Six lines and three sentences are enough for Dave Bonta's "Dreaming in Church" to pick a quiet quarrel with a preacher's theology. It starts with the most ordinary of churchgoing lapses: "At sermon, I doze." The speaker has stopped listening, and what follows reads like the mind's own unsupervised sermon. First comes a memory, then a stray piece of bookkeeping, and then a dream-image that no one in the pulpit could have planned.
The memory is the poem's strangest and most pointed moment. The speaker recalls "a large man of small mien" who claimed that the speaker's "convulsions gave / great contentment to the Lord." The phrase "large man of small mien" is a neat piece of deflation. "Mien" means a person's bearing or manner, and it is the one slightly formal word in an otherwise plain poem. It sounds a lot like "mean," so the man seems physically big but meager in spirit. The poem never says what the convulsions were. Judging by the word, they could be a medical condition, a fit of ecstasy, or even helpless laughter or weeping, and the vagueness lets all of these in. What matters is the claim: that someone's bodily distress is a source of divine pleasure. The line break after "gave" leaves the verb hanging, so the reader waits for the gift, and what arrives is "great contentment," a comfortable, almost domestic phrase for something so unsettling. The mismatch between the violence of the body and the cosiness of God's satisfaction carries the poem's irony.
The final two lines shift from theology to money. "I look over my accounts / and find a sea in my purse." Church and commerce already share vocabulary. A sermon asks for an "account" of one's life, and a collection plate asks for a purse to be opened. The memory implied a transaction, in which the speaker suffers and the Lord is paid in contentment. The speaker now audits the books and finds something impossible. A purse should hold coins, but this one holds a sea. The image can be read two ways. It might be abundance, a wealth so huge it overflows any container, which would mock the preacher's picture of a God who must be satisfied by suffering. Or it might be something closer to drowning, a debt or confusion too large for ordinary arithmetic. "Sea" also sounds like "see," and the speaker has just been "looking over" the accounts, so perhaps the dream is where the speaker finally sees clearly. The poem doesn't choose between these readings, and it is better for that.
The form supports this slipperiness. There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The first line is a clipped five syllables, as brief as a nod of the head. The second stretches to roughly ten, the longest line, as the memory rolls in. The last three lines all settle at seven syllables, which gives the ending a calm, level tone, as if the speaker is untroubled by the impossible sea. The sentences follow the same pattern: four words, then nineteen, then twelve. Sound does quiet work too. The m's in "remember," "man," "small," and "mien" give the preacher's description a mumbling, drowsy quality, while the hard g's in "gave," "great," and "contentment" (with its blunt t's) make the divine pleasure sound oddly heavy. The verbs also matter. The speaker "dozes," "remembers," "looks," and "finds," and none of these is forceful. The speaker never argues back. The mind simply declines the sermon and supplies its own image.
The poem is worth reading because it does so much without raising its voice. It treats a serious question, whether God delights in human suffering, with dry humor rather than anger. It lets a sleepy moment in a pew expose the economics inside a religious idea, in which pain is credited and contentment is owed. And it ends not with a rebuttal but with a surprising image that cannot be filed under any heading. Dreaming in church is usually thought of as a failure of attention. Here it becomes the one place where the speaker's own thinking is allowed to happen.