Disturbing dreams

SOUL FOOD

“If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain and your faith is

also vain.”

-- The First Epistle

of Paul the

Apostle to the

Corinthians 15:14

Many of my dreams over the last few weeks have been related in

some way to this war, Operation Iraqi Freedom, mingled with biblical

references to the stories of Passover, Palm Sunday and Easter that

I’ve been reading.

They’ve been somnolent and sometimes rather silly doses of

comfort.

A few days after the war began, I dreamed about standing before

Pharaoh, who was the spitting image of Saddam Hussein. Moses was with

me and when he gave me a nod, I stepped up to Pharaoh and said, “Give

me Easter or give me death.” Grains of truth sown with a grain of

comic relief -- my apologies to Patrick Henry.

The night after our troops entered Baghdad, I dreamed the war was

over and I was in an auditorium with a choir of angels teaching them

to sing, preparing them to sing on a cloud-shaped float in a victory

parade.

Never mind that when I’m fully awake I can’t carry a tune, or keep

a beat in a bucket. We practiced the first line, the only line I

know, from the song that Moses and the children of Israel sang when

they escaped Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea.

“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously!” we

harmonized to psalteries and tambourines.

When we got the news, the miraculous news, that Jessica Lynch had

been rescued, it sounded just this sweet. But so much of the news of

war is so sad I have a hard time imagining how victory can be

anything but bittersweet.

On the 14th day of the war I saw a photo of a man named Razzaq

Kazem al Khafaj weeping over a coffin that held the body of his

mother. It was on a page right above a photo of Jessica’s jubilant

parents.

I thought of these words from St. Paul’s letter to Rome, “Rejoice

with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.” And I asked

God if he could teach me how to better do both at the same time.

Later I saw another photo of Razzaq Kazem al Khafaj weeping over

the bodies of three of his children, children so small one coffin

held them all. Then I saw him again, on television, weeping over more

bodies. Fifteen members of this man’s family were killed.

That night I dreamed I was walking outside of Hilla where I’d

heard that Razzaq Kazem al Khafaj lived. I heard his weeping; I

followed its sounds and I found him. I took him by the hand and I

began to sing the words we sing in church on Easter. We sing them

over and over again.

“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and

upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”

Then I taught him the words Job taught his friends when they had

persecuted him in his suffering.

“I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the

earth; and after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh

I shall see God.” [Job 19:25]

I wish that in his grieving Razzaq Kazem al Khafaj knew that. I

wish he had that comfort.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].