Dreams and a Book on Aquinas

Dreams perish under conditions of light like bog bodies suddenly exposed to oxygen.  And yet somehow it feels important to try to recapture what my subconscious was obsessing about just seconds before, as if I can rationally explain the irrational.  

It's a kind of metaphor for our supernatural God whom we try to fit into our natural brains.  Often our understanding lapses into superstition (?), like how Ross Douthat wrote against the health and wealth gospel and then... Or a middle-aged couple who liked to watch “Six Feet Under” and then...  Tragedies demand a "rationally irrational" explanation.  Or an irrationally rational. 

So in the dream I have wheelbarrows of nickels to pay the mortgage payment. Darwin Catholic - the last truly competent individual on earth I think is my subtext -  handles it, but is increasingly dyspeptic to the arbitrage and its elements of the menial. I worry he will move on to greener pastures and I’ll be left with this dumpster of antiquated money. 

The dream morphs to my dog somehow, now lost to wakefulness, perhaps in his performing services no one else will do.  Max licks fresh cuts on hands, crumbs off shirts, replaces old germs with new ones...

Understanding dreams remind me of the audio book I’m listening titled “Aquinas and Prayer” in that understanding everything is futile.

Sometimes it’s not about me, or even us as His patrimony. Like Jesus in the Temple or St. Thomas’s last gift of silence to God. Not finishing the Summa seems a great loss to us and our understanding of the Lord -- except it’s really not.

For one thing, it’s between him and God, a private moment, like the scholars had with the 12-year old Jesus in the Temple. 

For another, it's a last best statement on the inscrutability of God. Maybe the inscrutability was also a gift for Mary and Joseph.  And for the scholars a mountaintop moment to last a lifetime and beyond.  

A killer insight of the Aquinas book is to see that St. Thomas’s late silence was not so much a result of thinking that all of what he said was straw (only comparably so to his mystical experience) but because silence was in itself a tribute to God and therefore somehow a fitting way to end his life. 

For years it was years prior the great saint had written about the Trinity: “God is honored by silence. Not because we may say or know nothing about Him, but because we know we are unable to comprehend him.”