Of Tidal Waves and Ancient Texts
“What flower save the lotus knows the waters and the sun?
What heart save the lotus heart shall know both earth and sky?
Behold my love, the golden flower that floats ‘twixt deep and high
Even as you and I float betwixt a love that has for ever been
And shall for ever be
In Nazareth there lives a Poet, and His heart is like the lotus.
He has visited the soul of a woman,
He knows her thirst growing out of the waters,
And her hunger for the sun, though all her lips are fed.
They say He walks in Galilee
I say He is rowing with us.”
It would be an easy thing for me to get self-conscious about speaking out what I know, what I am learning, what I am hearing. There are a lot of complicated reasons for this, and some simple reasons too. But mostly its because I grew up in a culture where people who ‘heard from God’ were either revered to the point of idolatry, or in the locked ward of the psych hospital.
I am not interested in being either of those things. I am, however, interested in being a clear mirror, through which what needs to be seen can be reflected clearly, without the interference of my agenda, ego, hopes, desires, fears or brokenness getting in the way. I realise intent and outcome are not always aligned, but at some point I just have to stop worrying about ‘what ifs’ and press on.
This is one of those moments.
I hear from Spirit on the regular, in a variety of different formats. Why this is the case is anyone’s guess. I’m no more special than the next person. I have lived an interesting life, to be sure, but it has been deeply pockmarked with horrendous failure, laziness, arrogance, ego, fear and vanity. My many shortcomings always leave me sure that Spirit will move on to someone more deserving of revelation. But to my horror, it seems like the more I fuck it all up, the more deeply I am torn open to feel and hear and know the Divine at levels I didn’t even know were available to me.
This used to shock me, though it doesn’t anymore. It has become as familiar and comfy as my slippers.
My life has been full of failure and sorrow, but it has also been underscored with a quiet belonging, an assurance that no matter how hard I try and wriggle out of her grip, that Divine holds me fast next to her heartbeat. I know this heartbeat now, as intimately as I know the shape of my own fingernails, or the sound of my truck engine in second gear, or the smell of my little boy’s head after he comes out of the ocean on a hot summer day. I live in a space where I have to accept all of these apparent contradictions and carry on, because there isn’t any more time left for navel gazing. The energy right now has an urgency to it, can you feel it? Impending closure, celebration, the ending of toxic and painful cycles, rebirth. Its like, as a collective, we are in the delivery suite now – at once the agent of the birthing act, the witness to it and the active participant in it. In the spirit of the urgency of birth, the impending, unstoppable nature of it, I must just get on with saying what I have to say and stop attempting to qualify myself as the messenger. This will either resonate with you, or it won’t.
Either way, its none of my business.
“I dream every night. You do too, even if you don’t remember it. ”
Some of the dreams I am given are just for me. They are private conversations between my higher self and Divine, and their richness is for my own nourishment, growth and healing. I have been taken into territory in these dreams which is so wild and fantastic that it is beyond language. Occasionally, one of my friends and I will share the same dream. Or be in the dream with each other, seeing it from varying perspectives. These dreams are endlessly fascinating to me.
Extremely rarely, I am given a dream and instructed to share it. Either with a person, or a group of people. In this instance, I’ve been instructed to write about it here. I suspect it is because it is a parable-like dream, which shouldn’t really surprise me as much as it does, perhaps. We are in a time of a grand awakening, and many sensitive people who have lived at the pointiest end of life at one juncture or another, are ringing like bells with the same messages. Scales are falling from our collective eyes as the beast of Empire in all its abhorrent forms lies in its death throws – still deadly, in the way a shark lying on the deck of a boat could still take a leg off, but out of its own element permanently now, never to return. I see it sometimes like the tail of a giant dragon, twitching erratically as the life-force of ancient reptilian energy begins to fade with death, shutting it down slowly from the inside out.
In this particular dream from two nights ago, I am standing in a giant library. The dark wooden shelves are full of orderly rows of dusty old theological texts. Rows upon rows of doctrine, discourse and dissertation on the many minutiae available to the brilliant mind of the scholar who lives in relentless curiosity and in service to Divine truth and revelation. Leather-bound, with gold inlay and regal fonts. Many illustrated with sacred images, written by important people who have made important contributions to the world of religious thought.
In this library, I am not alone. I am surrounded by some of the key women who have been my friends since the days when I was still a pastor’s wife. Since the days when I was still employed at a Seminary, writing curriculum, teaching and studying and preaching in churches on weekends. In the days when I was doing everything I thought I was supposed to be doing, even when it didn’t resonate with the ferocity of my soul’s Longings, or the depth of my Knowing, or my thirst for Something More.
In my dream, my friends’ eyes are shut, and they are kneeling, or bent at the waist standing or sitting at various places around the library we are all in – and they are deeply concentrating in prayer. Through their closed eyelids, tears are leaking. And as I look closely, I realise they are praying for me, for my lost soul. They are weeping because they think I have forgotten what the books on the shelves say, that I have turned away from their pages and forsaken tradition, wisdom and ancient knowledge held in ancient holy-texts. While they cry and their mouths move silently forming words in prayer, I look on, confused, wondering how they can keep their balance with their eyes shut tight, against the powerful energy which is swirling the room, bending the walls and floor with resonance, with wonder, with shimmering iridescent light. I have begun to float in it, feet off the floor, tilting wildly like an astronaut in space laughably out of place in the midst of a carefully curated theological library.
It is then that I recognise with a stomach-dropping horror, that they can’t feel it, the thrumming in the room filling it with swirling colour and music and Presence. It takes me a minute to understand that they are appealing in prayer to these books, petitioning cold, dead words on a page, and not the Presence of powerful and sentient Life-Force which is now consuming every square inch of the library.
In this same moment, several things happen at once.
Firstly, the energy prepares to shift. I feel it, intuitively, and am shown by Spirit an impending tidal wave which is coming, about to break open upon the walls and the ceiling of the library. Immediately I start waving my arms wildly as I float through the energy currents, yelling to my friends, telling them to run, to prepare to swim, to open their eyes and see that a torrent of mighty water is about to break into their prayer time and swallow them whole.
Either they can’t hear me, or won’t, or I’m not saying it right. Because they don’t stop weeping and praying quietly, not even for a second. Knees bolted to the floor, hands clasped together. One of them, without opening her eyes or looking at me, reaches out to me, grabs my forearm and tries to hold onto me tightly and co-opt me into repentance but I can’t repent when I’m floating like an energy-astronaut in shifting golden fractals of light and resonance. I drift out of her grasp frustrated that she can’t hear me, won’t open her eyes and see what is happening around her. .
The next thing that happens is that I see the tidal wave coming is being brought about by Divine design – it is not an accident or a cataclysmic horror to be braced against, but an overwhelming ocean-swell of blessing. It is beauty and restoration and healing and Divine energy, more than can be contained in an entire sea. It is gracious overflow, coming to cleanse and clean and quench deep thirsts like the one I have come to know as my own thirst for Something More. My heart starts to race with delight and anticipation and joy, as I realise that this is what I have waited for my whole life.
My shouts of warning turn to shouts of joy.
“Look up! Can’t you feel it? God is coming! God is in the water! Not in those old books! He is on his way in! She is showing herself to us like a giant tidal wave! Don’t be scared, hold on and enjoy the ride! Its going to be amazing! Stop crying, open your eyes! I’m fine, you’re fine, we are all going to be saved by this flood of desire and fulfillment, of goodness and grace!”
It is like I am pounding on a giant steel door, completely sound-proof. They still can’t hear me, their faces still wet with their tears of grief for my lost soul, their mouths still moving in silent petition to the leather-bound gods of doctrine and dogma. In that horrible moment, I am shown that they will not see the coming wave as a blessing, but as a drowning. I understand that while I will embrace it as a baptism, and drink it in deeply and be nourished and thrilled in equal measure, they are about to get washed away without warning. It is too late to think or feel anything more as the wave crashes through the roof with an almighty roar, a cacophony of delight and destruction in equal measure, collapsing the shelves of books and dissolving the words on pages as they float and swirl in the shimmering blue. I’m swimming alone, at times breathing effortlessly underwater like some kind of new-age mermaid, at other times floating on the iridescent surface and watching with horror and shock as my friends drift through the water below me through the remains of what used to be a library. Their hands are still clasped in prayer even in watery death, their hair wafting like seaweed in the cold water, their tears of petition for my sinful soul washed away by this tidal wave which has broken over them and rendered their lungs useless.
I wake up still in the dream state, filled with sorrow and the profound grief that comes with realising my friends drowned in my dream because they were so busy in pious devotion, praying for my sinful soul, that they could not feel the move of God when it came. I sit in grief that they who had lived faithful, sinless, perfect lives could not sense the power and energy in the room with the pure and unadulterated power of the Spirit of God, whilst my wild and wayward prodigal self not only survived the tidal wave, but saw it coming ahead of time and was prepared to let it take me with it, allow it to permanently transform, nourish and support me. It doesn’t seem fair. None of it. And I am tied to them by a powerful love which transcends time and space and won’t let me off the hook. I can’t find a singular view of this scene, I am forced to see it from every angle simultaneously and so I am not allowed a unified response of either relief, or grief, or joy or horror or thrilling excitement.
I am cracked open to feel all of them at once and it is too much, it is always too much.
I lie in the flickering dawn light taking all this in, letting it settle deep into my heart space as I allow room for wonder and exploration. I hold the dream like a stone in my hand. Putting it in my pocket as I pry my tired body up out of the bed and shuffle sleepily to the kitchen to tend to the kids, brew coffee, kiss my baby nephew who is gurgling away happily in his highchair in the middle of the last breakfast we will have in this bright yellow kitchen of the holiday home I’ve rented with my sister.
The dream is still sitting in my pocket as I drive home along the winding country roads, bikes strapped to the back of my truck, kids sun-weary and zoned out to screens with headphones on. In the blissful quiet of the long road-trip, I ponder the dream some more.
I am remembering the way the water felt like soft silk on my skin, when I had expected it to hit with a blast of painful cold. I remember watching the last bubbles drifting up from my friends lips as she floated in the deep water, and feeling a sense of helplessness and rage that I couldn’t save her, that she hadn’t even heard me shouting a warning at her while she wept for me. I am still thinking about the pattern the books made floating strewn open in the water when I pull into my driveway.
The horror hits me the minute I open the door.
Christmas presents unwrapped under the quiet tree, paper strewn all over the room. Glass smashed, wind blowing through the hole in the sliding door which had been left askew by the burglars who have come and gone whilst I was away, and ransacked my house. Every drawer and cupboard in the house open, filing cabinet upturned on the ground, loose papers blowing under the dining room table. My heart stops in my throat, as I take in the violent detritus of my trashed Christmas-ready home.
Next comes all the things that one does in such moments. Police reports, forensic investigators, repairs to the back door. I am surrounded by love and support and friends whilst I manage all of this and the dream is parked firmly in the back of my waking subconscious whilst I vacuum up shattered glass, put all the clothes back in the drawers, answer questions, wipe down surfaces, tuck belongings safely back into their cupboards, take stock of what has been taken, what has been left.
It is not until much later, curled up into my giant bed with both my sleeping boys, too terrified to be in their own rooms for the night, that I start to ponder that the only things of value which were taken were two of my three passports. I have triple citizenship, Canadian, American and Australian. My clear plastic pocket full of my identity documents and citizenship papers seemed to be the target of the thief’s efforts. My US and Canadian passports are missing, my Australian one left behind. I am lying awake pondering this, thinking about identity theft and how the black market works, when I get a text message from my oldest friend who lives on the other side of the world, in Canada.
Its been a long time since we’ve spoken, months.
“Are you ok?!?” her text message starts out.
“I had the weirdest dream about us…we were young again, and my clothes were all soaking wet.”