Dream On

Matthew 4:4

But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.


I know the refrigerator word magnets have gone the way of the Rubik's Cube. Passe. No longer cutting edge, yet on the high school's Guidance Department's office metal file cabinet next to the chairs where students wait to see us, the swami school counselors, these word magnets and phrases provides a psychological palette for the students who come in.

The combinations can be silly or sad, and even occasionally profound.  I review the work regularly to observe what is going through the students' minds. And more importantly, what is stirring in their souls.

The other day I saw a girl student feverishly composing her words like Beethoven at the piano. I am not sure if she is the one who constructed this above but I surmise that she was. Her affect and engagement reflected a seriousness that seemed congruent to the expression. I think the statement is profound, particularly since the student had to work with a limited amount of words. Maybe that limitation helped narrow the options and in a way I suppose this can be helpful. Too many choices leads to paralysis or endless wandering. One of those paradoxes that freedom can be enslaving. Keys on the piano open infinite musical doors while they themselves are finite.

A tension in my work as a school counselor is that I want my students to dream, to imagine great things, to have hope for their future. That is why I have written my book. But, I don't want to set them up for the dark side of dreams, that dreams impose a harsh cost with no promise of fruition. That can result in cynicism and a cancer of the soul, eating away at hope from the inside out. We all have echoes of Eden in our ears, a collective remembrance of a better world now gone bad. The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil has decayed, leaving a bitter taste. Actually, beyond bitter. From Wisdom to Wormwood.

In Anne Brontë's "If This Be All," the speaker of the poem makes an allusion to wormwood in its sixth stanza: "While all the good I would impart, The feelings I would share, Are driven backward to my heart, And turned to wormwood there." 

In an age of Darwin, where all dreams die--the magnets of meaning fall in existential weakness off the wall of eternity, we are left with the Curse but not the Cure. Bill Nye, the Science Guy, says we have too little Darwinian Evolution. I say we have too much. Mere survival does not add up to significance no matter how one plays the cards. But, what do I know. I only have a Ph.D. from one of the top universities in the United States.

The ache of existence, the pain of life, points to a greater purpose. For if everything is meaningless, why are our magnets desperately seeking meaning? And for meaning to mean anything, it has to last. C.S. Lewis suggests the following, and although it does not prove beyond all doubt, the existence of a life to come (Heaven or Hell) it does at least argue for it as plausible (sorry, that is the best that can be done):

“A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world.”