About six months ago, I was called to serve at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Gloucester. When I arrived, most celebrations of the city’s 400th anniversary were ebbing and St. John’s was wrapping up its 160th anniversary celebration.
When communities reach a milestone like 400+ years or even 160 years, it’s a good occasion for us to reflect on our history and begin a process of dreaming and visioning for the future.
Indeed, the City of Gloucester has begun what I like to call “daytime dreaming” and visioning with initiatives such as Gloucester’s Comprehensive Plan, introducing CrowdMap, meetings in a box, and a community survey. Additionally, the Gloucester Initiative has started exploring what kind of social climate we want to nurture and support going into our future.
Similarly, over two years ago, St. John’s began a visioning process that included self-study and assessment — our own daytime dreaming. We have been a part of the community since we began ministering to the needs of the Canadian Maritime fishermen who emigrated during the Civil War, and we want to continue to minister to the needs of Gloucester and Cape Ann today and in the coming years.
Daytime dreamers are often prophets unreserved in their candidness, who have visions for more equitable strategies and policies to challenge those who try to hold onto the status quo. Daytime dreaming is a vital part of our life as we envision a more hopeful, engaged, and peaceful community.
There is, of course, another kind of dreaming — the kind we do while we sleep. Recently, I learned that nighttime dreaming is essential to our health. Apparently, we are not dreaming enough. We are caught in the middle of a sweeping and relentless epidemic of insomnia. We’re not dreaming enough because we’re not sleeping enough, and our hyper vigilance about wakefulness is becoming our Achilles heel.
For more than 20 years, I have struggled with sleep. In my vocation as a mother and priest, turning off my brain as an act of generosity to myself has been a real challenge. It is well known that insomnia increases the potential for heart disease, obesity, and early aging. But I never imagined the damage that dream loss causes until I heard an interview with psychologist Rubin Naiman. He says that the “ramifications of dream loss are pretty profound, including cardiovascular problems, problems with memory and mood disorders, because we know that dreaming down regulates negative emotion. The bottom line is that dreaming is an antidepressant. People who dream well are less depressed and they’re less anxious during the day” (“To the Best of our Knowledge,” Wisconsin Public Radio).
When we don’t live balanced lives with enough sleep, we don’t dream. I for one am much happier being awake. Although I confess to prefer being awake, I’m often not as fully present as I want to be because of the lack of sleep and those much-needed dreams. When I don’t sleep or dream enough, I feel like I’m running on fumes (physically, emotionally, and spiritually). My hyper arousal does not promote a healthy culture in my family, my faith community, or my wider community.
Our Abrahamic texts (Christian, Hebrew, and Quranic scriptures) remind us that dreams are a way that God can break through our overloaded minds. There are 21 dreams recorded in the Bible, and they vary distinctly from other mysterious ways in which God communicates with us. So, in this new chapter of my life in Gloucester, I am praying mightily that the Holy Spirit will gently lead me out of the patterns of sleep and dream deprivation I have fashioned for myself. Recognizing our dreams as spiritual teachers and messages from our deepest recesses may be one healing path to follow into our future together.
I wonder: Could our path to reaching our daytime dreams in Gloucester start with good nighttime dreams and sleep? I think so.
So, let’s begin the next 400 years by praying together a favorite night prayer from The New Zealand Prayer Book:
Lord, it is night.
The night is for stillness.
Let us be still in the presence of God.
It is night after a long day.
What has been done has been done;
what has not been done has not been done;
let it be.
The night is dark.
Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives
rest in you.
The night is quiet.
Let the quietness of your peace enfold us,
all dear to us,
and all who have no peace.
The night heralds the dawn.
Let us look expectantly to a new day,
new joys,
new possibilities.
In your name we pray.
Amen.
Dream boldly and sleep sweetly!
The Rev. Marya DeCarlen is the priest-in-charge, or as she prefers to call herself, “priest-in-collaboration,” at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Gloucester.