The following is an account of a dream of Carmen Joy Imes, the first contributing editor of the Sacred Roots Spiritual Classics. Her dream not only inspired her to contribute Praying the Psalms with Augustine and Friends, but continues to inspire the Sacred Roots Initiative in retrieving our Christian heritage for the whole church.
"When I was asked to write this book, I planned to say no. Two things changed my mind. First, my teenage daughter begged me to say yes. Eliana is a philosophy major in the Honors Program at George Fox University. She loves reading ancient texts, and she wanted to help. The chance to work on a mother-daughter project was enticing. Second, I had a dream (literally). It was not the typical process-random-parts-of-my-day-with-a-strange-combination-of-people-from-my-entire-life kind of dream. It seemed significant.As I awoke the next morning the interpretation took shape. It felt like a message from God straight to me.
"The dream was a single image, a painting. It looked like a Greek Orthodox icon (which is outside of my own church experience). A man was standing on a bridge in the center of the painting, reaching into the “nave” of a church with his left hand to grasp a yellow pear, and extending his right hand to a group of people huddled outside. As I awoke, I somehow knew that the pear represented the Psalms. I was not entirely sure what a “nave” was (though I knew it was some part of cathedral architecture), so I looked it up. The “nave” is the sanctuary of the church where worshipers gather. As I reflected on this dream, it began to make sense.
"The vision of the Sacred Roots Spiritual Classics is to make our Christian heritage available and accessible to everybody. If you are hungry for more knowledge of God and thirsty for mentoring from faithful and fruitful Christians, then we have you in mind. After all, the Psalms are for the whole church, but especially for those afflicted—for those resilient men and women for whom every day presents a new challenge. The Psalms have been the mainstay of the church’s worship for thousands of years, but our generation has nearly lost them. We lack the habit of praying the Psalms, either individually or together. It is from the ancient church that we need to recover the practice of praying the Psalms. That is why the man in my dream was reaching into the church. He was recovering the fruit of faithful Christian worship in order to make it available for us today.
"I know very little about art history, but I have a great little book called Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. It explains that in Christian art, a pear usually represents Christ. This is significant. Ancient readers of the Psalms saw Christ as the primary voice in the Psalms. True, they were written hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus. However, because God took on human flesh and joined us in the suffering of this world, Jesus could pray the Psalms along with us. He entered into our joys and sorrows, finding in the Psalms the language of prayer. If they were essential to Jesus’s faith, they are essential to ours as well. In these ancient prayers, Christ identifies with our struggles and expresses dependence upon the Father. It is appropriate, then, to see Jesus as the center of the painting in my dream. By praying the Psalms, Christ demonstrates the life of faith, inviting us to pray with him. So I said yes to this project, and I have learned so much along the way. In the pages that follow, you will find a brief mediation on each psalm from believers in Jesus who lived long ago. These ancient voices will give us a sense of the sacred roots of our faith. Our primary teacher will be an African man named Augustine."
~Carmen Joy Imes, in Praying the Psalms with Augustine and Friends, 6–8
