Have we lost our cosmic imagination?
Ok...Ok...Ok! Go ahead and say it: I’m a fuddy duddy! I’m a boring “this world is flat” guy! I’m one of those who insists, like so many scientific minds, that something isn’t real until we can see it and taste it and feel it! It doesn’t really matter unless it is practical, useful, and can happen in the now!
Why? Do you ask am I ranting about my shortcomings? Well, two things can be blamed: the eclipse and angels! Because on May 8th, while all of you were in Austin, or Arkansas, or wherever you are all go to see the eclipse, I was inside the church in a meeting that had no windows! And to be honest with you I had forgot all about the eclipse until someone in our meeting said, “Well, I guess it’s over.” And I asked, “what’s over?” and she said, “The eclipse. It’s been over for 30 minutes and we didn’t even stop to look out a window!”
What have I become! Add to this a sermon Sonya Garrett sent me written and shared by her sister, Dede, (an amazing sermon by the way) entitled, “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Man, how creative is that! I mean how come I can’t come up with something that creative...instead of “Easter, Part 3!”
The second reason I’m pondering this shortness of imagination, is because I’ve been reading “Prayer in the Night” by Tish Harrison Warren, and she has an actual chapter on angels. Angels!?! Are you kidding me? In the 21st century, you are going to write a chapter in a serious book about prayer on the subject of angels?!?! Tish, you are going to be laughed out of town by every academic on the planet!
To be honest with you it took every ounce of my “relevant Christian mind” NOT to skip the chapter! I kept having visions of “Precious Moments” figurines dancing over my head while the Disney theme played with the syrupy string orchestra in full swoop! But, believe it or not, as I read the chapter on angels, I have to admit it...Tish Harrison Warren got me. Partly by admitting she had the same feelings about angels that I did. Take, for example, a paragraph like this one that totally resonated with my “flat-world imagination.”
Believing in the supernatural can frankly be a little embarrassing in my urban circles—especially the undignified supernatural. Not some vaguely exotic, hip new-age trend. But angels. Really? This is the stuff of cheesy figurines that line a batty aunt’s bookshelves.
Now you’re talking Tish!!!
But then she shared that all this changed when she had a child and someone from an Eastern Orthodox tradition gave her an angel to hang over the crib of her little baby. Immediately she hung it up, and soon started to be comforted by the idea of an angel watching over her tiny, vulnerable baby as he or she tried to navigate this great big giant cosmos!
But that was all a warm-up act. A move to draw me in, because on the next page she went for the jugular when she shared this:
I cannot even imagine living with this view of the universe, where you can spin around on an average day and bump into a thousand angels. What was assumed for centuries—that the universe is buzzing with divine life—is something I have to stretch to believe. Yet my ambivalence about angels is not due to reason. It stems from a failure of my imagination, an imagination formed by a disenchanted view of the world—the empty ocean of the cosmos. Even though I confess otherwise, I am often not particularly captured by any world beyond what I can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. With this comes the loss of wonder. I rarely stop to consider that the universe—and even my small home—is drenched with the presence of God and full to the brim with spiritual mysteries. In his book Recapturing the Wonder, Mike Cosper writes, “Christians and non-Christians alike are disenchanted because we’re all immersed in a world that presents a material understanding of reality as the plausible and grown-up way of thinking.” Warren, Tish Harrison. Prayer in the Night (pp. 83-84).
Come on, now, Mrs. Warren! Are you saying I lack imagination? Just because I don’t imagine angels!? Well...
You know I think she has a point. Our rational world has caused us to look only for the evidence that we see in 3 dimensions. But faith is another dimension all together. Just because something is empty from our human eye, doesn’t mean there are not a thousand tiny micro-organisms out there! Just because we can’t see them, doesn’t mean there aren’t millions of electrons and protons and neutrons buzzing around! I mean, could there be angels out there?
What has caused me to become so 3 dimensional? Where has the mystic in me gone? Where has my sense of wonder gone? Why has my adult world become so disenchanted? She’s got a point!
And so, next week I’m headed to Austin...I think I can still catch it...the eclipse, I mean! Or perhaps next week, I’ll head to Iceland to see the Northern Lights. Or maybe next week, I’ll go to the latest Disney movie in the local theater. Or better yet, create a worship service that is not so “rational,” that has room for wonder. That perhaps still leaves room for Easter ...for a God who keeps leaving a second chance for an old “flat-world” thinker like me, to get it and live it!
Your pastor and friend, out catching fireflies or lightning bugs of wonder, Brook