• 

I dream of Father Bernie, my granduncle, a priest, with whom I spent holidays, including long summer holidays, when I was a child and teen. He was my maternal granduncle. He died about fifty years ago. He healed me of a childhood disease when he gave me a bag of red apples to eat, telling me I would get better, when the bag was empty.

In my dream he is in the confessional, a place to relate sins for forgiveness from God. There is someone on the other side going to confession before me. There is a loose board between Father Bernie and me. He seems to take it down. I had a little time to find something deep to confess. (Waiting for the priest to open the slot and to say his opening prayer, always held a little terror for me as a child.)I have no memory of what I had to confess.

Once upon a time, when I was rearing three children, my mentor wanted me to go to confession to the local catholic priest here, in Harrisonburg, to confess my lack of good attitude toward my husband. I did it by making an appointment with the priest and talking to him. I had good intentions. That was probably the last time I physically did an individual confession with a priest. Maybe my dream is asking me to look again at my attitude within the relationship with my intimate other, the same person I am living with again. Sometimes my attitude can leave something to be desired, especially if I say “Love is My Religion.”

“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” came to me last week. I connected it to the dream loosely before deciding my dream was about my attitude in particular. This other talk is about the Lord’s Prayer and that part connected to the Solar Plexus, the third Charkra, and the part of the Lord’s Prayer connected to debts.

The sin of forgetting who we are is our real debt to God. We have forgotten our connection to God but God has not. God is the heartbeat in us. When we remember God,  and act out of that certainty, than we can be forgiven all out debts. This remembering brings us to a white stone and on that stone a new name given.

• 

Not that the debts go away that others owe us, but I, remembering who I am with God, need never focus on what is owed to me. God has got me, and that is all I need. The only reason I have people owing me something is because I created other debts in the past(including past lives, if you believe in that.) The wheel goes around and around.

This remembering, who I am to God, helps me get off the wheel of debt. I can focus on debts I owe and ask God for help in discharging that debt. Just a little prayer for that person can cause grace to descend. The debt, which I owe them, which is causing the problem, that debt I owe them from another time, is causing the conflict in the first place. Acknowledging there is some input from me in the conflict changes the direction of the wheels. Or maybe I am being asked to stand up for my self when I did not in the past. That prayer may cause them to come and hug us. I also have had someone apologies for what they did some time later, after I prayed for them on a daily basis for a long time.

• 

There are no enemies, because we are all connected, like the aspen trees, in our roots, and it is a good idea to love our enemy, because that enemy is myself and also one of God’s own.  Keeping our enemy close to us by hating them is what keeps our roots intermingled. This is one of the most important laws, going in there with loving the enemy and searching out what that looks like for us. Where the rubber meets the road, is the place of choice, about how to do this loving, lobbying, peace and love over the fence between. Prayer is the beginning and sending light and love and healing to them is a big second.  

• 

I had a little dream, surely linked to the first one above, the lysis of which was to go outside and I would find what I needed out there. So I am outside on my porch this morning and, well, it is freezing. Not bad when it is sunny but when the sunshine goes in behind a cloud, and when a snow flake lights on my hand and melts there, I refuse to believe until I see it turn to water. I though it was some white fluff flying around for fun.  

The other part of this second dream is that there is huge plastic snail like thing attached to a man’s back and I have a largish wicker swat to get to it. That is when the man tells me to go outside and get that green stuff out there. I wonder about this huge vacuum like thing and wonder if it is full of my trespasses, the name for debts in my mother’s religion. Someone said that the word “trespasses” is full of the sound of snakes.

And on that note I will say goodbye today. A lunch meeting and some sessions await me and I am looking forward to that. I will say some prayers for you and you for me so we can let go of all those debts and claim out birthright of connection, direct no less to our Source, and direct to each other. Love from Rose. Love is my Religion, “Like” if you do and comment if you want. I look forward to your comments on my dreams, even on that great plastic tube attached to that man’s back.