I woke up from a dream. In my dream I found a lovely chapel in a monestary. At first it was old, dusty, laid out in choir with benches facing each other. I moved to the front and began to sing an old song I haven't heard in nearly fifty years. It is call the "O Canticles", a simple chant sung during Advent which anticipates the coming of the Lord. It is very beautiful as chants go, very easy to sing, and unlike other chants is written in a major key, without the sort of sad longing that characterizes so much chant. It's always been a favorite of mine.
     As soon as I started singing, the chapel changed. It was clean now, orderly, the dust was gone, and there were others in the pews around me, dozens of monks all singing the same chant. That was a treat for me because that's how I remember the song, prayed together in choir. When it was finished, the other monks got up and left, leaving me alone again in the echoing space...

     Perhaps some dreams are like prayers that God says, and because we are sleeping, quiet, we can hear them. When I woke up I was thinking about our journey, how far we have come in just a year and a half. How much we have changed. It isn't as though we set out to change. Rather, changes come to us like they come to seeds on the ground. The rains come, the wind blows, the sun shines and suddenly there is a new plant where there was nothing a day ago. JoAnne asked me last night to spend today helping her "thin out" our closet. She wants to begin letting things go. Whatever we don't need, whatever we haven't used in awhile, will go to charity or the recycling center. We want to make enough room in our lives to hear echoes. We want some space, inside and out, for God to flow in and find us. Today is Labor Day, for me, the beginning of the Holiday Season. This year we will celebrate our freedom.
    For it says in the Rule that we must become free to love God, and our teachers tell us that this freedom comes from God. We don't make it or do it to ourselves. But under His watchfulness we begin to see what we can Live without. We begin to crave it like the desert waits for water. This dream--where the music is filled with emptiness, holds no ornament, shows only the beauty of voices joined in prayer--was a sign of what God wants to give us, share with us. It is His language and he wants to teach it to us.
    God, in all his greatness and wonder, is simple. So is his Gospel. The two come together in our lives, if we want them. All we need to do is say "yes" and suddenly what was old and empty reveals its life. In exchange for the world, we are given Beauty...