Amy Lyles Wilson

“Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.” —Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

“It’s the thought that counts,” our mothers tell us when we are young. Maybe a grandmother has given us an atlas of the United States, or Uncle Edmund has shortchanged us by coughing up one dollar instead of five, when what we wanted was a Mrs. Beasley doll and a pair of ballet slippers.

This month I turn 50. As in, half a century. As in, at least half of my life is gone. It sounds depressing, and in some ways I guess it is. But for the most part, it feels like a gift.

Laura Hileman is a dreamer, and she wants you to be one, too. Hileman, who has been leading dream groups for more than 10 years, believes that “dreams become a portal to prayer and to deeper relationship with the Holy.”

I am a wanderer. Not the kind who has walls full of artifacts from foreign countries or hours of enchanting stories about trips to exotic locales. Instead, I possess an impressive and varied collection of church bulletins.

Before I married my husband, there were two things I was hesitant to tell him. I didn’t see the need to mention that my collection of childhood stuffed animals would be accompanying us to our new home, or that I’d been known to waste more than one perfectly good Saturday watching Murder, She Wrote reruns.

In June of this year, I will have been married for nine years. It might not sound like much, but for a woman who never thought she’d walk down the aisle as anything other than a nervous choirgirl or a taffeta-clad bridesmaid, it is quite a milestone indeed.

After years—a lifetime, really—of being told I am “too sensitive,” I have finally come up with a thoughtful and well-articulated response: So sue me. 
 

There are three things I appreciate having in life but had just as soon not talk about: sex, a healthy colon and money. Sex, because I’m a prude from way back, and in my middle age I have little frisky fodder to offer. My colon, for obvious reasons. And money, because over the years I’ve been judged by people who assume too much about me simply because of the neighborhood I reside in or the kind of car I own. As if they could know my heart simply by learning my zip code.
 

I learned a lot when I went back to school to study theology in my early 40s. For starters, I found out that I was not the oldest person who wanted to know more about religion in general and, in my case, God in particular, which made me feel better for reasons I cannot explain. I also realized that there is an entire literature devoted to the Holocaust, the atrocity somehow having been overlooked by my high school and college educations in Mississippi in the 1970s and 80s. And I discovered that some people don’t think of God as male.