Kings and Dreams
May 30, 2014
Read
Dear child of God,
What do you dream about in your loveliest of dreams?
…Do you know what God dreams about?
If you close your eyes and look with your heart,
I am sure, dear child, that you will find out.
– God’s Dream, by Archbishop Desmond Tutu & Douglas Carlton Abrams
Reflect
I use Desmond Tutu’s Storybook Bible and his wonderful book God’s Dream often in my work. If you have anything to do with teaching young children, I highly recommend them. I bought them because I adored the artwork, which celebrates diversity. In fact, in the Storybook Bible, a different artist illustrates each page so Jesus is shown with many different colors of skin. Boy, does that inspire some great conversations with kids!
The books are connected by Tutu’s theology of God’s dream, a non-hierarchical metaphor for “the Kingdom of God.” The dream is a longing we can all feel in our hearts for a universally peaceful and generous human society. In these books his description is kid-friendly: people caring, sharing, laughing, playing and loving one another. Even to an adult, God’s Dream is a beautiful and touching refection. Tutu imagines we all have a piece of God’s heart inside us and when we live in peace with one another, God’s heart is whole.
For years, both my spirituality and my theology have revolved around the idea of the Kingdom of God, though I was familiar with objections to the hierarchy implicit in the metaphor. Then it happened that I read God’s Dream and a particular passage in the Hebrew Scriptures on the same day. When the Israelites whine and beg about how they want their very own king, like all the other kids’ nations, God warns them that kings are not always just and good, and few can resist exploiting their power. So Tutu, with the authority of a man who pioneered truth and reconciliation in South Africa, has reimagined an ancient metaphor, and stripped it of that hierarchy. I am very glad.
To me, God is not a king, but The One who calls us, through our dreams and longings, toward this future of generosity and peace, where we might live together in a way that makes God’s heart whole.
-Amber Belldene
Respond
Close your eyes and look with your heart. Peer into your deepest longings. Can you see God’s dream?
Verdery
The term “God’s Dream” is lovely–something still in process, something in which we can participate and to which we can add our own parts, our own dreams.
Actually, I don’t mind the “kingdom” of God; I actually prefer it to the current term “The Reign of God”. To me “reign” is a top-down, power-driven, even dictatorial system. But a kingdom is a place as well as how things run, somewhere we each have a place and can play a part. And there’s somehow the implication that the king owes a certain responsibility to his subjects, even as they owe him their loyalty. (OK, I’m not using inclusive language, but somehow “king” has some resonances that “monarch” simply doesn’t have.)
Amber Belldene
Verdery, I know what you mean–the way you describe the kingdom does appeal, and it reminds me of the peaceable kingdom, where the lion lays down with the lamb.
I wrote this post ages weeks ago, but today I happened to read from the Storybook Bible to Kindergartners, and was so moved by the story of Jesus healing Jairus’s daughter, because he calls her “Child of God,” just like in God’s Dreams. Perhaps reading God’s Dream to my own kids and those I serve at church made that phrase hit me so hard, about the dead girl raised. I began to cry and had to pause for several long seconds to get my emotions under control. Wow.