[Pearls Ep 150: Bringing Sunday into the week.]
In yesterday’s Gospel reading St. Joseph receives a message from an Angel of the Lord, in a dream.
And so we’ve been looking at God and our dreams. On Friday we looked at what may be the most important aspect of our dreams – not those that happen while we’re asleep, but those of our wakefulness. We can be certain that God comes to us in our desires and aspirations – yes, He comes in His own good time and according to His plan, but there will come a time when we will be able to look back and see how He worked through the desires of our heart to achieve His perfect ends – you may well have experienced that for yourself.
What of the dreams of our sleeping? Does God speak to us then? You can find a great deal on this on the internet. The bottom line is that of all the ways God speaks to us, messages in our dreams are the least likely and need to be handled with the greatest care.
There are three general ways that God reveals himself to us:
- Daily events of life: many times God is speaking to us in the most “ordinary” moments – such as a kind word from a family member, or a stranger. Other times it will be through those “coincidences” that turn out to not be mere coincidences. Often we recognize the significance of these moments when we reflect back on them at the end of the day.
- Spiritual messages and promptings: this includes messages we receive during meditation and promptings of the Holy Spirit. Discernment is required, especially if the message or prompting calls for drastic action on our part.
And then, there are messages we receive in dreams. Both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas comment on messages in dreams. The short of it, particularly on the part of Aquinas, is that messages in our dreams are most often coming from our own subconscious (or from the enemy). Aquinas also notes that the more pure our life is, the pure our dreams will be!
The Catholic Encyclopedia has much to say about dreams (in the tradition of Augustine and Aquinas, as well as modern psychotherapists), and sums it up thusly, “until more is known about the dynamics of dreams and about the relationship between conscious and unconscious life, great caution should regulate attempts to use dreams as a technique of spiritual guidance.”
So what to do with our dreams? First off, as with everything else in our life, and as St. Ignatius would say – pay attention. Even in the ordinary course of life our dreams are revealing what is happening in our subconscious. Our dreams especially reveal the things that are causing us anxiety – and those are the things we need to turn over to the Lord.
And if there is a persistent message that we sense may have a supernatural source, that is something to bring to a spiritual director, as well as testing and discerning in the usual ways – bringing it to prayer; subjecting it to our own reason (e.g. is the message of the dream asking us to do something that is contrary to our state in life, or contrary to the faith?); and watching for independent sources of confirmation.
Much like with St. Joseph, it seems that if God is truly sending us a message in our dreams, it will be something so unmistakably from Him that we will be able to readily confirm it our heart and mind.
Steve and Karen Smith
Interior Life
Postscript: Matthew 1:18-24
This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about.
When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly.
Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.”