Not the American Dream

I'm reading a book entitled "Between the Dreaming and the Coming True" by a man named Robert Benson. I highly recommend it. He speaks of God as the great Dreamer, and life as the space lived between the initial dreaming, and the full realization of that dream.

In it, in a chapter on work and vocation and cathedral building, he wrote the following, which caught me this morning as I settled in at a desk for another day at a job I don't hate, but certainly don't love.

It may well be that the business of America is business, but the business of the Dreamer has always been and always will be something else altogether. And the business of selling our lives by the hour, doing work that we do not want to do or being people that we do not want to be - in the name of piling up treasures that have more to do with what we want or think we ought to have than with what we need, treasures that have more to do with what shines rather than what sustains - is hardly what the Dreamer envisioned. (pg. 91)