I don’t
usually even remember dreams, but once in a while I have a doozie – not really
a nightmare (I don’t remember those either), but one that is so bizarre it
defies any explanation. It means what it means, I guess. As Bob Dylan put it in
Gates of Eden:
"At dawn my lover comes to me And tells me of her dreams With no attempt to shovel the glimpse Into the ditch of what each one means."
But this
one - . Anyway, Bill and I were in New York (I think – at least, some teeming
urban centre that I wasn’t familiar with, at all. Here we were in Gotham. The Big Apple. This Is The City.)
We were standing at a sort of crossroads, a busy corner, although I had no idea
where we actually were and even less idea of the names of the streets, what hotel we
were staying in, etc. THEN – suddenly – I was sitting in a wagon. It was a
wagon FULL of Amish people. Just chock-a-block. Not one of those smart
carriages – this was a fairly primitive wagon, kind of like a covered wagon
only un-covered. I didn’t quite know how I had gotten there, although I vaguely
remembered climbing aboard. No kidnapping or coercion was involved.
But I was
sitting next to this woman (she was on my right, maybe 30ish, very Amish in costume and demeanour, the
kind of woman who already has a dozen kids) who kept talking and talking. It
was Amish talk, but as usual I can’t remember much content. Pro-Amish, of
course, though since I was not handcuffed, I didn’t think I was required to join
the cult.
BUT. And
this was the hard part. Though I had climbed aboard somewhere in the teeming
downtown, I had no point of reference. I had no phone. Where was my husband? I
wanted out (or “off”), but didn’t see a way. I could have, I guess, said (and I
think I tried), “Stop and let me off”, but the Amish woman told me “no, we’re
going up to the Lake
country”. I envisioned being away to hell and gone in some isolated rural
community living completely off the grid. It was a helpless feeling. I was cut
off. I was part of this. . . group. Religion? I finally said, “Can you take me
back to where I got on and just drop me off?” They looked at me in bafflement.
Like most
of my dreams, it didn’t “end” but just sort of petered out. Of course, my mind wants
to put puzzle pieces together, so I wondered if this whole thing was an allegory
for the church I attended for fifteen years. THAT ended badly too, though I had
been disaffected and unhappy for the last three or four. I stayed too long, and
began to feel a creeping sense of “we-think” – in other words, if you start
thinking OUTSIDE that box, you are no
longer welcome. This coincided with a horrible meltdown in leadership
that I won’t even go into. But still I didn’t leave!
Eventually,
as I regained my mental health and saw the light, my relationship with the
church also petered out and I no longer wanted to attend. I was tired of the
whole thing. I now see mainstream church attendance as something out of the
last century. Big drafty 100-year-old buildings being used for two hours a week, doctrine
and cant that is always vigorously denied, hidden agendas that create constant
guilt and a sense of inadequacy, an INSISTENCE that everyone is welcome and
people can interpret God any way they want . . . but if you go too far, the minister will summon you to his office for a friendly chat.
The
pandemic has virtually wiped out "liberal" church congregations except in a very limited
capacity. Some have gone to “hybrid worship”, which sounds to me like something
out of Soylent Green or some other cinematic dystopia. I am not sorry, for
so-called liberal churches are an anachronism. We didn’t really help anyone. If
someone in need came to us, they were given a bus ticket and a token for the
food bank, all the way across town. And that’s it. People grumbled about having
to pay for those tokens and wondered why people didn’t just get a job.
Oh, but one time we tried. Having dutifully brought our canned food donations to the church, someone made the mistake of getting up at the front and saying, "We also need can openers." To a person, the congregation roared with laughter. Someone needs CAN OPENERS?
The Amish
thing, well, I’ve never had too many feelings about the Amish either way,
except to say that we often hear about alarming genetic diseases that have not
even been heard of before. The Mennonites, Hutterites, Anabaptists and Amish
have been profoundly inbred for centuries, but as young people leave in droves to
live more normal lives, the gene pool is getting smaller and smaller. Marry
your first cousin? Maybe you have no other choice. So you end up with a sort of
horrifying Habsburg situation, with children stillborn, hopelessly deformed, or dying of untreatable
medical conditions.
The only
churches which are flourishing now are Pentecostals, led by evangelicals who prey
on the weakest and most needy. Shameless grifters, the sort that preach at us
from our TVs, buy private jets with the congregation’s monetary “seeds”, and
eventually get into sex scandals. I’m so tired of it all. We have two gigantic
churches in our area, very recently built, which I
have heard are full every Sunday. Pentecostals. The UnitedChurch is foundering on the verge of
collapse, and is even thinking of converting some of those huge drafty
buildings into low-income housing (an idea that horrifies almost everyone!). I don’t care what is happening to my former
church now because it outlived its usefulness thirty years ago.
Now I’m
thinking: if that cart was pulled by horses, why didn’t I see them or at least
smell them? Was it an oxcart, perhaps? DID I ever get off? The dream tapered
off before I could answer any of those questions. But I would not willingly
climb aboard any sort of wagon now, Amish wagon, bandwagon, wagon train with no
end. Stop the horses – I want to get off.
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