“Curiouser and Curiouser” are my favorite words from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There’s something marvelous about a young English girl’s story that invites us to believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” However, the sad truth is that we tend to put aside our imagination as we get older, believing not “six impossible things” before our coffee but ruminating on any number of items on our “to do” list. Wonder is relegated as “nice but unnecessary.” Yet, creativity is intricately woven into our being and is essential to our relationship with God. It is not an accessory but a necessity for the survival of hope and community, building a bridge to deeper conversations about faith and how to live in this intricate and surprising world together.
I’m troubled by an alarming trend in society toward categorical black-and-white assumptions. We are draining away all grey areas for compromise and mutual forbearance. Without the possibility of another perspective, our ability to love one another as we are loved in Christ is greatly inhibited. And when we double down on black-and-white thinking, we also ignore the choice of living in technicolor: of painting in brave, bold colors born out of imaginative hope and love for real people in real community.
Our lives and our faith suffer without imagination. Associate Editor for the Acton Institute Jospeh Sunde writes, “Imagination is a uniquely human faculty that is connected with reality and faith at the same time … Further, for a Christian, imagination is even more valuable: ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Heb. 11:1). If you take this word of the New Testament seriously, it follows that you must have imagination in order to have faith.”
We are, after all, born of imagination – God’s imagination that bloomed into soil and seas, volcanoes and deserts, and a million unique creatures that crawl, fly, swim or walk. God’s imagination that fashioned human bodies in all their glorious variety. God’s imagination that saw a way to enter our lives as fully human, yet fully divine; that invented a way to radically change the world without violence or armies or political parties; that created love and kept creating it until we could imagine it, too. Love requires enormous imaginative capacity.
Pope Francis once addressed artists of faith, offering them the wisdom: “the Lord always surprises us: The Lord is always greater; he is always a mystery that in some way escapes us whenever we try to fit him into a frame … and when we do not sense that the Lord surprises us, something is wrong: Our hearts are diminished and closed.” If we are not curious and open to the surprise of “impossible things” happening when it comes to God, the gospel, and Scripture, then, I believe, Pope Francis is correct; We are diminished as proclaimers and hearers of the biblical narrative and the work of the Spirit within us and between us.
Being a disciple means embracing the radical imagination of a God who loves. It means that you will be surprised by God’s unfolding narrative in the world, with us and for us. It means there is always hope and there is always opportunity for us to live out our faith in new ways that expand our hearts. Imagination inspires us to break down barriers and entertain new perspectives; it keeps our prayers and proclamation alive. Imagination and curiosity about what God’s action in the world, within our communities, and in each of us, can remind us that we are all made in the image of a holy, and wholly imaginative, God who does “six impossible things before breakfast” if we are curious enough to see.
