When the walls speak…

…or, dreaming under a Codex painting in a time of war.

According to some of the experts, it’s called lucid dreaming.

Those dreams where you know you’re dreaming and may actually have a bit of editing influence on the dream, itself.

I’ve been spending a good bit of time in that land lately. Generally early in the morning, when the paintings wake up.

You’ve seen bits and pieces of this one lately. Last night, it was the whole team! The masculine and feminine voices of the Creator of my understanding, leading a tour of memory lane.

First stop, Hungary. January of 1989, before the Eastern block fell. A handful of seminary students, one of our professors, a guide from the synod office of the Hungarian Reformed Church, and a very patient driver.

Mostly countryside, between cities. Roads with enough curves to make me feel dizzy in the back seat of the van. And Russian tanks in the fields beside the roads.

A nation of history where any question was likely to yield somewhere between 700 and 1500 years worth of answer. (Even from school children!) And a seminary student from, at that point, Romania, who said, with tears in his eyes, that he grew up checking the news every day to see who was in charge and where he lived now.

It rattled all my filters, then, and it still does, now.

We moved a lot when I was a kid, but we were choosing. Going somewhere with more opportunity. Not imagining the whims of the latest dictator-in-charge.

Next stop, Tennessee. The winter of 1991. The beginning of US involvement in the Gulf War.

I was recently ordained. Recently installed as pastor of the St. John Presbyterian Church. Female. And not from around here.

We all showed up at church that morning… the NASA crowd and the farmers and the tech folks, the city administrators and the solid rocket fuel types and the grandparents, knowing that, by Monday morning, we would be at war. Or not.

And, as so often happened on a Sunday morning, I needed something to say.

I don’t remember the whole sermon.

I do remember trembling in my blessedly flat, rubber soled pulpit shoes, the whole time.

And, I remember, vividly, my last words in that sermon.

May God have mercy on us all.

And then the bombs began to fall, on TV.

This morning, as I lay curled under one of my quilts, all spooned together with The Legendary Husband in the land of lucid dreaming, I began to hear voices from paintings on some of the other walls.

First, my Artisan (or Taliswoman) painting from Color of Woman® 2018. She’s known, these days, as The Fiercely Compassionate Artist.

And then, Bella Mama, who found form during the recent Mexican border crisis when children were being tragically separated from their families.

It was almost as though they had a committee meeting going on and the result was this…

May we, in partnership with the Divine, live mercy in this world. Now.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if you were wondering why I was telling you all this.

And you’re right… it is a whole lot of sharing, even for the writer and preacher who live inside me.

The part of me who trembled her way through that sermon in 1991, is trembling, still.

And yet..

I have 2 granddaughters growing up in this world.

I can’t not say these things.

And they come with a couple of questions…

What is THAT true for you?

And, HOW will you live it?

ps… sometimes asking new questions is at least as important as any particular answer!

pps… in case your walls need something to say, check out the original paintings section at FierceArtWithHeart.