Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great English romantic poet and incisive apologist on matters religious and spiritual, suggested in a defense of Christian orthodoxy against the puritans, the fundamentalists of his day, a radical premise. He wrote that in order to understand scripture one must employ the imagination; that it is the imagination that inspires scripture and not the reverse. It is the imagination that breathes life into the words of scripture and gives them renewed and perhaps new meaning. The ancient words of scripture are reconstituted, indeed transfigured and given new life through the imaginative process…God, in an intimate collaboration with the human imagination enabled, invited to speak in present tense.
Moreover, Coleridge would further say that the collective human imagination is synonymous with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that moved over creation in the beginning; the Spirit that indwells a people. The imagination now spelled with a capital “I.” His most famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a veritable hymn to the transforming and saving power of the imagination. You will recall in the poem that the ship is becalmed and the crew is near certain death when the moon, a consummate symbol of the imagination, appears and an unlikely breeze picks up, fills the torpid sails and the ship is brought safely home. This idea of the power of the imagination is re-articulated in various ways by poets with neo-romantic sensibilities of the modern era: Hopkins and Yeats of England and Ireland, Stevens and Frost of the U.S., Borges of Argentina to name a few. The mystics of all faiths have forever known the truth of this. The alchemists’ quest to turn mundane elements into gold, yet another symbol of the transformative power of the imagination.
What does this mean for us, as people of faith? As we are made in God’s image, we are made to create. Through the sacred power of the imagination, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we like the One who created us are called to speak the world into being. “In the beginning was the Word,” the Gospel of John begins. Words are artifice….from the realm of the beautiful…creations sprung from the imagination set loose in the world as means of saving change, means of the new creation, the means of a primordial sacred order breaking into our world now and not yet. We are forever “in the beginning” speaking the Word, shimmering artifice, words of the Word that take on the flesh of the new creation.
And words inform deeds…deeds also sacred artifice that will save and transform, and order the world to which we have been given. And imaginative deeds beget new words in a cosmic dance whirling to a humming rhythm that governs the very stars themselves. Every word, every action comes from the Spirit, the enlivened imagination, and exists solely for the good of the whole. The art is not for the artist to possess, but for the apprehension of the many. As pilgrims on the way, ours is to speak and act into being such fruits of the imagination as goodness and truth, kindness and mercy, compassion and forgiveness, and saving justice made manifest in infinite possibilities; components of the beautiful… Let us speak into being a sustainable dignity for our dispossessed sisters and brothers who share the common blood of our humanity. We are made for this, and this alone. Imagine God’s kingdom for the world until we wake and find our alchemical dreams to be true….that things in earth are as they are in heaven.
Very nice Reverend and very truthful. I especially like this…
The art is not for the artist to possess, but for the apprehension of the many. As pilgrims on the way, ours is to speak and act into being such fruits of the imagination as goodness and truth, kindness and mercy, compassion and forgiveness, and saving justice made manifest in infinite possibilities; components of the beautiful… The first sentence makes me think of our singer/songwriter talks of late, the music and words useless until they are shared and then I like the “act into being” part..without the “acting” part everything we say is just pretty words without a purpose aren’t they. I am happy that we are a church that’s puts right action up front. Peace.
French theorist Roland Barthes contended in his essay S/Z that there are essentially two kinds of texts: “readerly” texts, which offer only a limited number of possible interpretations, and “writerly” texts, which require the reader to actively participate in the production of the text’s meaning. Barthes privileged the writerly text because it pictures the reader in an active posture, in the role of co-writer, jointly producing meaning rather than passively receiving it. For this reason, Barthes argued the writerly should be considered the “value” used to determine the quality of a text.
I cannot imagine a more writerly text than scripture, from the allegories of Genesis to the rich symbolism of the Psalms to the highly metaphorical parables of the Gospels. It should follow, therefore, that our call as people of faith is to read scripture actively in an imaginative act of co-writing a new meaning for our time, translating marks on a page into living words, transforming words into actions in the world, remaking that world through the creative power of imagination, all of this through the act of reading, the act of writing.
Incredible post! So brilliant. And so true. Thanks!