Dreaming our faith

DREAMS are an unavoidable part of our life. There are good

dreams and bad ones and nightmares. There are those that give us good

and restful sleep, and those that leave us quite wrecked.

  

            There are those that are a product of our own desires and

effort, and there also are those that simply come to us from

mysterious causes. As persons who strive to be in control of our own

lives, we should always try to train ourselves to dream well. We

should little by little distance ourselves from being at the mercy of

the inexplicable causes of dreams and start to shape and direct our

dreams.

  

            This can happen if we learn to dream our faith. Our

Christian faith is actually the richest and the happiest dream

material since it gives us the whole picture of our life, not only of

the here and now but also and most especially of the hereafter.

  

            Dreams actually expand our world, and stretch our

consciousness, enabling us to enter not only into far distances or

into the past and the future, but also into the spiritual and

supernatural world. They not only recall or project personal events

and experiences but also give us a share of the experiences of others.

  

            Dreaming our faith is not dreaming fantasies which we

should try to avoid and prevent, if we can. Nowadays, this distinction

is very important to realize, since we are aware that we often are

carried away by the many false and deceiving charms of our own

discoveries and inventions. We don’t realize that they also come from

God and should be used according to God’s plans and never just on our

own whims and caprices.

  

            On the contrary, dreaming our faith is projecting before

us the ultimate reality of things, where all the loose ends of the

things we don’t quite understand in this life are properly resolved.

Dreaming our faith will give us the proper perspective that would give

the proper meaning and context to every event, good or bad, in our

life.

  

            We should do all so that our dreams be dreams of faith.

When we dream our faith, we can be sure that our dreams will happily

fall short, since our faith gives us much more than what we can dream

of.

  

            So, we have to learn to dream and dream. This is the ideal

for us. St. Augustine described this truth in this way: “The entire

life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire.” A

holy desire can be interpreted as a holy dream.

  

            He said that since we don’t see heaven now and yet long

for it, we need to keep on desiring or dreaming to prepare ourselves

for it. That dream not only has to be maintained. It also has to grow

as time passes. The time of our life, the time of waiting to see our

ultimate end, God, is a time to cultivate our holy dream to the max.

  

            We will soon see that this practice of dreaming our faith

will give us true joy and peace that in turn will help us to work for

God and for others better. Dreaming our faith will make us persons who

are always on the move. There will never be a dull moment because our

dreams of faith will convert our ordinary daily events into exciting

adventures.