Spiritual Gifts

The Hunky Hubby’s Grandma loves to gift us with random “Spiritual” items. As far as I am able to guess, she is not a believer. But ever since the Hunky Hubby came home from college and revealed the startling news that he’d “found religion” she has been gathering “Spiritual Gifts” for us at yard sales. One of my favorites was a sort of self-helpy little paperback about the struggles of being a homemaker and a believer simultaneously. It featured a young long-haired housewife in 70s garb on the cover. Not too bad you say. But that was not all. The aforementioned long-haired, 70s clad, housewife was busy accomplishing both menial labor and great feats of spiritual prowess, in this case it was levitating socks! You heard me, levitating socks. Right away I could tell that my laundry skills were not going to measure up and I chose to skip the levitation lessons entirely.

I visited Grandma on Tuesday and was sent on my way with yet another “Spiritual Gift.” Two in fact. One was a little pocketbook full of inspirational poetry with a drawing of a horse grazing in a meadow on the front. And the other…Well I’ll let you decide for yourself. Here is the title. Dreams: Gateway to Your Inner World. Above the title it states: Discover an exciting new dimension to your life. On the cover is the face of a beautiful young woman made out of wood with different colors (mainly red) and water droplets smearing all over it and some tangled branches in the background. I am certainly not going to say that God doesn’t ever use dreams. Of course he does. He did in the Bible there is nothing to stop Him from doing it today. But perusing this little tome left me quite skeptical.

Of course some of my innate skepticalness could well be from the fact that I have lots of dreams, and absolutely none of them make sense. I once dreamed that a creepy guy at a gas station came up to me and started eating my hand. Crunch crunch crunch. Icky yes. Meaningful, I hope not.

So I fear that “Dreams: Gateway to Your Inner World” will be going the way of that ancient and “Authentic” prayer rug we got in the mail that was supposed to give us peace and millions of dollars if we used it for our next prayer session and mailed it back to the Monastery or Cathedral from whence it came. It was made out of a new piece of paper. How it could be: ancient, authentic, and a rug while simultaneously being made out of a single piece of common paper is beyond me. Oh well.