The night after I drifted farther from the center of the purity path than I had in some time, I had this dream. It was strikingly vivid and full of minute detail in a way that dreams rarely are. I wrote it down for my own benefit, only to discover that it might serve as a good mediation for more people than myself. I hope it will.
I was on my way to a theater with some old friends, walking through a town that looked like 1940’s America, when I realized I had left my keys behind. When I turned back to retrieve them, everything suddenly looked like an Irish countryside instead of that town. I decided to try to take a shortcut and went off the road. On my left, as I went through the moors, I saw through the mist an enormous ruin of an old gothic cathedral, with heavy, moss spotted stones and an open roof in most places, and a multitude of small rooms coming off the main body of the church at every level.
I walked to a side entrance and carefully pushed open the tall, damp, heavy wooden door. A few steps in, I heard voices and I saw lights coming from somewhere below me. I found myself at the back of the main church and saw the altar at the end of a long, uneven aisle, far away from me. I looked down, and saw a vast hole in the floor, opening to level upon descending level, as far as I could see, with a narrow but strong stone staircase winding in squares along the edges of every level. There was the sound of wedding bells, far off, and on each level I saw a medieval bride in procession, with a heavy cathedral train spread out in a great length behind her, bridesmaids in simple medieval dress attending either side of the train. Each bride had vibrant dark red hair, very curly and long, flowing down around her arms, and shrouded by a finely-wrought and impressively long lace veil that followed the length of her cathedral train. The veils framed each face on a sort of tall and wide headdress of white flowers and silver drippings that piled several inches above the forehead and off to the sides above the temples of each bride. I could see the expression on the face of the bride on the highest level, just a few feet beneath me; though her attendants had downcast, sober faces as they held the edges of her train, her eyes were lifted up as she smiled hugely and insipidly. But she was entrancingly beautiful nonetheless. She walked slowly and regally, taking each step deliberately (all the brides at all of the levels stepped in time with each other), but going in a continuous square around the level she was on, never rising higher. There was no staircase that led up; presumably she would continue walking where she was, not realizing, in her vapidity, that there was no way out.
Some of the brides below her, though, had found a staircase. Just as slowly and regally, they were ascending one level at a time. They were equally radiant, and all seemed something out of a dream, even within my dream. There was an ethereal, other-worldly quality to the whole picture that I saw through the floor, and it left me in wondering, confused amazement.
I decided to explore the rest of the cathedral ruins, thinking maybe I could find someone who would explain to me what I had just seen. I realized, to my consternation, that the door I had come in was gone, so I turned to my left, and through some dark rooms at the back of the church, I found another staircase, this time of heavy wood, leading up to another level. As I moved toward the staircase, I heard the sound of a child crying, and realized that a thin small boy with dark curly hair was sobbing in a little heap in the hidden underside of the staircase. I bent down to see if I could help him, and he reached his arms up around my neck so I could pick him up. He was wearing almost nothing, and his skin was dirty. I cradled him in my arms like a baby, supporting his head with my hand, and turned his face so I could make eye contact with him and try to calm him. All at once his subsiding cries turned to maniacal laughter, and his mouth widened into a demonic grin until it was almost the only thing on his face. His scrappy arms with sharp fingers began scratching at my face, gouging deep gashes across my cheeks and eyes and lips as I screamed in fright and pain, and tried to drop him and push him away. Hardly able to see, I ran up the stairs, but he clung to me and continued to scratch at my face, neck and shoulders, tearing slashes through my clothes as he cackled. I felt fat drops of blood splashing from my face to my chest, leaving large red spots all over my off-white linen peasant’s shirt.
As I reached the landing at the top of the stairs, still unable to fight off the demon, I saw a man walking calmly towards me and cried for help. He reached in with one hand and easily plucked the creature away. It screamed as it was tossed back down the stairs and disappeared around a dark corner. Gasping and trying to calm myself, wiping blood out of my eyes, I looked at the man who had saved me. He was wearing a light brown robe with a knotted white rope around his waist, had a trimmed, pointed beard and an unwearying but peaceful warrior’s look to his thin face and stature. He was taller than I, and yet his height came more from the aura of subtle indomitability than his physical form. He might have been St. Joseph, or one of the early founders of a monastic order. I asked him, as I regained my composure, what that thing had been, and what the brides below were doing, and what they meant.
He answered with a stern but not unkind economy, “That is one of the demons disfiguring you because you love your intended more than you love God. They will continue to torment you until you have learned to put your loves in the proper order. The brides below are caught in their circular procession, close to marriage and yet unable to marry, for the same reason. You cannot take shortcuts to find the key, and you cannot marry properly unless you love God more than anything else. You will not find a door out of this ruin until you have worked here for many years and learned to love.”
He turned away to resume his own work, explaining as I looked past him and saw a busy scene, all under the open daylight of the roofless cathedral, that he and the other saints, and other workers I saw, were all there to help me and people like me to learn to order our loves. Some of the industrious crowd I could see were like me, but had started some time ago and were on their ways to sainthood. There were large drafting desks with piles of notes of accounts that needed to be calculated, and there were also mountains of fine cloth to be washed and folded and sorted. In some ways the room looked like a sacristy; there were long, narrow drawers to hold vestments, and other wooden cupboards among the remaining labyrinth of stone rooms and crannies.
As I took my first step out of the corner, preparing to join in the tasks at hand, an enormous stone gargoyle, tall and thin, swung suddenly into my path and began to advance on me, towering over me, prepared to crush me. I determined he should not win, and that I would conquer him with my own strength, and crack him till he fell to pieces at my feet. I realized, after I took my first swing, that I had barely impacted him at all, and he began to grin with the same long, wide demonic leer of the savage child. He moved in closer and faster, and his shadow blocked out the light as I backed into the corner and tripped on my hem, stumbling away from him. All at once I realized I couldn’t defeat him on my own, and that he was moments away from crushing me. I raised my arms above my head to shield myself and cried out, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, protect me!” I heard a wild sound of stone being crushed, and felt debris rain down on my hair and hands, and then felt warm sunlight. I opened my eyes, and the gargoyle had vanished, leaving only some light gray dust and rubble on the floor.
I blinked, and saw the man who had plucked away the first demon. He looked over his shoulder from where he was busy at work, nodded curtly, and said, “Well done. Now begin your work. Clean that cupboard, and then those drawers, so we can put away the priest’s vestments.”
I opened the cupboard he had indicated and a small animal came out, the size of a raccoon, but not fitting a description of any animal I knew. It leapt at my face, screeching, determined to attack me, but I stabbed it swiftly with the sharpened end of my broom handle, and it disintegrated. I nonchalantly brushed away the dark cloud it had left hanging in the air and looked inquiringly back at my guide, who had calmly watched the whole episode. He gave another curt nod in answer to my implied question. “Yes. With each task given to you, a new demon will come from the dirt, some large and powerful, some more easily defeated. You must destroy each one, and so you will gain your freedom as you clean and prepare the dark spaces.”
As he finished speaking, I heard a trumpet sound from far away. Everyone in the room smiled radiantly as they paused their work, and looked expectantly at the stairs. I saw a bride ascending, and she was simply dressed. She no longer had a train, and her bright red hair was all loose and flowing, covered only by a white lace mantilla that fell to the floor, meeting the hem of her dress. Rather than the six or eight attendants I had expected to see, there was only one. She looked at the bride now, rather than at the floor, and she smiled serenely. And the bride, no longer grinning vacuously at the sky, smiled a private, shy smile as she looked at the ground and was a little embarrassed at the pleased attention of the joyous onlookers. She walked across the room with an unhurried surety in her step, and a door opened in the stone wall across from where I stood, surrounded by wheat stalks and golden light. It opened to a brightness I couldn’t see, and she and her attendant stepped up into it. I ran to follow them, to try to see where they had gone, but the door closed before I could reach it. It disappeared, and the stone wall grew back.
“She has finished her work,” said my guide, “As you shall.”
Wow Ellen, that’s a lot of words!