"In Dreams Begin" - the Reverend Alison Hyder

14 January 2001 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown

Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter-but-beautiful struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the children of God.
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Never again can we afford to live with narrow, provincial ideals. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class and our nation.
If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
Human progress comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God.

Reading: by Henry Hampton, African American filmmaker, producer of “Eyes On the Prize,” “I Dream A World,” and “The Great Depression,” and member of the Arlington Street UU Church.

“I am given to talking about dreams because dreaming separates us from other animals, other life forms. I have a favorite line from a play I read years ago, a Chaucerian drama. The line goes: ‘In dreams begins responsibility.’ And indeed it’s true. When you dream something, you can begin to take it upon yourself, make it yours, change it. But you have to dream it first. And the Unitarian Universalists don’t dream…You have to think of the world as you would really have it. I don’t mean wish it, I mean dream it. And sometimes I think Unitarian Universalists wish more than they dream.”

Sermon: “In Dreams Begin” - Reverend Alison Hyder

I don’t know about you, but when I wake up in the morning I rarely remember having dreams. And the few that I do vanish like wisps of smoke by the time I’ve walked downstairs. I try to hold on to them, but at best all I can remember is one small scene, a sensation or a word. Maybe that’s because they have no linear cohesion – there’s no plot line, and every detail has about 14 meanings, and you always know someone is your mother or best friend even though in the dream they look like the kid who used to babysit for you in 3rd grade. On the surface, dreams don’t make sense. At the same time, they can be profoundly moving.
Daydreams are another matter. If we don’t control them entirely, we can at least alter them, add to their detail, rethink them and refine them over and over, see ourselves being witty, courageous, and wise. As kids, we imagined ourselves having magical powers, able to blow over bullies with one big puff of breath, or fly around like Superman, saving lives and righting injustices. But as we got older, most of us stopped daydreaming and got on with reality. We dismissed the reality of the heart, which knows – deeply, instinctively - a world where goodness prevails and we feel needed and loved, in harmony with life’s purpose. We forgot how to feel powerful.
Henry Hampton – a UU who worked at the Unitarian Universalist Association for 5 years before founding Blackside Film company – said that Unitarian Universalists wish more than we dream. Do you believe he was right? I don’t like to think so, but maybe our doubts are too strong to ignore, even in fantasy. In our desire to be inclusive maybe we have forgotten how to focus. We don’t pretend to have all the answers – not even in our dreams.
And then someone like Dr. Martin Luther King comes along with a vision that is so profound, so clear and right that he pierces through all the indecision, all the rationalization, all the evidence with the one true fact of his authority. Here is a man whose dreams have power. And Unitarian Universalists responded, then as now. In 1965 over 100 Unitarian Universalist ministers from the Boston area alone, and countless other U Us from across the country, answered his request to march in Selma. Those were our glory days, when our call was clear. And King’s influence on U Us continues to be strong.
Dr. King did not ignore reality. It’s hard to dismiss lynchings and police dogs. But he transcended it with the strength of his vision. He saw a future, detail upon detail, filled with individual faces and great institutions, with acts of justice and nobility. He prayed peace into his heart so that it became as true for him - and as immediate - as his morning coffee. And Dr. King knew that by sharing his dreams, by speaking them, they would grow larger and wider. He preached his dreams into power, into the hearts of generations, even if he didn’t live to see them fulfilled. He inspired love: people breathed it in with his words.
Dr. King’s spiritual journey followed a similar path, from thought to experience, from intellect to understanding. In 1958 King wrote:

In recent months I have … become more and more convinced of the reality of a personal God. True, I have always believed in the personality of God. But in the last years the idea of a personal God was little more than a metaphysical category which I found theologically and philosophically satisfying. Now it is a living reality that has been validated in the experiences of everyday life. Perhaps the suffering, frustration and agonizing moments which I have had to undergo occasionally as a result of my involvement in a difficult struggle have drawn me closer to God. Whatever the cause, God has been profoundly real to me in recent months. In the midst of outer dangers I have felt an inner calm and known resources of strength that only God could give. In many instances I have felt the power of God transforming the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope. I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power. To say God is personal is not to make him an object among other objects or to attribute to him the finiteness and limitations of human personality; it is to take what is finest and noblest in our consciousness and affirm its personal existence in him…” [Martin Luther King, Christian Century 77 (13 April 1960), revised from Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 1958; reprinted in A Testament of Hope, pp39-40].

What I think that King is implying here is that he envisioned his God into being by taking the best of what he knew – the finest and noblest in human consciousness that he felt in himself, that he saw and experienced in others – and dreaming big. He “magnified his soul” until he felt God.
I am not saying that Dr. King “made God up” or that what he felt was an illusion. I think I’m saying the opposite. God does not exist on paper, or in a book. I believe that it is only in our imaginations that we can begin to sense how immense life is, and how complex. One of the reasons that some people call themselves atheists is because someone else told them who God is, defined the ineffable. God, the doubters heard, is the vengeful judge of the prophet Amos, or the violent general of Exodus, God is 3 persons but one God. God is all-powerful - and, they concluded, fictional, if this world is any proof. None of these descriptions made sense, so God must not exist. They were never allowed to dream God up for themselves. They were told they had to fit God, and not vice versa. God became an object, not an experience. Dr. King’s God became personal because of King’s life, not his theology. He internalized his God.
King’s non-violent movement was more than just a political strategy. It was based upon the core belief he shared with Mahatma Gandhi in the need to act with integrity and dignity, and in the inherent worth of each person - even those who despise you and oppress you. These men – like Jesus, whose teachings they respected – taught that people must live into being their vision of a just and peaceful community, working from within themselves to change the world. “In dreams begins responsibility,” an author wrote. The dream must begin in the hearts and actions of those with vision.
Our sense of the world must be grounded in ourselves, built piece by piece, out of our values, relationships, and ideals. Julius Lester was teaching Black Studies at UMass Amherst and quietly exploring his Jewish ancestry when he was asked to speak at a religious conference. He says:

After five days of listening to theological discussions, I am ready to become an infidel. I do not belong among religious professionals – ministers, teachers and seminarians – who can’t talk without quoting Bonhoeffer, Barth, and others with whom I am not familiar. I wonder if they lack their own words because they have not experienced God. Tell me about you, I want to yell at them.
Eventually they do, but not with words, and not intentionally. I listen to their emotions and perceive that they are people without hope, and are thus in despair. They feel abandoned by God. This is not surprising because their religion is a politicized Christianity. They think that Christians are supposed to save the world.
What gives them the right to think they should change the world? And what do they want to save the world from? Or for? Christianity seems to find its raison d’être in good works – feeding the poor, marching in Selma, giving money to Indians – all of which is fine, but these are not things that atheists don’t do. But when “good works” don’t change the world, many Christians fall into despair and wonder, what’s wrong with the world? Nothing. The world hasn’t changed since Adam.
I speak on the third day of the conference and tell them that there is no hope, and as long as you think there is, you are saying that life is only valid to the degree that one’s impact on the world is for the good. The meaning of life is not found in the effect we have on the world, or what we think to be the world. We are called to live our lives and be instruments of God. We are merely human, curls on the waves, clouds that billow at midday and disappear at sunset. As long as Christianity thinks it should and can change the world, it will be nothing more than a caucus in the Democratic or Republican parties. Christians want Jesus to be president. I thought Christianity was supposed to be the alternative to Caesar, so intent on its own virtue that Caesar would not be able to withstand the intensity of its light. Christianity has become a wing of Caesar’s Bureau of Propaganda.
…There is only one reason to be alive and that is GOD ALONE. The human vocabulary should be reduced to those two words. [Lovesong: Becoming A Jew pp 82-3]

Each of us carries a piece of the truth within ourselves, wholly and inherently. Lester is saying, I think, that we have to find God within and then be who we are: not in order to force the world into changing to fit us, but being the world we dream of having.
To find peace, or love, or compassion, we must first create it in our own lives. Some people use forms of meditation, repeating a word or a concept like “peace” over and over. Others, perhaps the more visual, see scenarios, vistas, take themselves on an internal voyage of discovery, imagining themselves overcoming difficulties or living their values in a whole and sacred world. They create a vision of an ideal, and experience it in their minds until it they can feel it as a physical sensation. They mold their vision, but at the same time, it changes them, enlarges and focuses them. Some people feel their dreams through acts of creation, using color and form and movement to experience a power beyond their own knowledge.
Many cultures believe that that is how the universe came into being. It was first imagined in the creator’s mind. For the Australian Aboriginals, this, the physical world in which we live, was made by the ancestors in the Dreamtime. The dreamtime is the real world, a sacred world, and is closed to us except in our dreams. According to Aboriginal belief, all life as it is today - Human, Animal, Bird and Fish - is part of one vast unchanging network of relationships which can be traced to the great spirit ancestors of the Dreamtime. Certain humans can learn how to glimpse the sacred world through special trances and visions. But it is all tied to the land and read in relationship to geography and the animals who inhabit it. So the Aboriginals consider themselves both of their environment and responsible to it. They must treat it in ways that maintain ties to the creative ancestors. They say:
The Dreamtime is the Aboriginal understanding of the world, of its creation, and its great stories. The Dreamtime is the beginning of knowledge, from which came the laws of existence. For survival these laws must be observed. The Dreaming world was the old time of the Ancestor Beings. They emerged from the earth at the time of the creation. Time began in the world the moment these supernatural beings were "born out of their own Eternity". During the creation of our world, the ancestors moved across a barren land, hunting, camping, fighting and loving and in doing so shaped a featureless landscape. Moving from Dreams to actions, the ancestors made the ants, the emus, the crows, the possums, the wallabies, the kangaroos, the lizard, the goanna, the snakes and all the food and plants. They made the sun, the moon and the planets. They made the humans, tribes and clans. Each could transform into the other. A plant could become an animal, an animal a landform, a landform a man or a woman. As the world took shape and was filled with species and varieties of the ancestral transformations, the ancestors tired and retired into the earth, the sky, the clouds, and the creatures who live within all they created. Everything was created from the same source. Everything was created in our Dreamtime.
[website of the Aboriginal Art and Culture Centre, Alice Springs, Australia: aboriginalart.com.au]

The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a "seed power" deposited in the earth. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds. The shape of the land -- its mountains, rocks, riverbeds, and waterholes -- and its unseen vibrations echo the events that brought that place into creation. Everything in the natural world is a symbolic footprint of the metaphysical beings whose actions created our world. As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin. The Aborigines called this potency the "Dreaming" of a place, and this Dreaming constitutes the sacredness of the earth. Only in extraordinary states of consciousness can one be aware of, or attuned to, the inner dreaming of the earth. [Faces of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, by Robert Lawlor]
The Dreamtime continues as the "Dreaming" in the spiritual lives of aboriginal people today. The events of the ancient era of creation are enacted in ceremonies and danced in mime form. Constant song chant, to the accompaniment of the didgeridoo or clap sticks, relates the story of events of those early times and brings the power of the dreaming to bear on life today.
The Aboriginals’ dreams are also their responsibility to the ancestors and the world they created, inherited through tribal story, tradition and relationships. How do we discern, in our own lives, a guiding dream, a narrative that can lead us into wholeness? For Martin Luther King, the vision came out of intrinsic ideals and values felt from within. It was not based in wild fantasies or in some cosmic Nirvana. His dreams had himself and his abilities as the starting point.
Dr. King used his intellect to plan his strategies, but it was his principles and character that gave them birth. But he also knew that he was part of “an inescapable network of mutuality” and his dreams were not for himself alone. He had to share them with others. His life was based on relationships that transcended common divisions and loyalties. He knew the world was one. And his dream motivated him to realize it. And if not him, who? Martin Luther King accepted the responsibility that came with his vision. Some people are born great, and others have greatness thrust upon them.
As for the rest of us, maybe we can achieve greatness. In our dreams, and in our world.

As we pause for a few minutes of meditation, begin to ask yourself:
When I am challenged to dream about my ideal world, what do I really believe and stand for? What principles stir me and motivate me? What would I be like if I could make my dreams happen, right here where I am?

Let us be silent together.

Closing Words: by Jonas Salk, the great researcher and scientist, who developed the first polio vaccine.

“Your dreams tell you what to do –
your reason tells you how to do it.”

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