On the Moon’s Watch
by Pierrette R. Stukes, PhD
The moon is the shaded, cloistered sister to the sun’s resplendent masculinity. She offers a tender guidance to which we may be called to give reverence in our search for meaning and purpose in our lives. Mythologically, the moon symbolizes the feminine, the intuitive. It is an archetype for the cyclical rhythm of life and death and rebirth. Mystically, the circular shape of the moon symbolizes the omnipresent oneness of the Divine Mystery in all things and, thus, our profound spiritual unity with it. But the diffused, changing light and shape of the moon also symbolize our sacred relation to the Holy One by way of darkness, uncertainty, and mystery. I am learning these days that one way divine guidance comes is in the stillness of the night, in the wilderness of the unconscious, in the holy gift of the dream which offers itself up for opening on the moon’s watch.
In the Christian tradition, Jesus gives confident assurance of the Divine Lover’s steadfast guidance: "Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Luke 11:9). What a bracing and awesome promise from the Beloved! It is unequivocal. Yet, we know from our frail and imperfect human lives that both the asking and the receiving are fraught with missteps, misunderstandings, and mistakes. We may struggle to know for what to ask that will nurture, enrich, and bless us. And we sometimes do not know when we have received a holy gift.
Why is this? What has brought us to this place of spiritual confusion? For one thing, we may have come to rely far too faithfully on our intellect, our reason and may have lost faith in our intuition, our inner wisdom. In our self-reliance, we may have lost sight of Sacred Presence which existed before and outside of time and which creates and sustains us. Have we become postmodern believers who lay claim to the existence of Ultimate Reality but no longer lean on the surety of sacred support? This seems likely. We need only pay passing attention to the existential despair which has gripped individuals who resort to violence against their loved ones to know that we have lost our holy ballast.
We live in a time of spiritual nihilism. We no longer believe in the moon. My husband and I recently explored camp grounds and chuckled at the sight of a tent with an electrical cord snaking out of its door, its inhabitants afraid of the dark and immune to the moon’s soft glow. All of us—individuals, families, communities, countries, the world—are crying out urgently for a way back to the Sacred Lover. How do we restore our connection with the Holy One? How will we know when we have received its guidance? We will know that the Beloved has always been communicating its gifts to us when we prepare the spiritual ground of our souls to receive them.
How do we cultivate our souls in a time in which seeking spiritual meaning and purpose has become a cynical joke of our secular culture? I believe we are being called to return to ancient forms of spiritual practice, forms imbued with mystery and mysticism, as an antidote to postmodern nihilism. One of these forms is the vision quest. The vision quest is the ancient, sacred journey of the archetypal hero or heroine. The spiritual traveler wanders, with intention, into a deserted and desolate landscape without the benefit of food in order to cleanse the inner Self and to receive a vision. Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammad, the Native American Shaman, all prepared their soul’s ground through a vision quest experience. Into the wilderness they journeyed, knowing beyond a doubt that their soul’s questions would be asked and received.
I recently went on my first vision quest. In the cool, utter quiet of the night, the moon rose and illuminated a single tree in the damp woods. I was mesmerized and grateful to witness the tender, shaded caress of the moon’s luminescence. I heard the footfalls of spirits, guarding my shamanic temenos. Visions appeared before me, and I was granted a purpose for my return to my community. My purpose is still percolating. I have no idea how it will unfold. But I wait, in trust, in knowing, and in emptiness.
As I wait, I have been rewarded for my faithful knowing that the Holy One came to me in the liminal space of my quest. Images of the moon have appeared as the enduring impression from my sojourn. The moon has been present on my 4:00 am walks of a restless puppy, in my seemingly random nighttime readings, and in my dreams, even as I am back home among the safe comforts of “reality.” I have paused over this repetition, what Carl Jung would call a synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, as the Beloved’s affirmation of Presence in the wilderness.
You too can take up the mantle of the archetypal sojourner. You too can journey into the inner Self for all that hungers for redemption, healing, and purpose. You too can cultivate an attitude of faithful waiting in your daily lives, here and now. The most natural of human activities, when ritualized with meaning and mindfulness, enables us to wait for the still, small voice of the Holy Lover. It may begin with the sweet desire for silence, calling us to breathe in the awesomeness of Ultimate Presence. We listen to our body’s subtle wisdom, gently urging us to cleanse ourselves of processed food and processed life. We become lovers of nature, walking in solitude to hear the wood’s voices and to hear our own soul’s wandering. We pause before answering “yes” or “no” to life’s requests, trusting an inner intuition to speak us into our authentic responses. In this time of great financial upheaval, we discover we no longer need, or even want, the mere gratifications of material security. We revel in a life of simplicity. Trusting the sacred space in which we have placed ourselves, we wait in silence, solitude, and simplicity for a vision for how we are to lead an authentic life of wholeness and holiness.
We wait. We wait in emptiness and in receptivity. And the more we practice the spiritual art of waiting, the more we set aside our own finite plans and goals. Each day that we awake with the spiritual intention to wait, we empty ourselves. And in the spirit of Mary, mother of Jesus, we are made empty that we may receive the gift of Divine Mystery, be literally filled with grace.
One avenue of that grace is the dream. John Sanford, Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst, has written extensively about the sacred nature of the dream in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. In Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language, Sanford concludes, “Dreams and visions were regarded in both the Old and New Testaments as revelations from God. . . . The entire Bible is the story of God’s breakthrough into the human conscious mind via the unconscious” (94). Abram, Jacob, his son Joseph, Moses, Daniel, Solomon, Jesus, Paul all received and relied on visions and dreams in their awakening to God’s call for them.
The unassuming Joseph, the betrothed of Mary, is just one figure of Christian scripture who listened to God’s voice in the night. He relied on his dreams to become the human shepherd of Jesus into the world. Four dreams encouraged him to remain steadfast to Mary, to flee Herod’s murderous envy, and to return, not to Israel, but to the district of Galilee, to the town of Nazareth (Matthew 1:20-25; 2:13-15; 2:19-23). Joseph was a man who followed his intuition, who believed in the holy guidance of his dreams. His faithfulness to the moon’s offerings reveals to us, as much as Mary’s faith in her angelic visions, the wisdom way of sacred guidance.
Christianity’s spiritual forebears trusted in God’s voice in the waking visions of the day and in the dreams of the night. One way the writer of Acts instilled the early Christian church with confidence in its future was in reminding his readers of God’s unwavering presence and guidance through visions and dreams. He quotes from the book of Joel in Acts 2:17: “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” In Philippians, among other letters, Paul also speaks of this historical and cultural belief in and reliance on the mystical and mysterious world of the vision and the dream. He assures his readers, “It is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (2:13).
The dream is a sacred offering, “at work in us,” guiding us to our wholeness and holiness. It comes unbidden. It comes outside the linear, objective goals of our conscious ego’s desires. It comes, as Jeremy Taylor says, “in the service of health and wholeness” (The Living Labyrinth 262). It requires us to sacrifice the ego’s dominance and to place the ego in the service of the Self. The ego has gotten a bad rap. We need a healthy ego to provide us a sure container for our life. The ego also likes to think it is in control. But the ego, whistling in the dark its arrogant assurance of its own superiority, does not serve in the preparation of the soul to hear the Divine Beloved’s gifts of guidance. So when we begin to surrender our ego to its proper relation to the Self, it may recoil from the meandering meaningfulness of the unconscious dream life. But our souls yearn for this intuitive counsel. To honor our dreams is to bow to the Holy One’s voice seeking us, outside the conscious frame of our ego which believes it is the master of its domain.
Listening for the divine messages of our dreams is not for the faint of heart. The nocturnal storytelling of dreams is highly structured yet veiled in the language of metaphor and symbol. Dreams unfold sequentially, each image or event, in its place, revealing the wisdom of the dream. They offer up numerous levels of meaning at once. They are rarely about others and always about our selves. They are never fully “understood,” only nurtured, tended, and respected. Jungian analyst and Presbyterian minister Jerry Wright reminds us, "It is the intensity with which we engage the images of the dream" that is essential for their birth. So when we decide to follow our dreams’ paths, we must be faithfully diligent. We may find the ego building surer walls of defense, as our dreams offer up the unlived parts of the Self for integration. But we contribute to the continuing unfoldment of the Self when we attend to our dreams. Like the hero or heroine on a vision quest, we must go out away from the safe harbors of the conscious, rational life and into the unconscious sea of mystery and meaning.
Jesus promises, “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find.” Honoring our dreams is one of the richest vision quests to the inner soul. We discover that our souls ask the questions of our heart, and we are answered. We are seldom answered with rational answers to life’s questions. We are blessed, instead, with
intuitive truths to the soul’s yearnings and longings which reveal to us the next step of our journey. When we bow to the holy voice of our dreams which comes in the quiet of the night, on the moon’s watch, our souls are rewarded with wholeness and holiness. With each dream image nurtured, we harvest the Sacred within.
The Divine Lover waits for you to go to sleep. So bask in the glow of the moon, go on a vision quest to the inner soul, and tend to your dreams.
Pierrette received her PhD in English Literature in 2002 from The George Washington University with a specialization in psychoanalysis and culture theory. She has taught at colleges and universities since 1991. She is a certified spiritual director in the Jungian tradition. Her retreats and workshops mine the intersection of spirituality and psychology. She has been offering compassionate hospitality to others since 2006. Please feel free to contact her with musings, questions, and concerns.
24 June 2009 © Pierrette Stukes, PhD, Heart Directions, Inc., a spiritual hospitality ministry offering one-on-one spiritual direction, retreats and workshops. Contact Pierrette at pstukes@skybest.com.
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