LIMINAL
I had another COVID19 dream a couple of nights ago. It was not especially bizarre or nightmarish. If anything it was comforting in an ambiguous way. I am still sorting it out.
It began in a familiar space - the basement of the First United Methodist Church in Conway Arkansas and immediately beneath the sanctuary, a space that years ago served as the Fellowship Hall of the church and the gathering spot for MYF on Sunday nights (now UMYF - United Methodist Youth Fellowship). It was here we ate the landmark snack suppers, played four square and other games, and had our plenary meetings before splitting up into our sub groups by age and grade.
The dream was lucid and vivid. I and my fellow youths were sitting at the folding tables around which we gathered to eat our chips and hot dogs (sometimes we had burgers or sloppy joes) . A discussion arose about the fare. Someone grabbed one of the franks off the serving plate and mockingly asked, “What in the world is this?” Then an extremely prominent politician on today’s national stage suddenly materialized, took the wiener out of the questioner’s hand, calmly held it up, and replied to us all, “This is … a means of grace.”
I woke up. I reached for my phone to see what time it was and parted the privacy curtain of the sleeper to make sure I was still on the planet. I was not done with the dream and successfully slipped back into a deep sleep.
The scene shifted. I was still in the church, upstairs in a darkened and still sanctuary, standing with someone at the chancel. At first I thought I was reliving a memory from real life when a young lady, a member of a visiting group from Texas, and I snuck away from the youth meeting and shared a smooch. or two away from the watchful eyes of our adult leaders. But then, while still dreaming, I realized that, although the figure I stood with was somehow female, she was not really human. I could not clearly see her but there was a holiness in her countenance, an numinous presence, non threatening and peaceful. She placed a translucent hand on my left cheek and a tender kiss on my right and whispered in my ear, “Means of grace.”
Another shift. I was traveling a moonlit landscape (it seemed Balkan but this is hazy). I stopped at a isolated building in a rural hamlet and went through the front door. This lead me down a long dim corridor and down a flight of steps into a small sitting area. I knew that was a liminal space - one of those places where the walls between our reality and whatever is beyond our reality grow very thin and we find ourselves on a threshold of some kind. I sat in a chair across from a uniformed border guard who spoke in heavily accented broken English. He asked me what I was looking for and I had difficulty answering his question.
“Is it the woman? … the angel? … a place? … a friend? … money? … answers to your questions?” No in each instance.
He then smiled broadly and said, “Ah, yes … you are looking for the means of grace.”
The means of grace are many. The places and portals The Holy uses to get our attention and somehow address our lives are manifold, to say the least. A snack supper in a crowded church basement, a dream, a piece of bread and a sip of wine, the embrace of a friend, the cry of a protester, the thousand soft still moments of our days - even the desolation of a pandemic.