Awakened from a dreamt dialog with my long ago divorced first wife, she having become the priest I longed to be, the topic was not theology but pastoral. We, of course, are both in the same biz. She in uniform and I in permanent mufti. I left in a crude manor, irrevocable, humiliating her for which I still seek absolution . . . she claims to have forgiven me yet I cannot. At least not to my satisfaction.
Not all my dreams, obviously, are “out there” ‘sky pilot’ stuff: ecstatic or intellectual. But inconvenient, cutting cross grain with a rusty saw, the once living trunk of my expectations, longings and what I then thought to be love; taking not giving.
A love once said of me that I was; “sullen to discipline.” Too true by half, for I loathe authority and all its trappings, yet guilty for that.
Angst.
My maternal grandfather had been, before death, a wound to the groin with a shotgun, by choice or chance, a circuit riding Methodist Lay Minister. With four churches served in a Northern Kentucky hard scrabble area. C. G. Jung suggests that grandparents are The Great Mother/Father to this child who still morns for the unknown male lost when my mother was four.
Of my mother, her mother, myself, none of us knew much of the absent father . . . they, my maternal grandparents, married, she at thirteen and he at twenty-three, or there abouts. She was pregnant and delivered my aunt some nine years senior to my mother.
The point of the longish preamble: is that in the dreamt dialog between us, wife and now long experienced with death self, I witnessed the first in memory of her anguish, using a term I did not understand, requesting clarification I awoke and said oh!
In all the turnings, seven years after the death of our last, of two, biological children. The prospect of her ordination, experientially and by expectation, meant to me the farther loss of someone inscrutable to me enshrouded in dog collar and robes . . . receding in bells and smells and smoke.
Gagging, desperate, self-loathing, I sought love where I could find none in myself to trust. Some one to love me at last, constant and true. But that was not to be until M. A long, very long time, for I was then something like sixty-seven or eight when we first met . . . excluding all the intervening times of incredulity until quite recently. Convicted. Think of Sisyphus, yet in my case, not up a hill of sand but ball bearings spinning. Thrice the effort and endless crushings, the stony issue rolling over me down hill. . . .
Add: attempting to seduce a priest, a nun, a Sphinx: impossible . . . Though near the last of my sexual prowess at seventy-two, without apology I annotate that love is not sexual in nature but something given without desire or expectation of recompense. Yet bottled within the sealed solitary bottle of me has become enormous, but then, so has my reverence for others exclusive of creed, gender, age or culture. The exception is now that I no longer desire to be lead anywhere for I am there.
Back to the beginning everything explained and free to live and love at last . . . especially the author of my dreams. And the random rogue thoughts flickering across my attention day and night night and day.
Remember, please, this is teleology not theology. Random notes from a life in process . . . may as well be hung for a pound as a penny . . . full measure, well tamped, all grains being equal. The greatest joy I have ever known is now expanding not contracting.
About M. She is a psychologist of extraordinary ability and experience. Yet more! An alchemist making from dung gold. And should I do nothing else, no recompense required, I would do well to do, or attempt to do for others, what she has done for me.
For some, life is merely something endured, a job. For others it is a commission, joy.
Happily I know the difference in myself.
130325 23:23 dialog dreamt remnant
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved
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