Freedom in Lent - Day 27
“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”
― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Being a person of faith is rooted in imagination - Imagining that this world we see, touch, taste, feel, and hear is not all that there is, imagining that life can be more than it is, imagining what community - healthy, life giving, inspiring, growing community - can be like, imagining that this world can be transformed through love and compassion. The act of such imagining is not always easy, it is one which our forebears in faith have struggled to articulate in story, poetry, song, myth, and metaphor, over millenia. It is an act, a way of being, into which we are invited both as individuals and as community.
Part of this imagining is learning to live into a greater story than ours, one which countless people have been a part of since time immemorial. Part of this imagining is, together, seeking a vision for a world which is filled with justice, peace, healing, and wholeness. This is, as the theologian and writer Walter Brueggemann says, the calling to 'prophetic imagination' the act of visioning, it is this which is the start of the possibility of transformation:
“The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.”
― The Prophetic Imagination
The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say,
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.’
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
Isaiah 2.1-4
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