Dreaming to Wake Up

A friend, graduate student in psychology, explained to me the interpretation of dreams. He said that dreams come from the subconscious part of the brain. He said that to understand them, you must imagine that your subconscious is a director making a movie filled with symbolism – and that movie is your dream. This director is incredibly brilliant, but he doesn’t have a lot of time, so he composes the movie with whatever is handy.

I've used this explanation, and I find it useful.

1. A friend’s dream in China.

A friend of mine had a prosperous, life-long business in Asia, but the government forced him to sell it to them. He had a wad of cash, but no plan. We met in China. He was studying Chinese; I was teaching international business law.

He dreamed of operating a bakery. Literally. He had this dream as he slept.

He had found a Chinese bakery to buy. It was modern and well-equipped. But the price that the owners demanded was outlandish. And the local Chinese market was flooded with bakeries.

Like me, he was a Christian. We talked about how he could know that his dream was from God. He believed the dream was supernatural, but buying the bakery made no business sense. His business judgment warred with his desire to obey God.

2. Two interpretations.

My friend was inclined to take his dream literally. I don’t recall that I disputed his interpretation; maybe I did. But I warned him against entering into a bad bargain.

I think that his interpretation of the dream gave little credit to the genius director in his head. I think the bakery of his dream was symbolic, not literal. Bread in the Bible is associated with salvation and with Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 11:23-24, Paul says this:

[T]he Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.

In church, people to this day take "holy communion": bread and wine.

So in Biblical symbolism, Jesus is bread, and we must eat that bread. As a Christian, my friend was familiar with this symbolism. In this symbolism, owning a bakery can be spreading salvation.

So perhaps God, through my friend’s subconscious, was telling him to spread the word of God.

He didn’t buy the bakery. I don’t know what happened to him and his family after I returned to America.

3. My own bakery dream.

Twenty years later, I also dream of a bakery. In that bakery, I honor the dead, but I don’t now remember how. Then I’m among the dead – I’m a ghost in the bakery.

In life, I had been a part owner of the bakery. Newly dead, I stay in the bakery. There are other ghosts there, former part-owners. The living owners can see me and talk to me, but they are unaware of the other ghosts.

At one point, I take a ghost's arm and tell him to strain to push his arm up while I strained to push his arm down. I do this to prove to the living that other ghosts are present. In the dream, I think that my straining will show the existence of that which I am straining against.

The ghosts tell me that the living can see me because I’m newly dead; but with time I’ll disappear from the living, like them.

4. One interpretation: a premonition.

The simplest interpretation of this is that I’ve had a premonition or prediction of my own death. The bakery is life; bread – food – is needed to live, so it is associated with living. When I virtually arm-wrestle another of the dead, I am laboring to be remembered among the living. I’m trying to ensure my own remembrance among the living by trying to make them acknowledge the forgotten dead.

5. Another interpretation: salvation and its loss.

But that interpretation is very direct. It doesn’t give credit to a brilliant director. I think the real interpretation is something else.

I think that this dream is about salvation. Just like my friend’s dream in China might have been God telling him to spread the gospel, to spread the bread of salvation, the bakery of my dream might also be about salvation.

I’ve shared before, somewhat, my pessimism about my own salvation. It’s something that I share reluctantly, but I have my reasons. I think this dream expresses that pessimism.

In the dream, I’m dead. I take this to mean that I’m not saved – I’m dead to God. But I can commune with the living – they speak with me and I to them. To commune with the living while dead could represent the condition of physical life but spiritual death.

When I arm-wrestle with the dead, I strain to convince the living that they cannot take for granted their salvation. I act as a conduit of knowledge about spiritual death. I want the living to know that spiritual death is real, and that it comes to people like themselves.

In my dream, I don’t remember that the living were impressed with this demonstration. And, in fact, when I warn Christians about the uncertainty of salvation, I never convince anybody. My friends are mired in the false doctrine of cheap grace and easy salvation.

6. The dream expresses my frustration with the American Christian church.

This dream expresses my anxiety over my own salvation, but it also expresses my frustration with modern American Christianity. The Church doesn’t strive to bring its congregation to salvation. Too much, the Church says that salvation is easy.

Since salvation is all done and taken care of, churches find other missions. Some churches preach the prosperity gospel. They tell their congregations that God wants to make them rich. A church of this kind focuses its members’ attention on riches in this world. This defies the real message of the Bible, which is opposite of what such churches teach.

Some churches are about making insiders and outsiders. The insiders are the right-believing members of the church. The outsiders are those who are gay, or liberal, or who believe in science over a literal interpretation of Genesis and other parts of the Bible. These churches are about being church insiders. Insiders with God? No worries. Call these the churches of the gospel of smugness.

Some churches are about power – the power of the Holy Spirit. I heard of a pastor who boasted that new members of his church chase demons down the street before they learn John 3:16. I believe in the spiritual gifts, but I also believe that they can be a trap for a church, causing division and provoking pride and stirring foolish attitudes.

7. The point.

My point is that churches often are distracted by their particular obsessions. My point is that churches need to re-focus. I would hope that they would become less assured about the salvation of their members. I would hope that they would become more humble and more energetic in their pursuit of God. I think that’s the import of my dream.

Apple and China and the Dark Side

The right wing is filled with glee about a revelation in the soon-to-come authorized biography of the late Steve Jobs. It seems that President Obama sought out a meeting with Jobs. At that meeting, Jobs scolded Obama that it was easier to open a factory in China than in America. Jobs told Obama that he might be a one-term president.

So: Jobs says we should be like China. Should we? Not if it’s the China that I know about.

1. Marriage: it takes bribes (or a lot of travel).

A friend of mine taught college in China, like I did. He fell in love with a beautiful Chinese student, and they decided to marry.

My friend was a man of principle. He was determined to get the signatures and certificates that would allow him to consummate their betrothal, and he was determined to do that without paying bribes. He ended up traveling great distances within China to find officials who would do their duty without demanding extra payment.

Here’s a rhetorical question to my married friends: how many officials did you have to bribe to get married in America?

2. Civil negotiation: theft.

I knew the American president of a Christian trucking company in China. One of his drivers had a collision with a Chinese police officer. The company investigated and found that the officer caused the collision. The officer’s colleagues demanded substantial payment for the seriously injured police officer – enough for him to live comfortably for the rest of his life. The company refused.

But after much pressure, the company offered to pay the officer’s medical bills. This was a compromise, but the police didn’t see it that way. They said that it was an admission of fault, and they continued to demand extravagant payment. The company continued to refuse.

Then one of the company’s big rigs was hijacked at gunpoint. When the company tried to make a police report, the police refused to report the truck as stolen.

And when the company tried to collect on their theft insurance, they were rebuffed again. The Chinese insurance company refused to pay, according to the insurance company, because it was widely known that the truck hijacking was merely self-help by the police to settle the civil dispute.

Here’s a rhetorical question for my business friends: how often do the police steal from you?

3. Opening a business: it takes more than planned.

In a book about doing business in China, I read about of a foreign business in Guangzhoe that made contracts for long-term rent and other necessities for opening their business in China. Then the business bought and installed its costly equipment. With the equipment bought and installed, the landlords tore up the leases and demanded much more than they had agreed to before the business bought and brought in its equipment.

There was no resort to the courts for this foreign business, and they knew it. They were outsiders in the eyes of the Chinese authorities.

4. Criminal conviction: a frictionless conduit to guilt.

An American businessman was at a hotel and fell asleep on his bed while smoking. What should have been a small emergency turned into a life-ending fire because the Chinese fire department took their considerable leisure to respond to the fire call. The American businessman was charged with manslaughter.

He was assigned a lawyer for his criminal case. He was determined to defend himself on the ground that his fault was small compared to the obvious indifference of the fire authorities. But his attorney did not comprehend the concept of putting on a defense. What was the point? she wondered – conviction was a foregone conclusion. She saw her job as pleading for mercy in the punishment phase.

5. Sure: if you’re Apple.

These true stories say a lot about whether China is as easy as Steve Jobs claimed. But, of course, he might in one sense have been right. After all, he was Apple. Apple and other high-tech mega-manufacturers have it easier in China than others might have it.

Famously, China decided to renovate Tiananmen Square by tearing down the old buildings and putting up a new shopping center. Before construction began, China canceled all leases in the old buildings.

One of the victims of this summary cancellation of leases was McDonald’s. McDonald’s, of course, has a high international profile. McDonald’s made a lot of noise, and China relented – no doubt because of the bad publicity that a famous company like McDonald’s could visit upon them. So China agreed to lease McDonald’s space in the new development.

So maybe Steve Jobs effortlessly got fair treatment. Apple is Apple. But in America, we expect that we will be treated fairly, whether we are a multi-billion dollar manufacturing behemoth, or a mom-and-pop daycare center. We are not perfect or close to perfect in that regard. But we are not China.

6. Workers: Suicide.

In 2010, news broke of a high rate of suicide in China’s factory-city that supplied manufacturing and assembly for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and other big high-tech companies. The factory put a patch on the problem. It hired suicide counselors. And it put up nets so that workers could not kill themselves by throwing themselves off dormatory roofs.

Apple announced that the problem had been solved.

7. America: not China.

So: America should not absorb Jobs’s China-is-easy mentality without serious thought. In America, we have a lot going for us.

We have wage-hour laws to make work humane and reasonably compensable.

We have child-labor laws so that children can be children and not spend dreary childhoods in repetitive assembly-line labor. (When the suicides prompted it to inspect, Apple discovered children working in some of its suppliers’ factories.)

We have courts that more-or-less protect workers’ rights and enforce humane laws against worker exploitation.

We have environmental laws so that we can breath relatively clean air. (This is a genuine problem in China; I know this first-hand.)

So I disagree with Mr. Jobs. Americans have to become competitive and innovative. We need to be smarter and better than the Chinese, not imitators of the Chinese.

There's no easy fix. Restoring our economy has financial, educational, and moral components. The solution will not come from one source. It will take a joint effort of government, industry, and we the people, we the free people.

But this I know: being China is not the answer.

Some Thoughts about my Life

1. I wish I had known more sorrow when I was young. If I had, perhaps I would have lived my life with more wisdom.

2. Only when my co-workers tore my career like dogs did I learn any wisdom at all.

3. People are powerfully driven to be insiders. People will go against their judgment and interests to be insiders.

4. You never are wrong to assume that someone is more complex than you know.

5. Probably, I have never done anything with a pure motive.

6. In hell there is no virtue.

7. If everybody got into heaven who expected to go there, some of the angels would have to be riot police.

8. Whether we call it grace, or luck, or fate, there is something beyond our control that moves in our lives.

9. Trying to know what the present would be if the past were different is like trying to know the future.

10. It’s too bad you can’t live your life twice, and the first time didn’t count. Maybe that’s the idea of heaven.

11. I think of some women that I wanted to marry, and I am thankful that I didn’t marry them. I think of women who I had no interest in marrying, and I am dismayed at my stupidity.

12. It’s hard to convince somebody that they have a fortunate life if they are convinced otherwise.

13. Never bet against the love of God.

14. It is a good phrase, "A severe mercy."

15. If I want my advice heard, first I have to listen.

16. I am still learning about life. And some of the things I am learning seem fundamental.

17. As a lawyer, I spent years learning to attack. Now I’m learning to forebear.

18. I marvel at a functioning democracy, and a functioning economy, of three-hundred-million people.

 19. My parents had a phrase for when a person took a portion bigger than they could eat. It was "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach." I’m that way with books. My bedroom is filled with books that I’ve bought and I’ll never read.

20. I have that relationship to books because I crave wisdom and knowledge.

21. Craving is not having, but craving can lead to having.

22. One of the most important talents in life is knowing who to trust.

23. "Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools." I have remembered this saying as "Do not show your anger." It is important to me. Sometimes I have remembered it too late.

24. I think of those people whom I tried to convince that they had a fortunate life and couldn’t. Perhaps tonight I understand them better than I did then.

25. For a long time I did not pray because praying felt like trespassing. I should pray more.

Communion before Dying

I had a season of madness.

At its beginning, I believed that a particular client and his allies were conspiring against me. As my madness deepened, the conspiracy seemed to widen. Eventually, the whole world was in on it. Before I was seized and confined, I came to believe that I was the focus of a universal conspiracy that had existed for my whole life, and I alone had not known of it.

I feared to eat, because I believed that my food was being poisoned to control my mind.

In time, I believed that God was my only friend. But then a cruel voice told me that I was condemned by God. And I believed that voice.

If I had died, I would have died a lonely death – fleeing from my enemies, and my enemies were the whole world, and God.

1. A bad death: Saul.

There are good deaths and bad deaths. The biblical King Saul died a bad death. In the book of First Samuel, King Saul was chosen by God to lead Israel. As king, he fell short, and God repented of selecting him. Then darkness closed in on Saul. At the end, his enemies the Philistines pursued him. The Philistines killed Saul’s sons, and Philistine archers wounded Saul.

Saul feared that he would fall into the hands of the Philistines, and that they would abuse him, so he told his armor-bearer to kill him. But his armor-bearer would not. So Saul died by his own hand. He fell upon his sword.

The Philistines found Saul’s corpse. They beheaded him, and they fastened his body to a wall.

There’s nothing to envy in Saul’s death, save that the prophet Samuel mourned him, and that brave men risked their lives to recover his abused body.

2. A good death: Jephthah’s daughter.

I consider the daughter of Jephthah to have had a comparatively good death. Jephthah was a leader of Israel. Before battle against the Ammonites, Jephthah swore to God that if God gave him victory over the Ammonites, he, Jephthah, would sacrifice to God "whatsoever cometh forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon".

God gave Jephthah victory. Jephthah returned to his home. His daughter, his only child, came from the doors of his house to meet him.

Jephthah’s daughter agreed that Jephthah had to fulfill his vow to God. She asked only first to go into the mountains for two months with her companions. She did that, and then she returned to Jephthah and gave herself up to death.

My exposure to "feminist theology" is limited. But I know that some feminist theologians believe that the story of Jephthah’s daughter was designed to terrorize women. There may be much good in feminist theology that I don’t know of, but I think that that complaint misses the point. Jephthah’s brave daughter is a hero of this story.

And she did not die alone. She died after two months of fellowship.

3. An immaculate death: communion and alienation.

I believe that Jesus read of Jephthah’s daughter and was strengthened by her story. In fact, just as Jephthah’s daughter yearned for fellowship before she died, Jesus craved fellowship before he died. Before he died, he had a last supper among his disciples. Also, in the garden of Gethsemane, he yearned for Peter and the sons of Zebedee to watch with him. But they fell asleep.

Then Jesus died a lonely death. He died the death of a criminal. According to Matthew, even the thieves who were crucified with him taunted him. Before he died, he cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

4. My mother’s death.

When my mother died, of brain cancer, we kept her in the hospital long after it was clear that she would not live. We resisted the hospital’s pressure to take her home. That was a mistake. But eventually we did bring her home. She could not speak, but her eyes seemed to seize on the familiar surroundings when we returned her to her home and restored her to the embrace of her family. She died among us, and that was a good thing.

5. Suicide, murder, and the will to die.

The opposite of that good thing is the death of those who murder others before they kill themselves. Murder is the ultimate alienation. It alienates the victim from all they know, all they love, and from life itself.

I used to wonder why some suicides did this. I used to speculate that they were driven by hatred, and that their own deaths were afterthoughts. But I’m not sure of that.

As somebody who has tried to take my life, I know that it’s hard to gather the will to embrace death by your own hand. That I live might show that my dedication to death was not entire.

The last time I tried to end my life, a decade ago, I tried to tie up loose strands of my life to lessen the harsh effect that my death might have. I chose a time when I had no immediate, pressing duties. The only task that worried me was a reply brief for an appeal that I had been hired to do. From my place of slow death by starvation, I hiked to a pay phone and called my brother to suggest who he might hire to complete that task.

But in the end, I didn’t die.

Maybe if I had been less neat in wrapping up my affairs, maybe if I had left my affairs in a mess, then fear of going back to my life might have moved me to go forward and not retreat when my way of death shifted from slow starvation to sudden drowning. Of course, I can’t know that for sure.

But it makes me wonder if people who murder others before they kill themselves commit murder to compensate for a lack of courage. I wonder if these murderers do horrible things to make sure that, at the end, continued life will be less appealing than death. The truth probably is complex. But what I say might have a piece of the truth in it.

It’s horrible to use others for that evil purpose. It’s the opposite of the communion sought by Jephthah’s daughter and by Jesus. It’s like the death of Saul, who was moved to die by the thought of capture and abuse by the Philistines.

6. The principal theme of scripture: breaking communion and restoring communion.

I say this to emphasize the importance of communion. Communion is part of a good death. Alienation comes with a bad death.

In fact, the beginning of the Bible, Genesis, is the story of the breaking of communion between God and humankind. Communion was broken between God and humankind when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They were ejected from Eden, and death and suffering entered the world.

The end of the Bible is the restoration of communion with God by the death of Jesus, who took our sins upon himself. By his death, heaven became reachable – heaven, the new, eternal Eden.

Communion was broken by eating from a forbidden tree; it’s restored, symbolically, by eating communion, in remembrance of Jesus’s Last Supper.

7. Communion and the secular world.

Communion and alienation are important themes in our society. That’s true whether you’re a believer or not.

I didn’t take the privilege to serve in the armed forces. But I’ve heard that love of their fellow-warriors can lead warriors to sacrifice themselves. Warriors who sacrifice themselves for others are heroes.

There’s wisdom in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s archest villains were dividers: Richard III and Iago. Iago had a genius for creating division. At the end of Othello, Shakespeare is so certain that his audience despises Iago that he ends the play on the crowd-pleasing note of Iago being led off to suffer imaginative tortures.

8. Living in alienation and in communion.

Communion and alienation are central to Jesus’s instructions to us. "Love one another" is a call to communion. "Judge not lest ye be judged" is a warning against alienation.

When I was young, I judged harshly and often. I often hated somebody for some moral failing that I spotted in him, and I was vocal about it. A slightly-younger friend of mine adopted my habit of expressive hatred. Even then, before I was religious, I saw this and regretted that of all of my traits my younger friend chose that one for himself.

Judging somebody makes that person an outsider. I made a lot of outsiders in my own young mind. Forgiveness makes a person an insider.

9. Striving for communion.

To sum up, communion is good, alienation is bad, and we should always consider whether our words and acts lead to one or the other.

I’ve put off death, but I’ve not put off death forever. And any death, when it comes, is better if you’re loved than if you’re hated. This might seem obvious. Maybe I’m instructing mostly myself.

But maybe not. To say that America is polarized is to state the obvious. Left hates right, and right hates left. I believe that some organizations strive to stir up hatred among Americans. (To my mind, one organization does this more than any other.) We should strive for common ground, for a respectful restoration of communion among ourselves and with other nations, religions, and peoples where possible.