A Dream - A Blue Vestment

I had a good sleep last night and I had a dream.  I was vested with a blue vestment for some kind of a liturgical service.  My companions were looking for some kind of white or red vestment, but they cannot find one.  So I settled with the blue one.


Personal Prayer/Reflection:
Today is Good Friday. My wife said to me early this morning over the phone that it is flaming hot in Manila as far as climate is concerned. Whereas here in MCCLOUD, California we are having a snow storm and it is expected to reach up to 8 inches of snow. I went to work this morning and went back home immediately to keep myself safe. I don't know if we can have the Good Friday liturgy at St. Barnabas, but hopefully they will give me a call about it. As I thought and ponder about my dream, I remember the Blessed Virgin Mary. In her portraits she is always arrayed with blue colored or white vestments. The vestment I wore in my dream was similar to what she usually wears, a blue vestment dotted with some stars. I just write this dream so I will not forget it this time. I have a beautiful, serene and peaceful feeling after the dream. Fr. Ted Ridgway, the Priest-In-Charge of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Mt. Shasta, California saw me having some quiet prayerful moment just before our celebration of the Agape Meal and Eucharist yesterday evening, Maundy Thursday. He smiled at me and said that he mailed a letter containing a very favorable recommendation that he and Larry Holben made about me to Bishop Barry Beisner, our Diocesan Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California, USA. He said, he and Larry Holben will meet up with Bishop Barry on April 15,2010 and he will make a follow up to his letter. In my dream, I was vested with a blue vestment and I tried to understand few things about it. One of the things I received as an insight is that as a servant of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary has been always there in my life. I got ordained to the Catholic priesthood on September 7,1990 on the eve of the celebration of the Birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The ordination was done in a shrine dedicated to her name, The EDSA Shrine of Mary, Queen of Peace in Mandaluyong City, Philippines. That was almost 20 years ago. Now I have left the Catholic Church and joined the Episcopal Church. I am a married man now and doing some active service in our church every Sunday as a Lay Eucharistic Minister, with a certain hope to be re-accepted and commissioned as a priest of the Episcopal Church. The dream gave me a new vision of what kind of discipleship will I have in the Episcopal Church. It will be one according to the heart and spirit of the Mother of God. Today as I pause and take a good reflection at what happened in Calvary on Good Friday, I see the image of Mary as the one who is also having the greatest of pain and suffering, the loss of her son Jesus. My heart goes all out in unity and love to all those who lost their loved one's. May God console and give new strength and hope to all these! Good Friday is about dying and self-emptying in love. It points to the very essential of what life is all about, not the collection of things, power and status, but a clearing out of the debris of sin and guilt in one's life, so we can all live in joy and freedom as God's children redeemed by the Blood of Christ on the Cross.Last night before I slept, I read SERMON 7, THE CROSS OF CHRIST THE MEASURE OF THE WORLD by JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. At the end of the sermon, John Newman, an Anglican priest who was converted to become a Catholic and died a saintly death as a Cardinal said, "And so, too, as regards this world with all its enjoyments and disappointments. Let us not trust it; let us not give our hearts to it; let us not begin with it. Let us begin with faith; let us begin with Christ; let us begin with His Cross and the humiliation to which it leads. Let us first be drawn to Him who is lifted up, that so He may, with Himself, freely give us all things. Let us "seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness," and then all those things of this world "will be added to us". They alone are able truly to enjoy this world, who begin with the world unseen. They alone enjoy it, who have first abstained from it. They alone can truly feast, who have first fasted; they alone are able to use the world, who have learned to abuse it; they alone inherit it, who take it as a shadow of the world to come, and who for that world to come relinquish it."