My Dream

Not so long ago I had a dream. I had just come out of Auckland and had lain down to sleep in a room in a Maori house. I was tired at the time, as if ready to die, because of long contact with the pains of my friends who are themselves living and dying in that town.

page 174

In the dream I was standing in the street. And a strong wind was blowing from under a heavy grey winter sky. It blew across the water as if from infinity, from the void behind the stars.

Smoke was blowing through all the streets of the town. It came from immense piles of filth and rubbish burning at intervals in the streets. The smoke, dirty and clinging, poured among the blind faceless walls and blank windows of the concrete buildings. The town was empty of people, as if after some great calamity, plague or fire bombs. But there were men in greasy grey overalls tending the fires, like the men who tended the ovens of Belsen.

It was a dream of Gehenna. It was loaded with the sense of belonging irrevocably to the endless and radical pain of human disorder.

The wind blew more strongly. It overturned one of the vast piles of burning rubbish, scattering black rags. And it caught the rusty iron bracket on which the pile had stood, and sent it spinning like a huge bird against the walls and amongst the buildings, flying in my direction. The fear rose in me that comes from life out of control.

I think it was a dream about Original Sin. It was very hard to bear. Yet there was in it an element of liberation. Perhaps the wind blowing from the grey infinite void was the Holy Spirit. And the fire moving in the piles of rubbish could be the fire of God’s love.

Even inside the dream, I had thought: ‘Though I am in Hell, You are with me.’ This Gehenna is part of me. It is where I live. Perhaps it is where we all live, when the gestures of avoidance are stripped away. And our deepest spiritual frustration comes from our refusal to recognise it.

1970 (617)