Dreaming - Chris Gleeson SJ

As I sit at my laptop, it is only a few short days since the return of our Australian Olympic team from Beijing. For those like me who love the Olympic Games and spend inordinate amounts of time watching television and listening to events unfurl on the radio, it has been 16 days of less sleep than is necessary. So many stories of triumph and perseverance have captured our imaginations and stretched our hearts.

My first strong memories of the Olympic Games are of those held in Melbourne in 1956. Black and white television had just come to Australia, and I can remember coming home from school as a wide-eyed year 8 student at Xavier Preparatory School, getting off the train at Sandringham station, and stopping at the electrical store to watch the television sets in the window. Betty Cuthbert, Hec Hogan, John Landy were my heroes, and what a thrill it was to get tickets to the MCG to watch our own Chilla Porter come second in the High Jump as the November sun disappeared over the old scoreboard! Some friends also took me to watch the rowing at Lake Wendouree in Ballarat, now ravaged by the drought and entirely bereft of water. For me the Olympics are the stuff of dreams.

Earlier this year the five Centres of Ignatian spirituality brought noted Ignatian author, Margaret Silf, to Australia. She led workshops and ran retreats in all states and helped us deepen our understanding and love of the Ignatian spirit. One of her most helpful comments for me was the suggestion that ‘God’s will’ might be better translated as ‘God’s dream’. With Christmas just around the corner, her idea that God’s dream is to become incarnate, to get inside every human person and situation in order to transform it, is most valuable.

I have always had difficulty with understanding the concept of God’s will. How easily it can trip off the tongue to suit our purposes! Gerard W. Hughes has written in his book, God in All Things: ‘God has long been recognised by tyrants as a most powerful and useful ally. To keep their subjects under control, the Roman emperors declared themselves to be divine’. ‘The will of God’ is a phrase with which we can control, oppress, exclude, bully, beat, enslave and even murder: it is the reason why religion can be such a danger in human life …

Dreams reveal our deepest desires and these give us the clearest indication of God’s will for us. St. Augustine, whose Feast Day is being celebrated as I pen these thoughts, summed it up beautifully for us: ‘Lord, you have created me for yourself, and my heart is restless until it rests in you’. Indeed, he prayed: ‘Lord, that I may know you, that I may know myself’. To find our deepest desires is to find our true self, and to find our true self is to have found God.

To understand our deepest desires is to locate our passion, what fires us. Thankfully, it has become fashionable in recent times to be passionate about life and its various elements. For a long time, however, it seemed that passion was distrusted in various religious circles. Indeed, passion was made to seem at odds with religion. This has changed, and people like Canadian priest Ronald Rolheiser OMI can now write:

‘In a culture characterised by flightiness, lack of commitment, hanging loose, infidelity, cynicism, and programmed boredom, we need, fire, passion and romance … The fire of passion comes from God.’

Ignatius, which means ‘born of fire’, was an appropriate name for Ignatius Loyola. He certainly was a fiery and passionate man. In his early days he was passionate about serving his King, Ferdinand of Spain, and furthering his career as a soldier and man of the world. After he was ‘canonised in the leg’ in 1521, as one of my Riverview students once described it, Ignatius spent a long convalescence in redirecting his passion from things of the world—gambling, women, and soldiering—to doing great feats for God.

This same passion Ignatius bequeathed to his successors. Father Pedro Arrupe, General of the Jesuits from 1965 to 1983, once wrote famously and passionately:‘Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in a love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings, what you will do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.’

Thank God for Ignatius and his passion!

As we prepare for Christmas let us remember that we are God’s dream. How do I allow Jesus to be incarnated in my life in order to transform it? How can I permit Jesus to enter the various moments of my life that they might last for ever? In The Heart of the Matter Brendan Kennelly writes:

I myself will dream a dream within you.
Good dreams come from me you know!
My dreams seem impossible –
not too practical, not for the cautious man or woman.
A little risky sometimes.
A trifle brash perhaps.
Some of my friends prefer to rest more comfortably
in sounder sleep with visionless eyes.
But for those who share my dream,
I ask a little patience, a little humour,
some small courage, and a listening heart.
I will do the rest.