I know I tell my small story many times over. It is, however, important to re-tell, re-member, re-live, re-love. This process itself re-generates that original connection with the God, both immanent and transcendent, who listened, listens, and re-listens—always—to any and all dreams and hopes.
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The “dream” chats I had as a young child were not childish, nor did they die. We all have such dreams and they can expand and mature and modify themselves into vocations or life paths—even great visions, movements for love or justice, or perhaps happily imperfect marriages and parenthood. Favorite childhood books often provide clues about inmost dreams, heart’s-desires, hopes, and actual futures—all derived from early dream particles.
My childhood dreams were not of being president, or a high-hatted church bishop, or Pope, or even God. All I wanted was to be listened to. It wasn’t an impossible dream like Don Quijote’s. It was just a small girl’s peevish protest at having to play second fiddle for a short time each evening to the primacy of Dad's triangle-shaped martini glass. I couldn’t compete with such omnipotence, so I dreamed simply of an attentive listener.
That’s how I first met God. God, the one on the cloud who listened to all the sounds of Earth according to my own favorite book. That God listened to me, too. That’s how I first learned that I mattered, that listening itself mattered as much as talking, even though I did most of the talking. I still do, and I’m 84!
My listening God, I must add, did nothing at all to make all my little requests come true, according to my expected time table. As I grew up I continued to talk to my listening God and called it prayer. It turned out it was much harder to get the institutional Episcopal Church to listen to my dream-prayers of being a priest of pulpit and altar when I was also the mother of four beloved growing children, than it was to get God to listen. I never stopped my talky prayers, and God kept listening. As the years passed, I too started to listen to God, and seek God’s presence in myself and everywhere. You’d be amazed at how immense God is. I was.
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As to the Martini glass? It disappeared over the years. You get sick of things that make you sick after a while.
As to my focused aspirations? The Episcopal Church, not the church in which I grew up, finally arranged itself to ordain women priests, and then to ordain me priest in 1988, a scant five months before I turned fifty, not my plan but my joy anyway.
As to God? Well, God still listens with care, and, according to me, takes her/his/their own sweet time getting all religions to figure out how to eliminate all those masculine pronouns that simply don’t fit to describe Divinity. I write and pray this dream: that women, all genders, and all ethnicities will be welcomed and included at all levels of institutional functioning. You’d think that by now God would have acted out in wrath at all this torpor, but God doesn’t do such things, even if lots of good people think God does. I knew that by now.
As to listening? It is not an auditory function, it is spiritual—divinely endowed and meant to enliven the collective well-being of all Creation. You listen with your whole being. I try.
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What about God’s own dream? That we all love, respect, listen, and promote the dignity of all humankind as well as the whole created order. Our part is to LISTEN—not agree, assume, persuade, approve, critique, argue, snipe, elect, fight, or shoot. My dream is that we listen with open-mindedness to ourselves and others, even supposed enemies, the insane, the criminal, the rich and the poor alike. I try.
