Word of the Week

Holy Family Sunday

Dream: chalam (Hb.): meaning “vision; dream; message” or “healthy and strong”

The term dream has no explicit definition in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. There are two paragraphs where we find the word dream ( excerpts pulled from the works of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John Chrysostom) . In both quotations, we find insights into the relationship that dreams have with the virtues of hope and fidelity. In relationship to hope, St Teresa exhorts us to “…dream to struggle that our love may prove worthy” of the hope that is inside of us (CCC 1821). In relationship to fidelity, St. John Chrysostom calls out husbands to dream with “ardent desire to faithfully serve your wives…above all things (CCC 2365). Thus, to dream is to be faithful to the present to realize the vision of your future.

Dream can be found in Sacred Scripture 145 times: 136 in the Old Testament and 9 in the New Testament. There are multiple meanings to the word dream in the Bible, I will address just a few. The OT prominence of dream speaks to the nature of a vision from a seer where God speaks to his people with a saving message. What is necessary to note is the measure in which God repeatedly uses dreams to mediate his power and love on behalf of the chosen people. Consider Jacob's ladder (Gen.28:12), Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar (Dan.5:12) and arguably the most notable OT dreamer Joseph, whose ability to interpret dreams reunited the twelve tribes of Israel (Gen.41). In the NT, the word dream is predominant in the Gospel of Matthew. In this gospel recorded by Levi, God uses dreams for “instruction and divine warning” (Hahn and Minch , 68); a place where God meets us in the still of our sleep (Mt.1:20, 2:12-13, 27:19).

Luke reminds us in Acts (by quoting Joel) that in the age of the Church God will use dreams to continue the pattern of ‘instruction and divine warning' (Acts 2:17). God wishes to speak to us in the quiet of our dreams, the stream of subconscious where the Spirit can illuminate our senses…even in our sleep. In addition, we ought to dream in the manner that St. Teresa of Avila would have us dream (see the aforementioned definition): with a life full of hope and vigor, remaining steadfast to God's initiatives in every circumstance. We must dream with the hope that God will sustain us in all of the peak and valleys of the Christian journey. Ultimately, in this manner of dreaming , we prove our Christian health and remain strong in exercising the call to beatitude.

“Let me tell you about a dream that has absorbed my mind”

--St. John Bosco

Primary Texts Consulted

•  Catholic Bible. Suggested trans. Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition.
•  Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition, 1997.
•  Hahn, Scott and Minch , Curtis. Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: The Gospel of Matthew , RSV, 2nd ed. San Francisco : Ignatius Press, 1998.

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