What we have here is a failure of imagination
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| Busted. Giulia van Pelt/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 |
We finally have a federal administration eager, willing, and prepared to disrupt the status quo, and this is the best they can come up with?
I can't get this exasperated thought out of my head. I'm more than exasperated, of course; I'm disheartened and overwhelmed and frightened by my country's precipitous drop from Constitutional alignment to modern coup in a matter of weeks. Every one of my most deeply held values—love, hospitality, generosity, care, safety—is under attack at the highest levels of global power, and while my personal day-to-day doesn't currently look too different, I can easily imagine the ripple effects around the world, across my country, and in my life.
Imagine. I can imagine it. That's why I'm furious, because I'm not the only one imagining alternative paths right now. Our federal leaders are doing the same, and the routes they are choosing are mind-bendingly thorough in their shared intent to exercise power simply for the sake of power, with callous disregard for what it ruptures and who it harms. I want to scream from the rooftops: Look at your prodigious creativity! Look at your mandate for leadership! Look at what you might accomplish if you combine these forces and turn your heart toward love!
If they wanted to, they could—in the words of poet Maggie Smith—"make this place beautiful." But they don't want to, which means all of us imagining different, love-grounded futures must now work even harder to counter the injurious progress, to staunch the bleeding, as we also attempt to forge a new path. It was always the work of a lifetime, but right now it feels like the work of seven. This too I can imagine.
What else can I imagine? In 2021, David Brooks wrote a New York Times essay titled "The Awesome Importance of Imagination," which closed on the thought, "Imagination helps you perceive reality, try on other realities, predict possible futures, experience other viewpoints. [...] What happens to a society that lets so much of its imaginative capacity lie fallow? Perhaps you wind up in a society in which people are strangers to one another and themselves."
Not "perhaps," I'd respond today, but "you do." By imagining others' lives in small and incomplete ways, we have othered far too many of our neighbors, and what I believe to be our natural bent toward community care has degraded in the face of relentless, dehumanizing rhetoric. This too I can imagine.
What else can I imagine? In a thought-provoking chapter titled "Reading Badly, Reading Well" in her book Break Blow Burn & Make, E. Lily Yu says:
"To read in the way I have suggested here is nothing more and nothing less than to live with open eyes and ears, attuned to both the sharp edge of the present and the thick layers of the past. It is to see not what we wish to see, or what other people tell us that we see, but what is really in front of us. It is to fully inhabit our bodies and our lives, in order to recognize what is vibrant, vital, and life-giving, whether in people, places, or books. It is to thoroughly learn, as a lover studies the beloved, the language we read in, that we may recognize landmarks and birthmarks, what is nourishing and what is diseased."
How might we examine the stories we hear, the stories we create, and the stories we repeat? As Yu notes earlier in the same chapter, storytelling is a "natural human impulse" that can be used for good or for ill, countering the popular modern narrative that reading is inherently good. I apply the same thought to imagination, with our present moment being a perfect example of how this faculty can lead individuals and societies in many directions. I posit that we have a moral obligation to acknowledge our own capacity for imagination and nurture it accordingly, in order to chase transcendence. This too I can imagine.
What else can I imagine? Artist and activist Tricia Hersey shares in her manifesto Rest is Resistance, "I have always been interested in the concept of community resurrection. We all may be familiar with resurrection only from a Christian perspective with Jesus rising from the dead on the third day. Outside of a Christian lens, I believe resurrection is a powerful idea for activism and disruption. A resurrection is a waking up into a new thing. It’s life, insight, breathing, refusing, thinking, and movement that is alive and made new."
Hersey's words remind me that disruption is not mere interruption. To interrupt is to pause a flow or cause a hiccup; to disrupt is to shatter so fully and completely that rebuilding is impossible yet creating is enabled. We have an opportunity in this chaos to refuse returning to the status quo and in that refusal increase our own aliveness. This too I can imagine.
What else can I imagine? Thomas Reese, SJ wrote recently in a National Catholic Reporter opinion piece, "The truly powerful are creators not destroyers, builders not demolishers, life-givers not killers, fixers not complainers, nurturers not bullies."
Do we humans believe ourselves to be generative? I'm not convinced enough of us believe it true on an individual level, much less on a societal level, making it that less likely we'll attempt to build, fix, and grow together. What if we asked ourselves "what if" more often and intentionally sat with the productive, enlivening discomfort of divergent thinking? What if we committed to try to create—an often hard path, yes, but ultimately a more joyful and sustainable one? This too I can imagine.
What else can I imagine? As part of the grand human tradition of imagination, Jesus imagined not only a different level of eternity but also a radical way to approach our present, which gospel writer Luke relays as Jesus' Sermon on the Plain (NABRE):
Blessed are you who are poor,
for the kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who are now hungry,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who are now weeping,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude and insult you,
and denounce your name as evil
on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way.
But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
But woe to you who are filled now,
for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will grieve and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you,
for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.
Folks familiar with these Beatitudes may recall more readily the loftier (literally and figuratively) version captured in the Gospel of Matthew with the Sermon on the Mount. What's powerful to me about Luke's version are the dual imaginative tracks. On one hand, the aspirational joy and safety of a world that centers and serves those on the margins. On the other, the all-but-assured consequences for those who forestall or negate this aspiration. In my reading of the Sermon of the Plain, I receive imagination as a holy mandate, a call to perceive and envision a purpose infinitely bigger than myself, in order to better love and serve others. This too I can imagine.
Here's what I am not imagining: I am not thinking we simply undo what is currently being done. I am not suggesting we return to business as usual. What I am proposing is that we the people give ourselves over to the blinding, vertiginous power of imagination and fall deep into its endless possibility. Our shared destiny can and should be greater than mere survival. Some prophets have already been to the mountaintop and shouted encouragement back to us. Some wayfinders have already braved the steep inclines and carved out footholds for us to grab. And so many more of us, with our wild imaginings not yet acknowledged by others or perhaps even by our own selves, have enormous creative potential bubbling within. We must imagine what we are capable of. We must then imagine what we want our shared life to achieve. Only then will we rise to the occasion.
This too I can imagine.
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| "Keep dreaming God’s dream with God. Those who build for a new world have to first imagine that it can be so." —Drew Jackson, Feb. 2025 |
Prayer #407: Imagination as Prayer
God who dreamed up stardust and then fashioned us from it—
So many things that once seemed impossible in our feeble minds now feel inevitable
heart surgery
WiFi
saffron
platypuses
fire
yet despite this overwhelming evidence of infinite possibility, we in our fear of that same infinitude have padlocked our imaginations, terrified of the riots—without and within—their roaming will inspire.
Now, help us kick down the doors with the voracious creativity that compelled you to imagine us in the first place. That's the energy we need now: the energy to bound, unbounded, abounding.
Amen.
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Looking to expand your own spiritual imagination? Check out the chapter titled "What If?" in my book, Amen? Questions for a God I Hope Exists, for prayerful and poetic inspiration.