Imagination is like freedom, a powerful gift mostly operating just below the surface of awareness. We turn this way and that, attend to this and not that, and because of this freedom
great acts of violence AND compassion are performed.
Imagination is a God given capacity. And one of the many things that it enables us to do is conceive of things that were previously thought to be impossible. It is also the means by which we walk a mile in someone else's shoes even if our experience is nothing like theirs -- and by so doing we connect our head to our hearts and act with generosity and kindness.
It is when we fail to use this gift that we keep ourselves at a distance from each other and come to conclusions like, "He's homeless because he's lazy; he's getting what he deserves." The imaginative response is the one that Jesus recommend. When you share in the suffering of these, you are sharing in my suffering. The kingdom of heaven that Jesus ushered in is a different way of imagining the world we live in. One where the last are first. (This takes some seriously, creative imagining.) In the KOH we don't need to worry about what we will wear or eat because the King will take care of us. This reality doesn't come from ordinary American consciousness, it must be imagined.
The world we live in is all about the bottom line. Even if we won't say that profit is the highest good, we betray our true values by acting as if it is. In the world that Jesus asks us to imagine, we are encouraged to give away all that we have and follow him. We are also told that if a man doesn't support his family he's worse than an infidel.
How do we reconcile these conflicting images? We hold them in our imagination in God's presence and wait. There are dozens of unresolved tensions that we must hold even as we go to work in the morning, if we don't hole them we risk heterodoxy which is simply picking and choosing what we prefer from Scripture and ignoring the rest. We hold these things like a living flame. We don't master them with our intellect, we respect them and so we contemplate them, which means holding them in our imaginations and letting them transform the way that we see, which then transforms the way that we respond, the way that we use our freedom.
great acts of violence AND compassion are performed.
Imagination is a God given capacity. And one of the many things that it enables us to do is conceive of things that were previously thought to be impossible. It is also the means by which we walk a mile in someone else's shoes even if our experience is nothing like theirs -- and by so doing we connect our head to our hearts and act with generosity and kindness.
It is when we fail to use this gift that we keep ourselves at a distance from each other and come to conclusions like, "He's homeless because he's lazy; he's getting what he deserves." The imaginative response is the one that Jesus recommend. When you share in the suffering of these, you are sharing in my suffering. The kingdom of heaven that Jesus ushered in is a different way of imagining the world we live in. One where the last are first. (This takes some seriously, creative imagining.) In the KOH we don't need to worry about what we will wear or eat because the King will take care of us. This reality doesn't come from ordinary American consciousness, it must be imagined.
The world we live in is all about the bottom line. Even if we won't say that profit is the highest good, we betray our true values by acting as if it is. In the world that Jesus asks us to imagine, we are encouraged to give away all that we have and follow him. We are also told that if a man doesn't support his family he's worse than an infidel.
How do we reconcile these conflicting images? We hold them in our imagination in God's presence and wait. There are dozens of unresolved tensions that we must hold even as we go to work in the morning, if we don't hole them we risk heterodoxy which is simply picking and choosing what we prefer from Scripture and ignoring the rest. We hold these things like a living flame. We don't master them with our intellect, we respect them and so we contemplate them, which means holding them in our imaginations and letting them transform the way that we see, which then transforms the way that we respond, the way that we use our freedom.
