Pastor Ed Reflects on My Pearl Dreams

Pastor Ed Pacht wrote to me yesterday. He said, "Your account of that series of dreams moved me very deeply, and, as I think I'd mentioned, began the formation of a poem in me. Today the poem finally came to completion. It's always a bit chancy to write something reflecting someone else's thinking, but the description of your dreams was powerful, and it had to come.

The last line, BTW, doesn't reflect anything you actually said, but just jumped out as the only place it could lead. That is where every true mystical experience ends, isn't it? Suddenly, the lights come on."

Here is Ed's poem reflecting on my 3 pearl dreams posted here: http://teachgoodwriting.blogspot.com/2007/09/three-related-dreams.html


Alice's Dreams

What I want I have,
a striving in my soul fulfilled,
an aching hunger deep within,
a hunger that has long possessed me
has been satisfied at last, and I ...

step forth enwrapped in glory,
and am led in triumph to the place,
that seat on high that I have sought,
and there was there no place for me,
and, standing out of place I raised my voice,
and sang a wordless, tuneless pilgrim song,
a song the saints and angels joined, until,
until the words began to flow,
the solemn, peace-filled, drawing words I sang,
the words the angels could not join,
the words I could not cease to raise on high,
and I ...

turned and saw upon the path behind me,
a pearl, a precious pearl, a pearl without a price,
a crystal of the loving tears of God,
a jewel with a secret name upon it,
a secret name that named my soul,
and as I sang the words upon that stone,
I bent in awe before it marveling,
thinking not upon the glad procession now behind me,
but upon the prize that I now saw,
and I bent to seize it, rising with my eyes now turning
from the thing that I had thought important,
to the path the precious pearl had shown me,
and I walked the way that I was facing,
toward the distant city gates,
and the lights came on.


I find this poem interesting, not only in the what it captures, but also in how it differs from my dream. Ed pictures me bending to take hold of the pearl. In my dream I had to stand on my toes and reach up to take hold of it. He pictures the pearl behind me when in my dream it was to my right. (There is equally important symbolism for me in both views.) Ed says, "That wasn't conscious, but it was where the creative process led. The way in which your dream spoke to my psyche seems to have caused me to see something other than the words written."

I came to Orthodoxy through Chrismation and that was the beginning of my spiritual illumination. To get to Orthodoxy I had to leave the order of Priests in the Episcopal Church.