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In 1980, somewhere near
Minneapolis, a man named Art Fry was singing in the choir at his
church every Sunday. He put bookmarks in his hymnal to be able to
turn quickly to the right hymns, but the bookmarks were always
slipping out. A strip of paper and scotch tape worked . . . TOO
well. Hymnal pages are notoriously thin. They tore when he later
tried to take out his taped-in bookmarks. Fry happened to work at
3M Company. He found out that another researcher had come up with
an adhesive that had some promise, but didn’t stick nearly as well
as tape. One or two “Eurekas” later, Art Fry invented post-it
notes. Incidentally, published accounts of this patented invention
indicate that Fry had his techno-epiphany during a particularly
boring sermon. Ministry continues to be a very humbling
path! Somehow, Art Fry was able to be present in a different way
with the chemistry, with the paper, and with how people keep track
of information. In the mundane sphere of office supplies, he was
exercising a capacious imagination.
Imagination is a critical element in
creativity. The essence of creativity is novelty. Planted in the
finite world of time and space, if we focus solely on what is,
there is no space for the arrival of something new. You can’t draw
an image on a crowded piece of paper. You need a blank one.
Creation requires emptiness, the opposite of our crowded concrete
reality. Planted in the finite world, where do we go to find that
emptiness?
I say that we reach outside of time and
space, experiencing our connection with the infinite, which I would
call God, but other names may suit. In that experience, creation
expresses itself first as image—the union of an experience of the
infinite, with an experience of something known, from our storehouse
of human living.
This merging of the infinite and the finite
is tricky business. Too much emptiness, and we overtax the muscle
of imagination. Too much tethering to grounded reality, and we
challenge that muscle too little. Either way, creativity fails.
Somehow, Art Fry wrestled the infinite into
equipoise with the finite, and an image was called forth. This is
what we need to be creative – the appearance, as if out of nowhere,
of an image. Armed with this, we can complete the cycle of
creativity by expressing the image in a tangible medium. All of a
sudden, out of nowhere, something new is present that appeals to the
senses.
Every time we do this, we stand with one
foot in forever and the other in the here and now. We affirm that
the deepest part of our identity embraces both the finite and the
infinite. Every time we create, we move closer to that wholeness
in which these opposites are united, even if only for an instant.
It is joyous. And so we repeat this dance, over and over again, in
matters profound and mundane.
But we don’t come to church to ponder the
mundane. Does this imagination stuff have something to do with
church at a level more profound than hymnal bookmarks? It does
indeed. Art Fry was a commercial imaginer. In the realm of
products sold for profit, our culture is an excellent incubator of
imagination. But there is a deeper form of imagination that is of
great spiritual importance. What happens when commercial
imagination becomes a voracious animal that drinks up sound,
swallowing up spiritual imagination, plunging the world into a cold
silence of producing and consuming, getting and spending?
My daughter recently told me about a new
ultra-masculine cologne. I thought this was one of her jokes, but
she insisted she was serious, so I investigated. It smelled nice,
but actually was pretty disappointing. It just didn’t live up to
its image. I guess I was expecting a little more odor of octane.
The new cologne is called Hummer. It comes in this squat, muscular
box with the familiar yellow and black trade dress. You can order
it on the internet, or from this catalogue—called Hummer Stuff. Two
Hummerians are pictured on the cover, next to their Hummer, probably
a whole mile off the freeway. (Ah, if only St. Paul were alive
today. “Paul’s Letter to the Hummerians” surely would be a great
read.) They’re wearing Hummer jackets, Hummer shoes, and Hummer eye
gear --formerly known as glasses. They’re peering into their wi-fi
Hummer Laptop, no doubt visiting the Hummer Stuff website, sizing up
the next cool thing—Hummer barbecue grills, ballpoint pens,
barstools, cocktail glasses, or maybe a $2,000 Hummer night vision
monoscope for those dangerous safaris into the suburban jungle.
Nothing is left to the imagination here. The Hummer trade dress can
be the way you dress. All you have to do is point, click, and
consume. Hummer culture is filling in the blank in one of the most
important sentences rattling around in the human brain. It goes
something like, “I’m the kind of woman [or man] who . . . [FILL IN
THE BLANK].” Hummer isn’t just marketing transportation, it’s
marketing identity.
Hummer culture is not a fluke. You can
hardly buy a cup of coffee without running into identity marketing.
The marketing slogan at Starbucks is “create the experience.” Not
“create a great cup of coffee,” or even “create a great place to go
sit and drink a great cup of coffee.” The experience will be
productized, sold, and consumed. It will tell you the kind
of man or woman you are. If Hummers and Starbucks don’t seem
relevant to your life situation, consider the practice of “staging”
in selling homes. It used to be that people walked into a house for
sale and imagined their furniture, their taste . . . their lives
being lived in that place. Now, it’s different. The culture is so
saturated with media images of what “the good life” looks like, that
there has been . . . a collapse of imagination. If you get them into
a candid conversation, the realtors will tell you that, on their
own, unassisted, many people walking into a home today cannot
imagine themselves in it. If you want the house to sell well, you
have to cater to this disability. You have to “stage” your house to
look like the residential equivalent of a department store window.
Our culture has created an expectation that in almost any situation,
a prepackaged set of images will be provided for immediate
consumption. Professional real estate stagers are the response to
that expectation. They figure out which department store window
your particular house should look like in order to sell.
Now, I’m not a sociologist, but as Bob
Dylan said, “you don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the
wind’s blowing.” Commercial imagination is swallowing up spiritual
imagination. In our quest for the commercial best, we concentrate
more and more on doing the things we do well and outsourcing the
other pieces of our lives to people we consider to be better at
those other pieces. With this increasing specialization, the muscle
of spiritual imagination gets weaker as the range of our direct
experience gets narrower. And our outsourcing extends even to the
task of finding out what we really want, which is to say, finding
out who we really are.
Those to whom we have outsourced this basic
task of human living reflect the results of their efforts back to us
through mass media imagery, which tells us what we want and who we
are. We are pickled in commercial images, even as, ironically, our
spiritual imagination -- and thus our self- knowledge – grows faint.
In our intensely commercial culture, being better
at imagining means being better at figuring out what people will pay
to consume. So what we want, and who we are, is defined
increasingly in commercial terms. The ancient philosopher Epictetus
advised, “Know first who you are, and then adorn yourselves
accordingly.” How backward we have gotten that wisdom. America is
selling the adorned life, and a whole lot of us are buying it as
shortcut to self-knowledge and authentic identity.
More is at stake here than the excesses of
consumerism. The phrase “failure of imagination” was popularized by
Shelby Steele, an African American social commentator. In an
article called “Race and Imagination,” he observed that minorities
are always asking the majority to understand what it is like to walk
in their shoes, because this is how equality will be experienced and
become undeniable. “Minorities know,” he said, “that racism and
bigotry are always a failure of imagination. In the face of
difference, imagination is the only way to common humanity.”
Without using the word, Shelby Steele was
talking about one of the most fundamental ideas in religion:
compassion. But how can we possibly imagine ourselves walking in
the shoes of others if we cannot imagine ourselves in
the first place? Without spiritual imagination, self-knowledge
eludes us. Without self-knowledge, we cannot feel compassion.
Without compassion, we are denied the ultimate value in human life –
the wholeness that comes from a deep connection with other humans.
We are left with a silent, inert world disconnected from the divine;
a world of getting and spending rather than being and becoming.
As the Jungian philosopher James Hollis has
observed, “The constriction of our imagination is our greatest
tragedy and the source of our deepest self-wounding. . . . We
have a soul, and within the soul is the power to imagine the
possibility of breaking the old mold and experiencing alternatives.
Without compassion and imagination, our lives remain forever
constricted within the small and the broken.”
Floating, as we do, in a culture that is
hostile to spiritual imagination, how can we nurture this essential
part of our nature? I believe the answer lies in turning our
attention to the domains where this kind of imagination flourishes.
Foremost among these is the domain of the poetic – whether it be
verse itself or other expressions that transport us in the same
way. The poet Shelley declared, “A person to be greatly good must
imagine intensely and comprehensively. He must put himself in the
place of another and of many others. The great instrument of moral
good,” he said, “is the imagination, and poetry enlarges the
circumference of the imagination.”
And another great poet, William Carlos
Williams, was pointing in the same direction when he said, “It’s
hard to get the news from poetry, but men die every day for want of
what is found there.” I used to think Williams’ reference to people
dying was rhetorical. I don’t think that any more. The utter
collapse of our ability to imagine peace has left us with
militarism, destruction, and death on a staggering scale. The news
brought by poetry, the gospel of poetry, is the extraordinary
power of spiritual imagination to fuel compassion.
I don’t believe I can have a healthy
spiritual imagination without the support of others who share my
commitment to this value. I need a place where options are
presented that go beyond consuming and being consumed. Where my
experience is unmediated by mass-produced images, where my
connection to the divine is palpable, and where outbreaks of novelty
happen all the time. I need a place devoted to supporting everyone
in seeing themselves as large enough to spread compassion in a
broken world.
Church has a greater capacity to meet these
needs than any other place I know. I see it as an incubator of
poetic possibility.
When Jennifer and I came knocking here, we didn’t have long
track records as parish ministers. The long track records we did
have were in law and business – domains radically different from
church. But you said to us, in many different ways, “we can imagine
you leading our church.” Your imagination reinforced our own,
sharpened our ability to imagine ourselves as your ministers.
And we looked at you and said, in many different ways, “we
can imagine you . . . flying. Really flying. We hope our
imagination reinforces your own imagination, sharpens your ability
to imagine yourselves doing just that.
A flying church? What does it look like
when a church takes wing? Here is what it looks like to Jennifer
and me. It becomes a place where you don’t have to buy and wear the
clothing of a manufactured identity; where you can talk about and
listen to heartbreak and tragedy in an atmosphere of trust and
confidence; where you can discover the deepest levels of who you
are, with the support of a community of a spiritual seekers, and in
turn you can support each of them in doing the same; where you can
practice expressing that deepest self outward, into the world;
where you can situate your identity in an overarching story of
culture, community, and religious tradition, and enrich your
identity from these sources; where you can take on the daunting
challenge of integrating your Sunday values with your Monday through
Friday world; where you and your caravan of spiritual seekers can
make a lasting, sustainable difference in your own lives and in
every life touched by your church.
The animal that drinks up sound is on
the prowl. Where will you seek sanctuary? This church is a
cricket, practicing and practicing how to keep sound alive. Of
course, a cricket could never escape from a beast so enormous that
it can drink up all the sound in the world. Impossible. Everyone
knows that. Right? Oh sure, crickets can hop; but they can’t fly.
Impossible. Everyone knows that. Right?
PLEASE PRAY WITH ME. Holy one, free us from the
smallness of our prayers for mere thises and thats. Incite our
imaginations to run riot. Give us new and unclouded eyes to see
that our given world is not here to be taken as a given. Give us
glad hearts for the gift of creativity. Give us the perseverance
to reach through the thorns to the stars. And when we have grasped
the fullness of these gifts, give us the courage to live the lives
of joy and justice that we have only begun to imagine. We ask this
in the name of all that is holy. Amen.
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