I have a dream

“I have a dream”. Abba sang a song about theirs and Martin Luther King prefaced his never-to-be –forgotten address to his listeners using the same four words. I have a dream too – that when my currently-being- edited book is ready for publication you’d be able to buy a copy from any K Mart, Big W, Coles and Woolies.

Regularly I thumb through attractively presented small books and magazines on their shelves and I’m conscious that anything openly religious or pertaining to God is just not there. Magazines like Breathe and Womankind can challenge the reader to reflect on deep personal issues that are common to everyone. Spiritualty, yes, but spirituality with a Christian focus, no.

In 2018 I published a book, A Gentle Unfolding, with the subtitle, Circling and Spiralling into Meaning. It was for sale in a few religious bookshops and on line, sold a few copies and that was that. Except I felt a compulsion to write another book.

Over the next year I wrote a lot but kept getting lost in a muddle of religious history and theology. I felt like a preacher instead of a woman exploring the spirituality that has threaded its way through my life. When a publisher is deciding whether or not to accept a book for publication they ask the writer who might be the targeted readers.

Women and men of all denominations’ probably middle-aged, critiquing the way they are living and looking to fill the gap once filled by church membership.

Prayerful women, many of the grandmothers, caught between the shoulds of institutional religion and their growing need to move away from churchy words into something more relational and quiet.

Then there were the outer suburb mums and dads who year after year filled the school hall four times over to celebrate first communions and confirmations. I wanted to pick up where their religious education classes or Sunday school left off and parish liturgy and homilies have failed to pick up.

Across Australia’s vast distances little communities of Catholics who come together each Sunday for a Liturgy of the Word and Communion – sheep without a shepherd looking for words to link the Gospel with the everyday.

 I wanted to liberate words commonly used about spirituality from inappropriate religious literature, piety, outdated language and outmoded ways of living and the headiness of male and monastic experience. I dreamt of replacing them with language that feels at home at the kitchen table, words and experiences that tapped into the reader’s own. In January 2020 I started again.

Years earlier Karl Rahner had talked about the mysticism of ordinary life. I decided to name my book Everyday Mystics. Three years on and Everyday Mystics has reached the editing stage and in a couple of months I’ll be ready to print out a ‘good’ copy.   What comes next? 

The prophets of the Old Testament were dreamers, doing their creative wordy best to speak God’s truth to a people whose faith and confidence in God was being swallowed up by the immense injustices of their world. Some of them, like Habakkuk, wrote down their messages from God. ‘Then Yahweh said, “Write the vision down, inscribe it on tablets to be easily read, since this vision is for its own time only: eager for its own fulfilment.

I’m not a prophet, but I too have a dream.

Judith judithscully.com.au