Summer Imaginings…

          Remember when you were a kid…lying on the summer grass. Noticing its tickly feel and vital smell. Watching an ant ply its way with bit of leaf over and under and around the grassy jungle. Looking up at the clouds, seeing other objects in their shapes, imagining where the airplane way up there came from or is going. Without being conscious of it, you were soaking in a sense of wonder and appreciation for the creation, and its Creator. I hope you have such memories from childhood.

          Summer can be a time to reawaken our neglected imaginations.

          Why should this be important in the scheme of things?

         We live in the world’s hyper-information society. We live with screen menus, bullet lists, Power Point; if it can’t be broken down, analyzed, manipulated for our use, it ain’t real. Sermons on how to be more spiritual in 3 steps…

          But good recent experience has convinced me again that God is most alive to those who imagine. This is the wisdom behind the writer Kurt Vonnegut’s statement: People don’t come to church for preachments; they come to daydream about God.

          Without imagining, we stay at the surface of things, or we stop with examining content and data. We may fail to recognize the God who is present in these same aspects of what we call “creation.” We miss the mystery of the meaning, the source, the heart of things, the Spirit.

         I’m currently enjoying a book by a preacher and poet, J. Barrie Shepherd, who was present at the “Reclaiming the Text” conference I attended at Montreat in North Carolina. The book is Whatever Happened to Delight? He quotes the great mystic, Meister Eckhart:

Apprehend God in all things,
For God is in all things.
Every single creature is full of God
And is a book about God.
Every creature is a Word of God.

         And if we are unable to imagine God in the things of the world around us, how will we ever be able to imagine peace? Or the healing of people and nations?

          I hope you can slow down a bit during the summer. Break from the constant flow of data. Maybe our summer slogan can be less information, more imagination!

Peace,

Rod