The Circle of the Garden

by

Iowa Annual Conference | May 1, 2025

As some of you might remember, I have long had an interest in dreams. 

Part of my interest in dreams and dreaming took me into the rich Biblical accounts. I am certain we do not work enough with the stories of Biblical dreamers or the dreams themselves.  Do we remember that the story of Jacob’s ladder is a dream, and upon waking, Jacob cries out, “Surely the Lord is in this Place,” and names the place of the dream Bethel?  What about Daniel and the prophetic knowledge revealed to him through dreaming? Both the Joseph of the Hebrew Bible and the Joseph of Matthew.  If we include Biblical people who were having visions, we could create a whole lectionary around dreamers, dreams, and visions!!  I, for one, would love that!!

During Holy Week, I pulled out a creative piece I was working on a while back about the possible dreams of the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane when they fell asleep as Jesus prayed. I imagined what it would be to have been one of those Disciples and what they might have dreamed.  The essay moves in three “circles” that speak from the voice of the disciples who call upon their dreams and knowledge of sacred Scripture to connect them in this garden with the first garden where Adam was placed and to point toward reunion in the last garden.

First Circle

We can not stay awake.  Again, we are in a garden, cultivated yet wild, intimate with holiness, like Eden, our original sacred space.  Now the garden is called Gethsemane—a place set apart to pray. 

Literally: the place of the oil press.  Olive oil and water are separated in an oil press. A millstone crushes the olive whose half weight is pure oil.  The water runs red when the oil bursts from the olive.  “Jesus’ agony became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.” 

Now we know where we are:  the space where the press, the crush of the one who is the Messiah, literally in Hebrew: “the one, who is smeared”, begins with prayer, while we sleep, in the garden. 

We cannot stay awake.  We do not obey.  Again.  Like in the Eden of old, in this garden of another age, of different first fruits, we do not obey.  Watch with me, do not fall asleep,” he says to us. “Take this cup,” Jesus prays to God, “but not my will but thine.”   “My cup runneth over,” repeats the psalm.  So much fullness.  Too much fullness.  “Not my will, but thine."

Maybe this time we really are obeying.  Would the God, Jesus, to whom you pray, be calling us to sleep even though you ask us to stay awake? Has the time of dreaming broken open with the olive?

“Watch with me," Jesus says, “do not fall asleep.”

Please do not let us sleep – but Jesus, the fatigue is overwhelming.  Sometimes the fullness is more than we can bear in this Chronos consciousness.  Chronos: the world of our immediate senses. The invitation you offer is expensive, like precious oil.  How shall we gather the strength to follow if not through dreams?  Through a dream, we enter the Kairos: the world of our immediate intimacy. In you, these dimensions of time and timelessness are coalescing, they are transfiguring to the new way.

We cannot stay awake.  While Jesus takes a second communion here in prayer, after our supper in the upper room, we struggle to keep watch.  But dream we must. We shall keep the watch through the dreams

Second Circle

The first communion in the life of Christ is fellowship, and the second communion is being alone in the presence of God. In the development of a person, we know this to be a psychological truth: we are symbiotic and connected; then we become separate and learn we are solitary yet in community. A child plays with her toys at the feet of her mother, lost in the imagination of reality. We learn to dream awake as well as in sleep.  In the spiritual development of our souls, we are one with God, then we become separate, and next we learn we are solitary with God, yet still held in the community of the beloved. We learn to dream in prayer.  We learn to dream awake and asleep. We learn to pray awake and asleep.

Now, in the garden of Gethsemane, as God offers the second communion of intimacy in the night, we fall asleep. Jesus is surrounded by our dreaming selves.  He is alone with God in the community of the beloved. Jesus asks us not to sleep, but perhaps this is another instance of “not my will but thine.”  Perhaps it is the divine intention that we sleep so the dreams will come. Too much wakefulness in this Gethsemane might be unbearable for the limited selves we still are. Let us imagine this is compassion for us. Maybe the Father needed to speak alone to Jesus. Maybe he needed to speak alone to Jesus in the presence of the circle of friends who walked this far with him.  And for us, maybe on our behalf, we are asked to become more through the dreams, more for Jesus, more for ourselves. Jesus is left awake in the presence of God and surrounded by the dreams of his companions. 

We close the circle.  Garden to Garden. We sleep now. God needs us to dream: tiredness creeps into our thoughts, fatigue weighs our eyelids, and our breath grows slow, gentle, rested.  We dream. What do we dream?  What do disciples dream about?

We dream of the garden of costly life. Everything lives in the circle. We are one and we are many. Everything is on a wheel.  It is the wheel of life, and it is the wheel of the oil press.  We are crushed and we are broken open. Our oil pours into the world. We come to the garden again, where we are from, and God speaks to us. We sleep and dream this night to fulfill our destiny, as Jesus is to fulfill his.  Again, we shall be cast from the sacred garden, but this time, our soil to till is the life of the world. To lift the dispossessed. To reach out to the lost and marginalized. To heal the wounded in mind, body and spirit.  And for that, maybe we must dream of who we are becoming this night, after communion, after our feet are washed, and after we have broken the bread of life.

We dream of being alone in the presence of someone, the Wonderful Someone who has knit us in our mother’s womb, and so, the promise of never being alone lives in our skin, our breath, and our thoughts.  We dream that our lives are the precious oil bursting from the olive, softening the skin of life, nourishing the heart, lowering the stress.  We dream of going home and of going on, the road merging into one path, a circular way. 

Do not go to sleep, He said -- and yet we could not resist, we need the dreams, and the dreams bring us again to the knowledge of Good and Evil.  Wild and beautiful, courageous and desperate, the dreams from the God of our ancestors break into our minds.  Once again, we must leave the garden.  

We dream of being lost and losing each other. We dream of being found and finding each other. We dream of earthquakes and tombs opening. We dream of people speaking in wild languages of love, forgiveness and mercy. We dream of fear, hurt, and betrayal. We dream of being washed in the river of light that heals us. We dream. We dream.

When we wake, the soldiers are there to take Him. Thou anointest me in the presence of mine enemies. My cup runneth over.  It is time for us to leave this second garden.  But this time, God decides not only to go with us, but to go first.

Now the circle enlarges: we dream the dream God dreams. We will go through the hell of betrayal.  And there he is!  He meets us there! “You will betray me…. did you have to betray with a kiss...go now and do what you must….”  

We will flee the cross, and he will be on the cross, crying out with all that is Life in Him: “forgive them, they do not know yet.”  

We will wait for the women to tell the tale. So God gives vision and strength to the women:  “Birth this truth all you Marys, run and say to Peter and Andrew and John, I have risen.”  

We will hide in the upper rooms, and He shall come and stand before us, saying, “touch my wounds, touch my body, believe!”  We are always, now, in the intimacy.

We dream we can hear the many voices of people speaking the language of spiritual hope, and behold, so it is. We dream we are awakened from our despair, and behold, it is so. We dream that the circle that began in Eden, where we forgot how to love ourselves and God, is completed as God anoints us in amazing grace that loves beyond our failings. 

Third Circle

God once said to us, “Do not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or you will be like me, knowing good and evil, and you shall surely die.”  Immediately, we ate.  Did our knowledge make us die? Did God know this would be a kind of sadness in the creation: that we would die a thousand deaths upon the sword of good and evil, choosing them with equal measure, and thus living lives with wounds as big as the piercing of swords? Did God want to spare us? Did He know how our hearts would break? Was it clear that some of the beloved might be long in finding their way to healing?  

Over the eons, the people walked upon the earth, hewing their lives from the labor of mind and body.  Around fires at night, tales of the garden recalled glimmers of fullness, of joy and justice, deep within the ancient memory of the soul. When the moon rose, the wise ones saw the certainty of light in the night, watched with growing curiosity the three days when she disappeared from the sky.  Our lives must be like that, these wise ones thought: we are here, and then we disappear for a while, and then we are here again; or perhaps the three nights of empty sky are the gateway to ancient Eden, and sometime the soul will ascend to meet the flaming cherubim guarding the way. Then, in honor of the dignity of the soul’s persistence, the angels might step aside, and the garden gate would swing open. We dreamed a dream.

The wise ones saw the circle of the sun casting rainbows in the light. They understood the length of days and the length of a single history in a single soul. They saw how the Sun held the story of everything since the beginning, and how a life held one story, a part of the whole. They wrote about the voice of God murmuring and shouting through the veil to men and women chosen to hear. They began to tell the story of our lives outside Eden.

The circles of human history told those stories and held the vestige of the garden in songs and prayers. The garden lived in the breath of human beings. The garden lived in the roots carried from place to place, and in the embers wrapped and unwrapped from camel bags, as the people went from place to place.  Each ember lighting anew from the old a fire that warmed the hands, cooked the food and held the mysteries of the gathered tribe.

And yet, we are not as strong as you are, God. We needed a way to return to the garden in this life. A great mercy opened in God’s thought.  His name is Jesus.  

We were cast out of the first garden, to sweat and labor upon the land, to break open our bodies in childbirth, to live as God lives: being the gardener, the womb from which love bursts, and the sojourner.  Now, God says to us, as you live in the discipleship of Jesus, you will become even more like I am, carved out in suffering, knowledge and love. The breath, the Ruah, the Spirit of the Lord, lives in you, is the wind moving around you, over the face of the deep, and with profound intimacy into your deep cellular tissue, into your blood, into your bone.

You shall be pressed like the olive, as in the fashion of your Teacher. And your dreams shall teach you about love and gift and hope and healing. 

And so there came another garden, a circle of trust in a place of prayer.  A way to return, to complete another circle. This garden, like the first Eden, is made for conversation with God.  Gethsemane. It was made so our lives would be split open like an olive, and the oil of ourselves would drip into the waiting palms of the hungry people. For this garden, we were called into the dreams.  And then later, in a time to come, John, thrashing in his dreams, captured in his visions, will promise us a final time, a last garden, when we stand in the Presence, home.

(Visit Mary’s website, www.sacreddreaming.com , for more information on dreams!)