Pictured above is the Reverend Dr. Peter Toon, theologian, custodian of the American Society for the Preservation of the Book of Common Prayer, personal hero, sometimes mentor, and the subject of a really weird dream I had last night.
I have never personally met Dr. Toon. We have exchanged correspondence over the years and I was always overjoyed to have in my email box missives written by an Oxford graduate and only wished his responses were as effusive and wordy as my original enquiries had been.
All the same, he featured prominently in an epic dream I had last night, which I will say has never happened with any other Anglican theologian. In this dream, Dr. Toon and I appeared to be close friends and compatriots something along the line of characters from an eighties buddy cop movie. We were always over at each other’s house eating popcorn, drinking soda-pop, and watching movies. Dr. Toon owned and piloted a massive, neo-Victorian, steam powered airship on which we would fly off to all sorts of distant locales in the interests of collecting rare manuscripts and artifacts pertaining to Anglican history and theology.
At one point in the dream, Dr. Toon and I were perched high in the rafters of the National Cathedral in Washington DC looking down at a host of shadowy, post-modernist clergy and laity engaged in denouncing the continued use of the 1928 Prayer Book. He and I repelled down on ropes into their midst and denounced them all with our combined erudition and learning and they were all dumfounded. I too was dumfounded when I awoke, though I must admit that I was left with a feeling of peace and warmth whenever I recollected the dream throughout the day. Something tells me that Dr. Toon would not feel the same way.
