Iain Atkinson

I’d like to reflect on a formative dream I had in, I think, 2017. It helped form my sense of my mission, my stature and my self-confidence in the heavenlies.

In it, I was walking through a series of spaces that were both libraries and cathedrals with my PhD advisor. I was also carrying a huge stone sphere, as in the world’s strongest man’s “Atlas Stone” competition.

I am immediately rewarded for deciding to write this dream down by the clarification of this detail: that the stone was like a world’s strongest man competition. I hadn’t thought of that before – I had just thought “that was a large stone”. But this detail elucidates for me something about the formation of icons and goals and the sense of achievement in my childhood, and the role of Atlas in the world’s spiritual system.

Dreaming, I parted ways with my advisor, and reached an exit door at the back of a cathedral. I put down my huge stone with relief. A genteel man nearby said to me “You can receive a substitute degree if you bring a lamb”. I looked around, and quickly found a lamb carcass in a white bucket under a table. I placed it at the door, opened the door, and walked out into nothingness.

After the dreamt feeling of ten or fifteen seconds of silence, emptiness, and nothingness, a man on a horse appeared. He was crowned, and looked back at me and beyond me as if towards many people. He shouted with a raised fist “the unification of the priesthood!” and the many people behind me cheered. He shouted this again to cheering, and a third time, as the dream concluded.

I had this dream during the season in which I was deciding whether or not to leave my PhD. program. The Atlas stone evidently represented the program. The spaces I was carrying it through were beautiful, but the weight was insufferable.

I was offered a substitute degree if I could bring a lamb. I was struck on early reflection by the fact that this lamb was bloodless. It was like a slaughtered lamb whose blood had been drained and whose hair had been shaved, but its head was still on and its skin was intact. It was in a bucket I associate with the halal butchers on Cowley Road near where I lived in my third year of university in Oxford (Tahmids).

I remember mentioning the dream and the bloodless lamb to my Dad, and feeling discouraged about it. Shouldn’t it be “the blood of a lamb” that delivers me? Had I found a fake solution to my problem? I’ve mulled on this for several years.

Then the dream concluded with a king – I felt as if he was a medieval English king – proclaiming over me “the unification of the priesthood”. I remain in awe at the precision of language and grandeur of calling represented by these words. I am in awe of what a dream can be. I feel as if it’s all in my head, but as if deep in my head is a window to the skies, skies in which resurrected medieval kings live and make cosmic announcements.

So what if the lamb was bloodless? It had indeed been drained of blood to be legal to eat. Priests know that. I was saved by a whole, intact, body of a lamb. I was given permission to exit and a substitute degree, one whose title was “the unification of the priesthood”. I have become qualified to unify the priesthood of believers through the bloodless body of a lamb.

I write these words with a sense of anticipation that writing will continue to elucidate the meaning of the lamb and of the unification. May writing bring the sense of the colour and texture in the memory of this dream, this distant corner of my subconscious, to these words, to a communicable space.

There was a table – the lamb was in a bucket under a table. Why was there a lamb just in the corner of the room, just when one was needed? All I needed to do for my substitute degree was look in the corner of the room, under the table, and find the lamb. The table is the altar, the communion altar. The table is the place around which we sit for a meal. The table, more than the bed, the door, the hearth, the wall, the window, or the road, is the unifier in human activity. Under the table is a lamb. The lamb is truly there.

I found there the body of the lamb. At and under the table I had easily found the body of Christ. Not simply at the table, or on the table, in any cathedral’s ritual, but under the table. As with the Phoenician woman’s crumbs, I had collected the substance of God on the floor and under the table.

I have found Christ under communion, in the sense of finding Christ in long reflection on the meaning of communion. In my early twenties I realized that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation was entirely plausible and sensible, if one simply allowed substance to not equal accidents (as per medieval aristotelianism and language I learnt at the end of my twenties) – i.e. if one allowed substance to be understood functionally and spiritually. For example, my wedding ring was becoming part of my body due: its chemical makeup had not changed, but its substance had if substance and spirit were one. So the substance of communion elements can certainly change as they change from Hovis to the body of Christ. They are part of the body of Christ as they carry his spirit, point to his name, and build up his disciples in symbol and spirit.

So is communion bread a symbol of Christ’s body or actually substantially Christ’s body? Both. The latter by means of the former. Communion teaches us the spiritual meaning of substance, as Christ has taught the world the meaning of the Holy Spirit. Communion’s “hocus pocus” is true magic. “This is the body of Christ” is the spiritual proclamation that is the body. The body proclaims that this which is not the body – left over bread – is hereby and henceforth the body.

I reflected on all this when I was 22 or 23 years old. I remember specifically thinking about bread on the shelves of Aldi in Oxford. If I bought that bread and used it for communion, when did it become the body of Christ? Yes there was some “hocus pocus”, and one can say it’s the body at the moment of proclamation. But if it is then the body, what is it before? Is not this bread on that shelf, here in my memory, here serving as example of Christ’s transubstantiation, not symbolizing his power to me as much before as after the magic of it all? So here is Christ on the shelf at Aldi. Such is my protestant and low-chuch perspective. Such is the perspective of a child whose mum, being his pastor, let him approach the communion table after church services and chomp on the left over bread. I gorged unceremoniously or post-ceremoniously on Christ’s body. And now I see him in plastic on Aldi’s shelves, and if in the bread there, why not in the chocolate, the beer, and the meat?

So under the table of the Lord, through and on deep reflection on communion, I found the body of Christ all around me. I found him in Aldi, certainly. I eventually learnt to see the streets I walked on as the body of the God I loved.

I love this process of dream interpretation. Dreams happen in this place of deep sleep, and deep release of one’s critical faculties, in the sense of renunciation of them. So interpretation also comes in the immediate thoughts, in the immediate associations and images that are aroused on reflection on the dream.

The whole, kosher, lamb’s body in the bucket is already the unified body of the priesthood. It’s my vocation to continue to find that body under the tables of the world, to bring it to the doorways, highways, and byways, and to step out with it into the void.