Story #2 – The story of the dream that God dreamed
Listen! I will tell you the dream that God dreamed.
After the long chain of centuries of patient evolutions of his “beautiful to see” Creation , God “planted a garden in Eden, in the East”. He put there nascent humanity “made in his image”. He entrusted him with the management of the great unfinished Work. And imagined seeing growing up a huge family multiplied by beautiful and happy children, frolicking in the green meadows of his creation, and savoring the fruits of the garden, served in profusion. Thus he conceived the beautiful and unique Garden-Earth, planted in the heart of the vast Universe of moving stars, and provided with everything needed to rejoice the hearts of his children. He saw nothing but happiness in living the overflowing love of the Eternal, love in all imaginable shapes, tastes and colors of joy.
Now, one day, God decided to visit his little world of spoiled children, saturated with the benefits prepared in the silence of his long centuries of invention.
The Story of the Origins, in the Sacred Book , which tells us about this divine visit , tells us that, “in the breeze of the day” of nascent humanity, God came to walk in the pretty Garden of his Creation. There he wanted to meet his little free creatures, fresh from the creative Earth. He liked the idea of chatting with them, almost on an equal footing, seeing them happy to experience the spring of history in the presence of the Lord.
God called. He called and he called! His creative Word resounds in the void of a deserted morning breeze. For humanity, feeling naked in the eyes of the Master of life, was seized with fear and went into hiding. And God only met ashamed sinners. Which spoiled him, you can imagine, the pleasure of his work so long built, so quickly fallen.
So God thought he would make up for it someday – he made a promise to the Gentiles Beyond. He would let his Voice resonate through the good and bad times of history. His Word became full of affection and invitation, and sometimes a little anger to remind the Creator Order. But, all the time, the little humans still looked like their lonely earth parents. Their ears were hardened by the vice of the selfishness contracted from the poisonous Serpent.
Patiently, God gave them rope, a lot of rope, centuries of ropes, so that they could have their experience and timidly wish to resume, one day, the way to the Fold. He had sown in their hearts a nostalgia for a distant origin that he had not known. Perhaps one day they would taste this irresistible attraction of the Paternal House. It was a long wait, a painful journey torn from the lusts of the earth; a path which did not always lead to the places of Life. Mankind, as such “prodigal son” of whom the Book speaks, had received the inheritance of the Father in order to manage its growth. And, like the prodigal of the Book, she wasted everything, thinking only of her pleasure.
Yet sometimes there were glimmers of hope that pierced a far here or there in the firmament of God. Because many people came out dazed from the sterility of their lives. They painfully found their childish hearts and began to dream – oh supreme victory of life – like the prodigal of the Book who was hungry. The Lord God counted on these unique people, reborn to life, to start over. And he did it again, poor man, many times: in the days of the Patriarchs and of Israel in the desert; in the times of Judges and Kings, Prophets and Wise Men; and in times – more eager to listen – of the “poor at heart”, a “little remnant” of nothing, of faithful intoxicated with the Word, who aspired to “know” God. He did it again, tirelessly, over the centuries that descended the slope of time.
The big problem, you see, is that God is SPEAKING, and humans have HARD EARS . I am not speaking of the hard of hearing of goodwill, but of all those whose hearing the heart is hardened by the deafening noises of life, or by their cumbersome reasoning reason. A fanciful little prince, come from the asteroid B 612, reminded us of this during his visit to Planet Earth (which “has a good reputation”, he said). “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye”. And long before him, old Isaiah had denounced the deafness of the people of his time: “ They have ears to hear and they do not hear. They have eyes to see and they don’t see ”. Deaf of hearing, we can no longer!
Then came the “fullness of times” , determined by the Creator of History. And the Word of God, Eternal Word, was incarnated in time, in Jesus of Nazareth. Some 2000 years ago.
Obsessed with his original dream, God sent his own Son to restore the path of life between Him and His creation. With his child’s heart, Jesus spoke to us about the God Abba, Papito. In turn, communicating with the heart of the Father, Jesus sought to discover the dreamed world of the Creator. He would have liked so much to contemplate the flower garden of children who love each other instead of making each other suffer; humans who like to live instead of struggling with the sweat of their brow, and who sing and dance instead of crying, when they have everything at their fingertips. Infinitely sad, Jesus wept over his tired people, abandoned as a flock without a pastor. He made himself a “Good Shepherd” in the hope of bringing humanity back to the Father’s path. Alas, the mass of people did not want this repented so-called prodigal: his Word cried out in the desert of indifference and weariness.
One day, fed up with this disillusioned sadness, Jesus launched this furtive complaint, shouted as a subtle invitation from Heaven to the children of the Earth:
Who can I compare the men of this generation to?
Who do they look like? They look like kids sitting
in a square and calling out to each other, saying
‘We played the flute,
and you didn’t dance!
We sang songs of mourning,
and you did not cry. ‘
All the instruments of God’s creation came together to make us dance, and we did not dance. All the tears of God were expressed in suffering of desertion, and we did not cry.
The childhood of the world obsessed Jesus. He repeated, addressed to those who had ears to hear: “Suffer little children to come to me, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are like them ”. And even more: “ If you do not become like children again , you will not enter the Kingdom of God”. It’s a matter of the Word and of the heart, with eyes to see and ears to hear. Its a question of life or death!
Friend, you may be wondering: how to “become like a child again” to gain the kingdom of God? Should we return to our mother’s womb to be born again, as old Nicodemus imagined for a moment? It may not appeal to you to “become a child again”, so as not to have beautiful memories of your childhood. And you certainly don’t want to “fall back into childhood” more than I do! So, how to live the words of the Master?
The answer is JESUS. He who was never other than a son-child before God his Father. Certainly, it is not a question of pouring into spiritual childishness . But, like Jesus , our elder brother in God , to become again what we really are : the very little children of the Good Lord, lost in the immense garden of his creation… Children who should dance when they hear the flute playing and cry when we sing a song of mourning. So God sees us, so God loves us. But our humanity has always had a bit of a hard ear; it is a sin of understanding!
But you,
listen to the creative Word,
the meaningful revealing Word,
and you will live forever
instead of dying every day.
Bible Readings
Genesis chapters 1 to 3; Isaiah chapter 6; Psalms 8.
Luke chapters 7, 8, 10, 15, 19; John chapters 3 and 10; Galatians chapter 4.
