I believe evil grows from a lack of imagination...redux

Poet Linda Pastan...

I have always believed that the act of reading a poem could change a person—could exercise his or her imagination as if it were like any other muscle—even the job of understanding a metaphor can be work. Since evil, I believe, grows from a lack of imagination (do lawmakers cutting poverty programs know what it feels like to be hungry?) poetry can become political in the most basic sense.

One of the many signs of spiritual death in the contemporary North American realm  is our collective loss of imagination.  We have become such a "bottom line" people - just the facts, ma'am - and all the other market metaphors for human interaction that speak of people unable and unwilling to slow down long enough to listen, watch and feel - let alone love.  25 years ago we began to abandon the arts in our public schools because they were too costly - and now we are trying to abandon public education.  We view creativity outside of the market place as both incidental to living and a waste of public resources only to wonder why children act like zombies and adults like robots.

A few years back the artist and theologian, Mako Fujimura, put it like this in an essay concerning the birth of Christ:

What a strange beginning to what many have called “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” A teenage girl engaged to a carpenter gets pregnant. She claims that an Angel appeared to her to say that she would have a virgin birth. Her fiancé is hesitant to believe her. They cannot make it back home when she is ready to give birth, and they cannot find an Inn in which to stay. So she gives birth in a stable.

The people who come to visit are not the in-laws or other family members, but shepherds—the most humble people of the time, like today’s garbage collectors. A few weeks later, Magicians from the East come with their gifts. They are fortune tellers, not religious leaders, and the stars are their scriptures.

The themes of the Greatest Story are not of power, wealth, and worldly notions of success; it is rather the story of people in the margins, people under suspicion, people who have been humbled—people like artists. When I meet someone on a plane and I tell them I am an artist, I almost always have to go into “explaining mode” to answer the same common questions: “What kind of art do you make?” “Why do you do it?” “Can you make a living?”

If I said I was an electrical engineer, explaining would not be necessary. But tell people, particularly Christians, that I am an artist and I am immediately regarded with suspicion and thoughtless dismissal: “You don’t paint nudes, do you?” “I don’t understand modern art.” “You make that weird stuff that my kids could paint and then call it ‘art,’ don’t you?” No wonder artist types sit in the back of the church and leave as soon as the music ends, if they come to church at all. Church is for successful people, for respectable folks with real jobs.

He closes his essay with a call for more of us in the church to not only embrace the way of mystery, but to do so with imagination:

A journey with Jesus is more like being an artist than working a predictable 9-to-5 job. It’s unpredictable, risky, and often strange. It’s an adventure for which you need faith. You don’t need to be a “respectable Christian” to walk with Jesus: in fact, it’s best if you are not. You’ll be better able to wrestle with the deeper realities of your journey, to confront your brokenness. You’ll be able to let your life’s experience become the materials for your craft, articulating that deep mystery within you rather than trying to explain it away.

The church needs artists, because, like Jesus, they ask questions that are at the same time enigmatic and clear, encouraging and challenging. But, unlike Jesus, they are far from perfect. And that’s okay because none of Jesus closest followers were respectable, well put-together people either. Jesus still gave them “authority” because they were chosen, broken creatures in need of a Savior who learned of their dependence on God. He gave them “author-rity” to write the story of the Kingdom and the mystery of redemption. He made them into artists.

We are all chosen, broken creatures and Jesus has made us all into artists, whether we use a brush or simply ride on a garbage truck. Our stories are living stories of the Kingdom that we write every day. Infused with the mystery of the Great Artist’s spirit, our stories can become a wide open adventure—part of the Greatest Story Ever Told.

As I watch the US Presidential candidates "debate" via Canadian TV I see what our collective loss of imagination and soul looks like in a very ugly way:  we have become a people of faith speaking harsh words filled with evil and that we think sound clever. But they wound and denigrate and confusion in a mean-spirited way.

And so I come back to the way Jesus put it?  "What does it profit a man (or woman) to gain the whole world but lose his soul?"  Our economy has been upended by greed, our education system has been dismantled from within and the moral content of our souls has been infected with the values of the market place.  We no longer even think about goodness, truth or beauty and spend most of our days in either busyness or distractions. 

I think the poet is speaking truth to power here: evil is alive and well - that is a simple theological fact in our broken world - but it is being encouraged at the highest level when we cultivate a lack of imagination.