And Joseph had a Dream

Confusion can tear our lives apart, but perhaps a dream can clarify. For Joseph, a dream tipped the balance to trust a Christmas mystery.

Have you ever felt like your brain is caught in a tug of war? You are pulled and torn in different directions. Your values, rules, expectations, and beliefs pull you to behave in a certain way, but you have a pull dragging you to another point.

Contradictions to the normal pull at you to step out of your comfort zone. To walk on water, climb a mountain to make a sacrifice, marry a prostitute and eat the forbidden food laid out before you.

The mind in turmoil needs a voice of security to cut through the tension of conflict.

Do you want to stay safe, or do you want adventure?

I feel for Joseph

There is a character in the Christmas story that I think goes under applauded. All the focus is on the baby and mother.

We read the story every year at Christmas, full of wonder and light. We sing joyful carols and celebrate a birth, but there are backstory questions that probably never get fully answered and tied off as neat as a bow on a Christmas gift.

This is how Jesus the Messiah was born. His mother, Mary, was engaged to be married to Joseph. But before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit. Joseph, to whom she was engaged, was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly.

As he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. “Joseph, son of David,” the angel said, “do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit. And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

All of this occurred to fulfill the Lord’s message through his prophet:

“Look! The virgin will conceive a child!
She will give birth to a son,
and they will call him Immanuel,^[j]
which means ‘God is with us.'”

When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded and took Mary as his wife. But he did not have sexual relations with her until her son was born. And Joseph named him Jesus. Matthew 1:18-25

A dilemma

He must have experienced a tug-of-war in his brain.

Feel the energy of the questions that must have torn at his thinking.

Engaged to Mary, but she is pregnant.
I haven’t had sex with her, so how is she pregnant?
She must have had sex with someone else! Who?
She says the baby is from God, and she talked with an angel. Seriously? Mystery upon mystery.

Then all the questions and judgments from others may have come flying at him. The accusations said and unsaid.

He had sex outside of marriage—what a weak man.
She had sex outside of marriage—Tut tut tut.
He will never become anything.
She will be on the outside of our group
Stones of shame

All the rules are broken, and all religious protocols are thrown aside.

You walk a fine and lonely line when God hands you an assignment like this. Everything you say and do is up for microscopic judgment. You are Job wondering what God is up to. You are Jonah sitting in the belly of a large fish, wondering what will happen next and if it will be good. You are Abraham pulling a knife to kill a son.

You walk alone, trusting and praying for assurance for the next step.

God, where are you? Life wasn’t meant to be like this?

Pain, confusion, struggle.

A divorce

So you retreat to the conventional, the normal, the logical.

Joseph’ decided to break the engagement quietly.’ That is the most logical and ‘right’ thing to do.

Right in the sense that this is what you do when you can’t logically and lawfully make sense of the strange and unexpected. If it doesn’t make sense, then it’s wrong. We like living in a box. We like certainty and order. It makes us feel safe and in control.

For Joesph, he was planning to divorce pregnant Mary. He was planning to break commitments made, sever the connection, and detach from the problem.

The tug of war in his brain would find release because he was doing what the law said he could do.

A dream

Into the battle zone of the brain, God brings a dream.

While he was trying to figure a way out, he had a dream.
God’s angel spoke in the dream: “Joseph, son of David, don’t hesitate to get married. Mary’s pregnancy is Spirit-conceived. God’s Holy Spirit has made her pregnant. She will bring a son to birth, and when she does, you, Joseph, will name him Jesus—’God saves’—because he will save his people from their sins.”

This is all we know of the dream. The writer, Matthew, shares what he has been told.

It’s a dream of intervention. Powerful, vivid, and intense. It’s enough to solidify Joseph into choosing to continue with the mystery of a virgin being pregnant.

He will always have questions about this. Running up against the safety requirements of the human brain comes a baby born to a virgin.

How can this be? We still have this question.

He, like Mary, probably forever pondered these things in his heart.

Questions often bring us to places of choice.

Do I trust in a God who holds all things together, even mysteries like virgin births, or do I worship at the feet of a God of certainty, a God of my own making?

A decision

Joseph trusts his dream.

He goes with the narrow path and enters the dance of mystery. Later another dream will guide his choices.

God’s angel showed up again in Joseph’s dream and commanded, “Get up. Take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt. Stay until further notice. Herod is on the hunt for this child, and wants to kill him.”

Joseph obeyed. He got up, took the child and his mother under cover of darkness. Matthew 2:13-15

I look at this whole story and take wonder at how God became so vulnerable to the decisions of a dusty human being like me and you. God depended on Joseph to go against the cultural and religious norms so that God’s plan would come to pass.

It all hinged on Joseph.

A dream swayed the momentum.

You and your dreams

How do you approach the world of your dreams?

My dreams fascinate me, and I consider them as simply another possible way God can speak.

I am currently reading Soul Therapy by Thomas Moore.

Here are some quotes to add to your thought blender.

It’s a mysterious thing, yet nothing could be more ordinary:

We go to bed at night, fall into a state we call sleep, and then visit lands of nearly pure fantasy. We revisit people from the past, those who have gone before us, and people we never knew. We do things that contradict the laws of nature, like flying in the air by flapping our arms. We have nightmares that make the heart pound with fear. Then we wake up, saying we “had” a dream, when actually we were in a dream.

In dreams I am a participant. I sense a continuity between the person I am in life and the dream-ego, the “I” experiencing the dream. Yet the dream-ego may be quite different in other respects from who I am in waking life. I meet a friend there, too, who in most respects is the same person I know in life, yet he may do something entirely unlike him. He feels like the person I know, but he is clearly someone else. He lives in the realm of dream. Thomas Moore – Soul Therapy

We are a rare society that does not take dreams seriously. Many intelligent people in the past have used dreams to help them find their way Patricia Cox Miller (1994) wrote that close to two thousand years ago dreams “functioned to bring submerged thoughts and fears to conscious awareness and provoked the dreamer to new forms of interaction with the world.” They “were barometers of inner dispositions and as roadmaps for negotiating the intersection of personal conscience and public action”. The fascination with dreams that many people have today is no doubt a reaction to the failure of society to take them seriously. We are now hungry to reconnect with this deep country of the psyche that promises to resolve many of our problems.

For centuries brilliant writers have explored theories about dreaming and methods for dealing with them. People have used dreams for divination and have understood them as visitations by angels and other spirits, hints about the future, and patterns from the dreamer’s psychological life. Thomas Moore – Soul Therapy

Christmas has the invitation to explore a mystery. God steps out of the heavenlies to set up a tent in our campsite.

And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. John 1:14 TLV

And Joseph had a dream.

Quotes to consider

Many modern people have trouble with dreams because they don’t usually think metaphorically. If they were to look at more paintings or read more poetry they would be used to thinking at multiple levels that are accessible only through metaphor. If you habitually notice metaphors, you can get a great deal from dreams without resorting to many techniques and theories. Thomas Moore – Soul Therapy
One word associated with dreams from ancient times and still used by some today is incubation. This word, of course, is used for birds sitting patiently on their eggs, waiting for them to hatch. What a perfect image for dealing with dreams. Sit with them patiently and keep them warm until they are ready to open up and reveal what they are all about. Thomas Moore – Soul Therapy
Let the dream interpret you. Let it affect the way you think and express yourself. Let it give you a glimpse of its mysteries. Let it give you the language to use and the meaning to cherish. Let the dream teach you to be dreamier, more reflective, and in some ways less active. Become a priest of the dreamworld, not its conqueror. Allow the dream to make you less forceful and analytical, more poetic and imaginative.
The ultimate goal in dream work may not be interpretation at all but in the invitation to live more fully in the realm of dream.
Jung once remarked that your dream work is not finished until you notice what it is asking of you. He used a stronger phrase: an ethical demand. Thomas Moore – Soul Therapy
With a dream, you are rarely certain about the final interpretation. You accept all the various ways of understanding it and allow a response to emerge. Thomas Moore – Soul Therapy
I walk through the caves of dream
And phantasms whirl around me
memories fall like rain
And I see myself as in a mirror darkly. Thomas Moore – Soul Therapy

Questions to consider

Have you had times when you have felt that your brain is in the middle of a Tug of war?
How have dreams influenced your life?
What aspect of the Christmas story challenges your need for a God of certainty?