Keep the Dream Alive

I am visited again this morning by Howard Thurman.  He encourages me to hold on to my dream and the American Dream as I struggle with whether or not a “dream” makes any difference or has any value these days. “As long as a person has a dream in his or her heart, he cannot lose the significance of living.”   I argue with Howard a bit, suggesting  that life calls for hardcore “realism” these days.  To talk about one’s dreams, or the American Dream,  is to be seen as a romantic, as naive, a bleeding heart, and as immature.  Dreams of any kind are viewed as an escape hatch from reality. But, Howard persists, “Persons (and nations) cannot continue long to live if the dream in the heart has perished.  It is then that they stop hoping, stop looking, and the last embers of their anticipations fade away.”

“Where there is no dream, life becomes a swamp, a dreary dead place, and deep within, a person’s heart (the nation’s heart) begins to rot.  The dream need not be some great and overwhelming plan; it need not be a dramatic picture of what might or must be someday; it need not be a concrete outpouring of a world-shaking possibility of sure fulfillment.  Such may be important for some; such may be crucial for a particular moment of human history.  But it is not in these grand ways that the dream nourishes life.”

“The dream is the quiet persistence in the heart that enables a person to ride out the storms of life’s churning experiences.  It is the exciting whisper moving through the aisles of one’s spirit answering the monotony of limitless days of dull routine.  It is the ever-recurring melody in the midst of the broken harmony and harsh discords of human conflict.  It is the touch of significance which highlights the ordinary experience, the common event.  The dream is no outward thing.  It does not take its rise from the environment in which one moves or functions.  It lives in the inward parts, it is deep within, where the issues of life and death are ultimately determined.” 

To lose the dream in my heart is to lose the significance of living.  To lose the American Dream is to lose the significance of our national life.  Keep alive the dream!  Lao Tzu wrote, “Be careful what you water your dreams with.”  Water the dream with hate, bigotry, fear, faux patriotism, and meanness of spirit and you will produce weeds that will eventually choke the life out of the dream—and without the dream we shall perish, both as persons and as a nation.

We must nurture our dreams with the water
of love and community.  Water the dream with hate and
bigotry and we will choke the life out of it.
Without that dream we shall perish.