The God-goven power of imagination

At the start of the day, we were asked to tie a piece of string loosely round our neighbour’s wrist. We were at a retreat at Hilton Church, reflecting on the theme ‘Extraordinary God in an ordinary life.’ It was led by the writer Merryn Glover, and by Church of Scotland Mission Development worker Steve Aisthorpe, both from Badenoch.  

The string was a reminder to each of us to ‘stay awake’, open to the whisper of God in one another, in the words we read and listened to, and in the ordinary things around us – the bread and wine, the beauty of the garden, the autumn sun shafting through the window.

Bishop Mark Strange gave the same message at Inverness Cathedral on the 1^st Sunday in Advent. ‘Stay awake!’ he urged. Christ has come; Christ is with us; Christ will come again.

I’ve been thinking about the fact that artists at work often feel they’re not so much creating something new as uncovering something already there. There are innumerable ways of combining the notes on a keyboard to create a new tune, but to the composer it can feel that all the possible melodies are already present, waiting to be discovered.

I believe imagination is among the most wonderful gifts God has given us, and that the correct use of it is key to staying awake. We are people of imagination, because God is a God of imagination, for God imagined the universe before it existed.

Merryn Glover quoted Albert Einstein: ‘There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.’

To live the latter way is to use our imagination – not in order to see what is not there, but to truly see what is there.

Imagination reveals what lies behind the surface of things, enabling us to see new possibilities and different ways of doing things, to forge new connections, to be makers and creators, to enter into the experiences of others, to enjoy poetry, music and drama.

But the gift can be wrongly used. A darkened imagination led to Auschwitz and its gas chambers, to the atomic bomb, to countless evil and destructive actions. If deployed unwisely, imagination can ensnare rather than liberating us, as when we imagine that the worst will happen.  Unwilling to face reality we can misuse imagination to hide from the facts.

Here’s an intriguing question: does our imagination actually change things? Well, imagining a better future certainly empowers me to live hopefully and positively. But you sometimes hear it suggested that we can ‘ask the universe’, changing by using our imagination things which otherwise lie beyond our power to change.

But if that’s true why are there times when despite all our prayer and agonising and imagining nothing changes? It seems to me that the only wise way of using the gift is to remain awake to God, asking God to prompt our imaginations, showing us things God has already imagined, the combination of notes which God has already heard, the futures in which God is already present, the dreams of God whose hour has come. These are the dreams which, when we enter into them imaginatively, are fulfilled.

We might think that God’s imagination is limited to religious issues, but in truth God’s dreams are holistic – there is nothing good which we can dream as cooks or architects, as cross-stitchers or engineers, as scientists or play-leaders, as ordinary folk wanting to bless others and make them happy, nothing good we can dream which God has not already imagined. So God doesn’t just give us imagination, but also guides our imagining – if only we stay awake.

God prompts us at this time of year to look at the Baby in the manger, at once ordinary and extraordinary, and to awaken to God’s imagined future – a new heaven and a new earth – and to our role in bringing that future closer through transforming the world smile by smile, sacrifice by sacrifice, dream by dream.

We need to seek reminders to stay awake which are as powerful as the piece of string round our wrists that day at Hilton. It’s significant that we tied the string on one another’s wrists, for we stay awake best when we are members of an expectant community, encouraging one another, transformed ourselves and transforming the world we live in as together we catch sight of God’s imagined future.

And yet each of us must find our own way. Merryn Glover quoted Rowan Williams – ‘With every person there is one way in which that person can show the life of God – and that person only.’ And we find that way in awakening to God’s imaginings for us as individuals.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 11th December 2014)