A poet dreams.

I dreamed I was 18 again, on the cusp of sitting my ‘A’ level exams, realising I had not done half the work and had revised even less. In my dream I was considering not actually sitting any of the exams, deciding that the whole business of formal education was flawed, going off and pursuing a different kind of life.

It was a vivid dream of the sort that stays with you through the day, as if it was true. I had to cut myself off from the anxiety and remind myself that education had been my escape back then, when it would have seemed impossible to me that following a non-conventional alternative path was possible for someone like me. The best I could hope for was to get as far into the world of certainty and salary as I possibly could.

It would be different now.

What on earth might this have been about? Well, what is the meaning of any dream?

My suspicion is that this one grew from a place of urgency around the deep desire for change. It was berthed in the turbulence of a mind grappling with some ‘new’ ideas (that are of course, not new at all, not even to me.) that hit me hard. That made me weep.

It is a dream about vitalisation, of the sort that is rare, but that I seek above almost anything, in which I sense, amongst the ruins of what has been, the emergence of next.

I don’t mean this to sound like the cult of the new, rather it is the longing for better. I hear a splintering of what was before and an excitement about what might be coming, if only to me.

It is a longing for a way to connect spirituality with the natural world. Longing for the emergence of a Christian (or perhaps that word is too tainted) tradition that sees the deep sacred dignity in all living things, that stands against exploitation and greed.

A Christianity that might be part of the healing of each of us, not an excuse for the powerful to hide behind.

What would the world look like if Augustine had lost the argument with Pelagius? What if we had never been convinced of our ‘original sin’, but instead built our thinking around the idea of original sacredness at the core of everything that has breath?

Without the empire that would we have had the religion of Christianity at all? What else might have filled this space?

What if the old Chritstianity is at the end of one of its natural cycles of existence?

What if it needs to be born again, and if so, who will be the midwives?

I have been immersed in these thoughts, so no wonder my dreams reflect this standing on the cliff edge.

Could it really be possible that we might see a new kind revival – not the sort that seeks to save individual souls from hell, by deleting sin through a cosmic confidence trick. Rather a rivival of remembering who we are and always have been.

A revival that rediscovers God in our souls not be addition, but by subtraction.

A gospel of grace, in which we remember that the God who is the light behind our light and the soul within our souls knows our woundedness, and waits for us to journey towards her.

A Christ who no longer is the deserter of earth, but an example of its greatest lover.

A Jesus who is no longer a supra-human ‘other’, but rather ‘us’.

A world in which nature is the gift of being, but grace is the gift of wellbeing.

But these are not doctrinal statemnents – what right, what skill, have I to pretend to such things. Rather they are raw material for poetry.

They are dreams.

They are flotsam on the shores of this beautiful sacred island.