Daring to Dream From the Divine Womb
Mystical Hope for Advent
“We are all of us together carried in the one world-womb; yet each of us is our own little microcosm in which the Incarnation is wrought independently with degrees of intensity and shades that are incommunicable.”
—Teilhard de Chardin
This advent season we are considering our own conception, our own carrying within, the capacity to bear our own divine offering, to bring into this world our unique and particular incarnation of divine life in this time.
We can bear this possibility within ourselves, each one of us, conceived in spirit. We have each been called to this divine participation. We have each received our own annunciation. If we chose to consent to this indwelling, we bear the divine life within. We nurture and hold it, dreaming with hope what will come forth in and through us in this life.
Becoming divine mothers of Christ in the world means that we carry the hope of glory within. The hope of all that might come forth for the goodness and redemption of the world, not through a one-time savior but born forth again and again through each and all who might be carriers, who might hold within and nurture the divine spark growing in our very own wombs.
Our spiritual womb is a space of possibility and potentiality. Whatever it is that might be born forth is, for the most part, unknown. It is shrouded in the nurturing darkness. We cannot mentally know what it is that is growing inside of us, nor do we need to know in this way.
In a time of pregnancy, we are given the gift of holding not only the new life that is coming into being but also the gift of anticipation, the gift of dreaming into the scope of possibilities that might come forth from this fresh new life waiting to be born. We are free to dream what might become, to delight in the ripe potentiality with joy. To hope in what is growing from within us together.
Hope Born Out of Faith
We may also feel some fear, too, as any parent-to-be does. There is much to be concerned about regarding the future of our world. And it’s easy to get overwhelmed or discouraged, to feel that the future will not be kind. Or to despair the darker horizon.
Advent is the season of darkness, of the unknown. Shrouded deep within, among our hopes and dreams, are the fears and shadows of loss. We may feel the pain of barrenness. We may feel the ache of miscarriage. We may still be waiting. How long, oh Lord?
We don’t know the future, just as we don’t know who a child will grow up to become. Or what sort of world they will inhabit.
One of the gifts of wombfulness is the capacity to sense and intuit the divine life coming to conception. To feel the quickening in ourselves and one another. To begin to sense more deeply the spirit of God planting seeds in the dark, rich compost of what looks like decay, what feels like death, and what may even smell like rot.
We don’t see this with our normal eyes. We don’t learn this through conventional wisdom. We find it in the cave of our hearts, in the deep hope born in the ground of our being, in the source of life and vitality we draw from every day. This river never runs dry. And in the darkness we may still hear its ripples. We might feel its undercurrents. We can know we are still in the flow, even if we don’t sense that we are moving at all.
This is faith, which is sourced in our womb space—not the propositional beliefs of our heads. The foundational trust in God—God-Being-Us, God-Beside-Us, & God-Beyond-Us—who is alive and at work in our midst, in the fibers of our being, in the great mystery beyond, and always still coming to be born. Especially in the darkness.
It is here from which our true hopes and dreams are born.
Hope, not as a denial or avoidance of difficult realities. Nor as an excuse to keep from changing or taking the necessary steps to bring about a better future. But hope in and as the divine intervention, wrought through our struggles and fashioned uniquely into form through our co-creative participation in birthing God anew.
This is the message of advent, that there is a star in the night sky that tells of a new hope, a new dawn. Not only that Christ will come, but will come again and again. That there is still hope for the world, ever and always.
For a tree has hope:
though cut down, it can still be removed,
and its shoots will not cease.
Though its root grow old in the ground
and its stock die in the dust,
from the scent of water it flowers,
and puts forth branches like a sapling.
Job 14:7-9
Dreaming a New World
From the wellspring of hope we find our dreams arise.
Hope opens us up to be able to receive the mystical dreams beyond our own calculations and considerations, beyond our own fears and losses.
A mystical dream is not a plan for problem-solving, though it may lead to that at some point. Nor is it a fanciful indulgence of naïve imagination.
Rather, a mystical dream is a co-creation with spirit that arises in intensified consciousness. It comes through a posture of openness and receptivity, much like Mary receiving a divine conception. We are participating, yet also receiving something from beyond ourselves. We are consenting to allow ourselves to be active vessels for the bringing to bear of a new form, a new life, a new possibility.
We receive these dreams not in our heads alone, though we may see them there. These divine dreams are sourced from deep within, given by the breath of spirit to our souls, absorbed in our bodies and held in our wombs.
Here, we dare to receive these dreams of spirit coming to life. And we become the bearers who incarnate them into being.
A Spiritual Practice of Dreaming
This is an intentional practice that we can take into our prayer or meditation time or into our WeSpace groups. For a guided recording of this practice, see below or click here.
1. Start by spending some time moving into a state of deeper consciousness and awareness, however you best do that. Perhaps through dropping into embodied awareness in each of your four centers through Whole-Body Mystical Awakening or any other practice that moves you into a state of inner spaciousness and energetic sensitivity.
2. Let yourself gravitate your awareness to whichever center of spiritual knowing within (head, heart, womb, feet) that you are feeling drawn to in the moment. In a WeSpace group, whoever is facilitating the guiding can follow his/her intuition here, either leading everyone to the same space for coherence or allowing each to move according to their own leading. For this practice, I might recommend going to the womb, but any space will have its value and different qualities. You might also even consider doing further separate practices for each of the centers. Whichever space you move into now, focus this time on an inner posture of opening and welcome to something new, something not already known.
3. When you are ready, raise the question, “What is possible?”
(You may find other questions arising also. Feel free to explore those as well.)
4. Don’t try to answer the question yourself or think through possibilities. This is not a problem-solving activity. Rather, let yourself be open from that center of spiritual knowing to receive. These impressions may come in a fleeting instant, or sometimes rather strongly in steady awareness. They may come in the form of images, sensations, intuitions, or even just a deep feeling. You may find thoughts coming up, and these, too, might be the form of the dream. You’ll sense if it’s of a different quality or tenor than your usual ordinary thoughts.
These forms of possibility may be related to an unknown time in the future. Or something very particular in the moment now. Don’t try to “pin down” a time or move to any “action steps” yet. For now, just let yourself receive the dream into your body, as a gift.
In a group, if you like and when you feel ready, you can speak these arisings and dreams to one another. You may even find sharing from others adds to or enhances your dream in cocreative generativity. If alone, you may want to write down or journal from this state, reflecting over what has come—without moving into systematic thinking. You can do that later. Try to stay with the arisings from the center as long as is fitting. Be willing to let yourself be surprised by what comes.
So, here is the practice again with short directives. Feel free to be for as long as you need in each step:
1. Move into mystical awareness.
2. Move into a particular center of spiritual knowing with the posture of openness and welcome.
3. Ask the question, “What is possible?”
4. Be open to receiving the arisings from that center, speaking or noting what comes, cocreating a mystical dream of possibility.
(For step 3, you can also experiment with different questions that might be a little more focused on your particular life situation at the moment, either choosing a question beforehand or letting it arise in the moment)
Here is a guided recording of this practice you can use as well:
A Dream of You, A Dream of Us
In most of our sleeping dreams, we watch the events unfold before us with little to no control over what is happening.
In a mystical dream, there is still a quality of releasing control from our usual state of personal will. We are choosing to receive something beyond our own usual egoic conceptions. We are opening ourselves to dreams born from divine conception, participating together with us.
Also, even in lucid dreaming—where we find a sense of awareness and personal choice—we are still usually bound to the singular perspective of ourselves and what we might personally choose to do.
Our mystical dreams need not be so limited, nor so individual.
In these dreams, you are not alone. Possibility doesn’t rest on just your shoulders. You will have your specific dream and calling that is your unique incarnation “wrought independently” and to some extent “incommunicable,” as Teilhard put it. More about this vital uniqueness in following weeks.
But our mystical dreams also cannot exist on their own alone. In isolation, our individual dreams will most often fade into forgetfulness or flights of fancy.
When we are able to bring them into conjunction with others in the same field of coherence, they take on a greater substance and a fuller energy—a shared vitalization amidst a community of dreamers. And we, in turn, support and cogenerate one another as well. We may even find others with the same dream being brought forth within them as well, our own mystical kin.
This is one of the great gifts of community, of the shared belonging to the collective becoming of the body of God—the incarnation again and again, together. Full of hope for a better world, saved by the inbreaking of God with us, Emmanuel.
You are the divine intervention. And so am I. And so is everyone who chooses to work—and to dream—so we may bear forth the better world that is possible.
Christ, the savior of the world.