Jorge: Bricks

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In this dream love was required. We all love here. The chaste kiss of peace.

The center of the Eucharist had become the moment of peace. This "moment" lasted for some minutes.

J began to panic. Did he love enough? Probably not. So would they notice?

Would they expel him from the sanctuary for the inadequate quantity of his love? Would everybody horribly try to repair him?

Was the love nothing but a disguised form of fear?

At the Thanksgiving dinner he'd attended a few weeks before, every single person in the act of expressing thanks had broken down into tears, except for himself. He had spoken but tears had not come.

A certain joy for him had been present but it had been dry.

I felt my mind wandering during the group prayers so I went into the parish hall bathroom. My absence so to speak wasn't alone -- there were lots of people in the hall. Preparing food. Acting out in the youth group. A few of the homeless lingering around the buffet and so they well might. I at least understood them. I understood a thing like need but love had me baffled. At least in dreamland it did.

Like a legalist trying to earn points I opened the closet to put out the necessary chairs for hospitality, but the closet had been bricked over by the new rector. The bricks wouldn't move. Then I heard the organ behind me and it seemed so far away, also somehow bricked off.

Yet I knew there was a way through those bricks if I could only figure it out. Most likely there was a breath of air reaching me through the impasse, like a winding clew. If I thus were to narrow my shoulder, and subsequently stand sideways, I might well squeeze myself through as if by a thought. And on the other side of the bricks, down a ramp of musty stairs, I did find a few of the chairs in a circle with men (only men) sitting in them. It was the other church, the secret church inside. These were 2 churches that did not so much share a building as in some arcane way hold a common interest in the space intervening between them, which I at least was finding irreversible -- that is, I could not back up. And the secret minister ordered me to sit down and so I did.

Who are you guys? I asked and they said: the men's group. J shifted with all the more discomfort in his chair for considering that he hadn't even sat there long enough to feel comfortable or not. The truth was that he detested and feared groups of men ("gangs!"). . And these guys were uglier than was possible, their ugliness was even multiplied by quantity and proximity. Not the sort to cry at a meal.

Oh give it up, J, give them a break. Soften your heart, it's the Eucharist. I needed to relax and soften. This was feeling like my dream of last night (? was it last night?) I think last night (?) when I found myself walking by the park on a windy night and watching the shadows of the walnut leaves -- just barely hanging on -- as they shook under the electric light -- and wherever a shadow touched the ground a bit of a pothole would open up -- so that walking became impossible, you had to dance and shimmy just to get down the street. And that was the way the women walked as they brought the bread in. Each one mincing like a waitress in the 50s or a reformed cabaret dancer. When they set the gifts down the men dug in. I held my own morsel like an idiot. Ever wanting to feel. To feel to feel. To be a part of reality, not a show. Then came the wine, maybe juice, and the girls danced right in, faces frozen in scowls. Oddly fetching or retching. I felt my stomach turn over and thought of the dancing walnuts. No that wasn't last night. I was mistaken, that was tonight -- had happened tonight. So this was the clew I had been craving: this very moment was constructed of dream, was not real. Oh, thank heaven.

Lord, you said that your gifts were given to "many" and you probably meant to "all" -- which is one reason we follow you, because in fact we feel compelled to be that "all" -- but the gifts must remain gifts, after all -- desired -- not just slabs of bread -- or no one will even take the trouble to receive them -- and it doesn't matter what people should do, since ultimately they will do what they will do, not what they should -- and the "many" will turn into "few" or "none" if no gift is there. But also what happens if it seems the gift has no one to receive? No one worthy?

So J stood up and walked into the kitchen where the women were working. Somehow it was steps taken down into the kitchen. He felt like a character in the Jules Verne novel, moving deeper and deeper, together with James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker and Pat Boone. Since it was a dream, he didn't worry about this.

Behind him the minister was intoning the prayers of the people and his voice was made of "nose". It was a voice with a lot of nose. The spirit was buried in a fussiness like tissue. Then the room rocked like a boat and you could hear engines turn on. The women all looked up from their kitchen work and said: you can't be in here. The head of the kitchen crew pointed to a staircase leading down into daylight. Meanwhile J saw with astonishment the chairs. There were at least a million chairs, waiting for someone to come in and sit down. But no doubt people were too scared to enter this place where after all they were not allowed.

I had had enough of this dream. It seemed to me that I was dreaming a dream that had no place for me and that that would be the meaning of the dream when it eventually crystallized in the following day's fresh air. Because outside in the daylight I saw the people from my own church now leaving -- and they greeted me with love -- with that love that was so overwhelming for me -- but at the same time they hadn't noticed that I'd been absent. So the love was real but the object of the love -- myself -- had been placed off-station or misprinted with a smear or was not answering the phone. If this love had been thrown like a brick no one had been able to catch it even as a concussion. Did that matter? I felt the way I so often felt after "church" -- that I had nodded off and missed my exit. I hadn't been paying attention! I had just been dreaming!

But when I woke up it wasn't even Sunday. I was on a pier that was separated from its marshland train-tracks by some unexplained gap. The trick was to get my suitcase off the pier and onto the train without getting either it or myself wet. This would be enough to take my mind off the strange and unsatisfying topic of human worship. Behind me a woman's voice continually scolded me to hurry up. Her voice was notably bereft of love. She didn't care if I lived or died. So this was more like the sort of reality in which, for better or worse, our lives actually occur. At least within this indifference I would be able to spend a little time figuring out just what my dreaming offered in the way of prophecy -- just what it was it sensed was coming for me. Because I have noticed -- and hope that you too will ponder -- how insistently dreams present themselves not (as people once mistakenly thought) as interpretations of the past but as most entirely -- in every detail really -- about the things that are to come, which they play as great a part in being as in speaking. And this is the source of their insistence and their fear.

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