This is Cardinal Francis George. I invite you to join me for the next few minutes to reflect

with Father Robert Barron on the Word of God, which is the Word on Fire. Word on Fire Catholic

Ministries is a non-profit ministry at the forefront of Catholic evangelization, using

new media to spread the faith and every continent. Father Barron challenges us to open our hearts

to the Word on Fire, which is God's Word of Love for each of us. If our hearts are open,

the Lord can change and transform us so that we might speak with love about the one who

is love. The global benefactors of Word on Fire with the support of the Archdiocese of

Chicago now present Word on Fire. Peace be with you. Friends, when approaching the

text of the Bible, it's so important, I think, to keep this in mind. Biblical authors think

not so much in a linear way, but in a poetic and associative way. They follow, if you want to

put it this way, the logic, not of an argument, but of a poem or a dream. Stay with that last

image of a dream. Why is it that dreams often strike us as at the same time crazy and oddly

meaningful? Why is the people from Freud on have tried to interpret dreams? I mean, long

before Freud go back to the Bible, you've got Joseph interpreting dreams. I mean, someone's

just babbling, babbling incoherently. We're not going to try to interpret that, but yet we try

to interpret our dreams, even though they strike us as crazy on the surface level. I think it's

because though they don't proceed logically or linearly, one event following reasonably from

another often dreams just seem, you know, they don't make any sense at that level. Nevertheless,

we sense in them a meaningfulness, a meaningfulness through the clustering of symbols, the clustering

of images and associations. Poetry often works that way, too, doesn't it? You read a poem, you say,

well, it doesn't make sense. It's not clear like a journalistic account. Well, of course not,

because poets don't write that way. Poets tend to associate symbols and images, and the meaning

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