In the first dream, I beat a woman I did not know, for reasons I never learned. My arms were weak and I could not land more than glancing blows. And then--I spent the rest of the dream trying to apologize, trying to repair, begging forgiveness she could never grant.
The other violent dream--the one I had the next night, after we crossed the border--we fought our enemies with hunting rifles across a thin valley. I knew my enemies' names, and they knew mine. My brothers in arms seemed rebels against impossible odds, besieging a small building in the valley. It was my own ruthlessness and ferocity that brought our adversaries to their knees.
At the end of the dream, the leader of our enemies--a great and powerful man, with vast regiments now laid low--held up my youngest son and appealed to me to surrender, to put down my rifle and join his men, or my children and my family would die.
Then I looked on, distant and numb, as I shot this mighty enemy to his death--through the body of my own child. And awoke in a silent scream of guilt and pain.
The third night, I only slept when I was certain I would not dream, and begged for the peace of Christ before I closed my eyes.
My friend has talked of dreams filled with undead temptations and plagued with horrors always just behind him, and I am conflicted. The warrior, the brute, would rush to his defense, but at what cost? Would my violence only become one more horror?
When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark. I comforted myself by realizing the evil in my own heart was more sinister than anything that moved in shadow. But this brutal comfort carries no help for my friend, and ties my own hands.
And yet--. There is a reason we do not daily live in the waking horrors of our darkest dreams: we are loved, deeply loved. The brute, the terrified child, the battered woman and murdered enemy: so created, so loved, and so forgiven, by a strength and grace unmentionable in human terms.
july 2017
july 2017
