Monastery of Christ in the Desert
Abiquiu, NM
Dream 03.25.2003:
“I will never let you fall,” Jesus says to me. He’s sitting on one of the walls along the corridor leading to the monastery's library. With these words the scene changes and we are now standing trailside on a steep mountain incline. A beleaguered man is climbing this mountain, carrying an impossibly heavy stone cradled in his arms. The stone is one cubit long and a half cubit deep; it is so heavy that with each step he has to let the stone fall to the ground. He rests a moment before picking it back up again. With each step he takes, he repeats a long, complicated mantra. Toiling, sweating, laboring under the weight of all this, when the man finally reaches the top of the mountain, he finds he is at the edge of a deep precipice. The weight of the stone he’s carrying pulls him over and down into the abyss below. All that for naught.
I turn to embrace Jesus, recognizing him as my Beloved. As I wrap my arms around him in gratitude for the lesson he has just revealed to me, his body transforms into one of the pillars along a corridor of the monastery, so I am actually clinging to him as my support by embracing the monastery, or perhaps monastic life.
People, even monks, walk by and see me holding fast to this wooden column, holding onto it amorously, and they don’t know what to think. Their puzzled expressions give away their confusion.
Now Jesus and I are walking to a wooden gate. It is the gate leading out of the guesthouse where I am staying. As I swing the gate open for Jesus, I say something of a mystical nature about being “out of time,” a double entendre suggesting that our visit, which is taking place outside of time, is now over. Jesus smiles, he gets my joke, but he responds by teaching me that time is just one of many rooms, and when he steps out of time he is not so much leaving me as he is entering another dimension alongside this one and relating with me from there.
I exit the guesthouse, following Jesus through the gate; though he is no longer visible his presence is with me as I navigate the physical world.
We arrive at a cliff's edge overlooking a wide, deep pit. This is the abyss into which the man carrying the stone fell earlier. It’s not a burning lake of fire but an impossibly deep quarry. Looking down into this pit, I can see that there is no hope of escape without intervention of some kind, be it a rope, a skilled guide, or grace.
In the pit there are throngs of people being entertained by a bizarre kind of children’s TV cowboy character. He’s dressed up in chaps, a bandana, and a wide brimmed hat, and as he swings his lasso in the air above his head, he says again and again, “Send me boys! I want boys!” Apparently this is a call for recruits of some kind, and war is implied. When he rides in my direction, I see he looks confused, deluded, and even comical. But the strangest thing is that this cowboy has no legs. His costume and his body both terminate in an obscenely large vagina. I am amazed to see that the cowboy is holding onto the phallic-shaped horn of the saddle with his vagina. This speaks to me of the fallacy of cocksure machismo, which is neither masculine nor secure.
Jesus takes me to Beverly Hills now where I am feeling at ease in the home of some old college old friends. There’s a big party going on, people are laughing, splashing and frolicking in the illuminated pool. It’s nighttime. A soothing masculine voice is singing a hauntingly beautiful melody, and the lyrics celebrate the charms of a buxom woman named Inga Binga. Mikal, my old college friend, is strumming his guitar and singing to a curvaceous blonde woman in the pool. His legs dangle in the water at poolside, his dreamy eyes gazing imploringly at Inga Binga. Mikal’s voice is soft and warm, sultry as Joao Gilberto's. I take a moment and study this man. I realize and remember how much I have always cared for him. I love him. He was once my closest friend.
I speculate how beautifully our two voices would blend if we were to sing together and wonder if it’s worthwhile to propose this to him.
Mikal has put down his guitar and is by my side now. I am hoping to talk to him about my proposal, my desire to sing beautiful songs together. As wandering troubadours we would travel the world together singing songs of spiritual love and longing. But Mikal isn’t listening. Or he is listening but not really entertaining my proposal. Instead, from right in the middle of his house in Beverly Hills he opens a wooden gate and steps into the monastery. Standing in the threshold of the monastery Mikal turns to face me. Very matter-of-factly, yet sweetly, he says, “Look at my feet and take a picture. You’ll never see them again.” Mikal closes the monastery gate and is gone.
I am back at the monastery, too, and it is midday. The atmosphere is deeply peaceful. The open sky is an expanse of high fingerlike clouds accenting the infinite blue. The monks all around me are busy with their daily activities, the candle making and animal husbandry that make up a good part of their life there. One of the monks is working in a field. As I watch him planting he tells me that I can go to any number of ‘mansions’. The monk stands up, shades his eyes with his hand and looks out into the distance, across the ubiquitous chaparral that soften the harsh aridity of desert landscape. I get the feeling that the monk can see the very mansions he has just mentioned.
I walk a little further on and come upon a nun in a Benedictine habit. She is enjoying the sun and fresh air. The sister turns from tending her section of another field and looks at me with a very sobering expression. She gazes directly into my eyes and speaks as frankly.
“It’s about time,” she says.
This is another double entendre. “It’s about time” I saw the world for what it is, and also understood what the life in Christ offers. Secondly, the monastic life is about time also, how we choose to spend our time, our life in Christ.
END
This was an extremely long and highly detailed dream. I have edited two additional scenes from the pit. The sense of the dream and its message are communicated well enough, I believe, without them.
[Photo of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, Abiquiu, NM, by Jeffrey Zoeller]
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