Church dreams

I occasionally dream about church. I mean literal in-the-night-while-I’m-sleeping dreams. Dream experts say we all dream in our sleep, quite a lot actually. But we don’t always remember what we dream, so maybe I’m actually dreaming about church all the time. Most of my church dreams are pleasant, but not all of them.

In the pleasant church dreams I’m usually a worshipper, not a worship leader. I recall dreams in which I was in the balcony of some sanctuary, often a beautiful amalgam of sanctuaries I’ve known. These dreams are populated with magnificent choirs, grand (and sometimes bizarre) processions and lovely – though usually unremembered – words. Maybe these dreams are sleep-peeks into heaven.

On the other hand, in my unpleasant church dreams, I’m always the worship leader, usually the preacher. I have these unpleasant church dreams with some regularity. They’re not terrifying – hardly nightmares – but they are anxious, often very anxious.

They’re most always classic can’t-get-ready-in-time dreams. Experts say that such dreams are common. In my can’t-get-ready-in-time dreams, the service is about to start and I can’t find my sermon manuscript or I just can’t seem to get my pulpit robe on. I recently had one in which I couldn’t find my office in a strange church building, an elusive study where I knew the sermon I was to preach was laying on the desk. I finally got to it through a trap door in the floor – but not in time, of course. I’m confident that I’m not the only preacher (or lawyer, or mother, or organist, or pipefitter) who has such anxious can’t-get-ready-in-time dreams. I like to think we have these dreams because we care so much.

I care because I’m persuaded that what I do as a worship leader, preacher and pastor matters enough that I should be something akin to “anxious” about it. I should be a bit anxious – at least some of the time – simply because I do so care. But I also know that such anxiety about what I do professionally, work I’m tempted to think so mortally important, can easily wax into a deadly – even ungodly – vanity.

I have long found a balancing wisdom in the enigmatic little prayer offered in “Ash Wednesday” by T.S. Eliot, “Teach us to care and not to care.” This nuanced appreciation of one’s work – important, but never ultimately so – falls on my ears as liberatingly good news. On the one hand, it encourages me to be fittingly “anxious” about what I do – work I’m convinced makes a difference. On the other, it frees me from the vain and crushing burden of imagining that everything depends on me and what I do.

Karl Barth once imagined himself dying and entering heaven, his life’s writings piled in a wheelbarrow he’s pushing through heaven’s gates. The angels who greet him laugh at the sight. “In heaven,” Barth writes, “we shall know all that is necessary, and we shall not have to write on paper or read more … . Indeed, I shall be able to dump even the ‘Church Dogmatics,’ over the growth of which the angels have long been amazed, on some heavenly floor as a pile of waste paper.”

Barth knew his work mattered. He’d not have given himself to it with such passion had he not believed in its importance. But for all he poured into it, Barth knew that even though it mattered immensely, even though it was indeed worthy of some anxiety, it was – in the end – nothing set next to the eternal truth and unspeakable love of God. “Teach us to care and not to care.” I’ve come to laugh at my anxious church dreams. I receive them as nocturnal reminders to care, but not to take myself too seriously.