Last night I dreamed that my baby was born, but someone had kidnapped it. I was desperately looking for it. When I reported the baby was missing the police said that it was not their job to find it. Still looking, I was holding my sister’s grandchild and it was also kidnapped. I went into a homeless shelter and saw no babies. An Imam I knew came in to help some of the homeless people. I asked if he could help me find the babies and he said no, he was there for the homeless. I awoke not knowing where to look next.
For the last 7 months I have been pregnant with a new identity. I am not even sure it has been born yet, but already I can imagine it being kidnapped along with other people’s new beginnings. The last few days have been actively stirring with political births and violent pushbacks to them. New identities are being born at many levels: the personnel for some, but also spiritual, political, cultural, and ecological. Like newborn babies of many species, these new births are extremely vulnerable. They need careful protection. Dreams come as warnings across all those levels.
The Christmas story is honest about the need to protect the baby from political violence. After all the new family’s visitors leave, the father Joseph has a dream that they must leave their country to protect their baby. They do so for two years. This well-known myth suggests that dreams can help us know how to protect the new – whether it is personal or political – and that such protection may be ones focus for more than a year’s time.
Have you ever had to protect a new birth, a new child, a new identity, a new political order, a new art form, a new social order? I remember feeling totally inadequate to the task after my first child was born. He was so small, fragile, and needy. I was lucky my mother came to help the first week because she had cared for seven babies who all survived. I still remember the day she left more than 45 years ago. I was terrified that now the baby would die. I must have done more that first year of his life then trying to find ways to stop his frequent vigorous crying, but mostly I remember quieting him by pushing him for miles in a baby carriage and nursing him the rest of the time. We both survived, but sometimes I made terrible mistakes. Once I was carrying him in a friend’s back yard and I dropped him on the ground. He wasn’t even wiggling; he simply fell out of arms as if I had opened them on purpose. I have done some bad things in my life, but I never felt more guilty before or since as he screamed his hardest for hours. Miraculously, he didn’t even have bruise after the fall.
No one ever tried to kidnap my children, so I think this dream baby is a symbol for one of those other levels of human experience. What is new and vulnerable in our lives? Are others of us afraid those vulnerable new beginnings will be taken from us? How do we protect them? Who can help us keep them safe? What do our dreams, our intuition, our wisdom guide us to do? Do we need to leave some things behind? What are we learning from our mistakes and our successes? What do we observe about our strengths? Do we trust that we can keep these new beginnings alive? Do we have the commitment to focus on protecting the vulnerable until they too are strong?