood and supported in your passage; and, moreover, where the journey itself is valued highly, where different, and finer, values prevail.

A principle key to the art of the impossible is found simply in the creation and sharing of a climate, or atmosphere. Is this a place where the drama of our own personal transformation, and the resultant transformation of society, is — what?

Expected? silly? normal? laughable? what?

Is it part of the climate and culture here that we think of what we do in our day jobs as possibly a calling; is it part of the climate here that what we do in our involvements here are supposed to lead to growth and personal transformation; is it part of the climate and culture here that it is a good thing to be vulnerable and open — you see, how very greatly we affect each other. Is it a place that embodies something Emerson said: "Never was anything gained by admitting the omnipotence of limitations."⁴

We all have a capacity to project on other people our own shadow, or our own light. And so each of us has the power to create, and is creating, the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being — conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. We do that for each other and in this sense everyone here exerts leadership because everyone here has influence, power to alter the weather.

Have you thought about the accident of our being here?

Now, aware, in this improbable universe
that from some infinitely dense impenetrable plasma
formed just-so
so that there are stars in the sky and life and humans?

And do you, sometimes, lay all this against what goes on in our lives, or doesn't, or might, or should, or whatever? You are in pain, you are disappointed, you are feeling successful, thinking of what might be or you're pretty sure can't be or just confused. You're bearing all this tension. And in the silence —

Can we place ourselves in such communion of silence
that we become aware
of the immensity beyond the silence
that moves in the turmoil and tension and demands of the soul
and that opens out to the deep stream of the human-divine spirit
and awaits there
to call forth all the colors of what we can be
and must be—

In a moment we'll sing our last hymn, but first: — May we be together in silence.

¹ Third edition. Boston: Sigo Press, 1988, p. 244.

² Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works, 7), pp. 47f.

³ "Zarathustra." Seminar notes, privately circulated, and reproduced by Frances Wickes in her The Inner World of Choice, p. 5.

4 The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ronald A. Bosco. Vol. II, p. 336. From Notebook PH.

Readings

Vaclav Havel,

from The Art of the Impossible

[New York: Knopf, 1997, p. 94f.

We all know that our civilization is in danger. . . .

The large paradox at the moment is that man — a great collector of information — is well aware of all this, yet is absolutely incapable of dealing with the danger to himself. Traditional science, with its usual coolness, can describe the different ways we might destroy ourselves, but it cannot offer us truly effective and practicable instructions on how to avert them. There is too much to know; . . . these processes can no longer be fully grasped and understood, let alone contained or halted. Modern man, proud of having used impersonal reason to release a giant genie from its bottle, is now impersonally distressed to find he can't drive it back into the bottle again.

We cannot do it because we cannot step beyond our own shadow. We are trying to deal with what we have unleashed by employing the same means we used to unleash it in the first place. We are looking for new scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems, new institutions, new instruments to eliminate the dreadful consequences of our previous recipes, ideologies, control systems, institutions, and instruments. . . .

What is needed is something different, something larger. Man's attitude toward the world must be radically changed. We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in the hope that sooner or later it will spit out a universal solution.

Only those who are looking for a technical trick to save civilization need feel despair. But those who believe, in all modesty, in the mysterious power of their own human Being, which mediates between them and the mysterious power of the world's Being, have no reason to despair at all.

From the Collected Works of

Carl Gustav Jung: (CW 17 para 299)

What is it in the end, that induces a person to go his/her own way and to rise out of unconscious identify with the mass . . .? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decisions, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extraordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a person to emancipate him/herself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. . . . Vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape . . whispering . . . of new and wonderful paths.

Gather

Every wondrous sight will vanish, 
Every sweet word will fade. 
but do not be disheartened, 
The Source whence they come is eternal. 

Why do you weep? 
That Source is within you, 
And this whole world 
is springing up from it. 

The Source is full, 
its waters are ever-flowing; 
Do not grieve, 
drink your fill, 
Don't think it will ever run dry—
This is the endless Ocean! 

—Rumi

Parting

Words of Walt Whitman

I announce natural persons to arise;

I announce justice triumphant;

I announce uncompromising liberty and equality;

I announce the justification of candor, and the justification of pride.

I announce splendors and majesties to make all

The previous politics of the earth insignificant.

I announce adhesiveness^__I say it shall be limitless, unloosened;

I say you shall yet find the friend you were

Looking for.

I announce a man or woman coming^__perhaps you are the one.

I announce the great individual, fluid as

Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate,

Fully armed.

I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold;

I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully

Meet its translation.

Meditation

Breath of life

Life of all Being

Blaze of clearest light

Creator destroyer

Mystery beyond our naming

It is given to us to share this time and moment

To breathe the spring air and

to think thoughts of days still to come

of beginnings made

and futures all unseen

We are filled up with gratitude

that we should be a part

of the unbroken line

of those who hear your call

and would say Yes

How hard it is to say Yes

In the face of the suffering and fragility

horror and hate

but we would say Yes

And today we lay open to purposes larger than our own

We would hope and struggle

And so we gather

each of us

our individual selves

Gather in awareness

Gather in wondering recognition

of what it is that

moves in the hearts of us

moves in the midst of us

And in this gathered silence

we would know

that

Life and Spirit and Soul of All

that holds us gently as one.

Amen.