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Last night I dreamt that I was standing on a sidewalk in an empty night.
From the impenetrable darkness I heard a child's voice begin the Lord's Prayer. Each word seemed to gather whispers off the sidewalk, and these whispers, speaking in time with the child, multiplied and magnified as the prayer continued, entwining my feet in a vortex of sound. The air around me quickened as the ever-widening spiral of voices gained a stormy momentum, and it seemed the whole of humanity was aiding and assisting this one child's words. In a moment the prayer had wrapped about my knees, and then it encompassed my sternum, until the tempest of voices, in ever expanding numbers and circles, rose over my head and into the darkness above.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
Here then, is my confession: I never once looked up in the dream to witness the prayer's trajectory. My eyes remained rooted to where my feet contacted the Earth; at that spot where the first murmurings of prayers voiced for twenty centuries rose to support a lone child in the dark. My cells were expanding and my lungs no longer supported me. My heart felt like an organ pumping life down a million passages into the surrounding dark. But I never looked up.
And so I remain tethered; to be greeted by another grey dawn.
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