Imagine, Religiously

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, September 28, 2008

When I was young, I lived a fairly idyllic existence.  Still, by the time I was thirteen, I’d had a grandfather die, I’d seen my dog run over by a car, and I’d heard the taunts of neighborhood kids picking on my Catholic and Jewish friends.  And I wasn’t sure where to turn with my questions about these hard things.

I’d been raised in the church, gone to Sunday School religiously, and listened to different preachers in the pulpit, and by the time I was thirteen, I needed help with the troubles of life, so I asked my parents:  What’s do I do with this stuff, the difficulties of life?  What is life about?  And is religion gonna help me with any of it? 

They, like many of us parents, were ill-prepared to answer such an angst-ridden set of questions, so they said, simply, “You have to have faith.”. 

Right.

So at thirteen, I became doubtful and confused.  “Faith” – what’s that mean? -  it sounded really mushy, unscientific, and unbelievable to someone who wanted fast answers to the hard questions and tough quandaries of life.  I needed a concrete answer, darn it, because as a thirteen-year-old human, that’s the only way I could think.

 

Stepping back a little further in time, I can remember, when I was even younger, looking up at a picture hanging on the side wall of the sanctuary of the little Disciples of Christ church I grew up in.  That once-famous painting portrayed a long-haired, bearded Jesus about to knock on a dark wooden door surrounded by thorn bushes.  I was told by some adult or other in the church – possibly the kindly and well-meaning minister - that the dark little thorn-protected door in the picture was the door to my heart.  That was okay for me when I was six – I could imagine a little wooden door there in my chest where a little supernatural Jesus stood waiting expectantly for me to let him in.  The story was vaguely comforting somehow, and made sense to me as a wide-eyed six-year-old because I had no other vision of what my heart, or any other heart, might actually look like.

Ah, but then I grew up and turned thirteen.  And I looked at that picture with what I believed to be very grown-up eyes, and I knew by then, very concretely, that my heart was an organ in my body that pumped blood through my veins and kept me alive.  There was no little wooden door, and I had a really hard time at that point, with my post-scientifically-trained mind, imagining a tiny supernatural Jesus waiting expectantly for me to let him in.

I want to talk today about imagination, specifically religious imagination.  I find in my discussions with friends and colleagues, with members of the public and members of the church, that too often we – myself included - tend to fall back on our thirteen-year-old understandings of things theological.  We want to think concretely, and that we thereby miss the richness of the metaphors and symbols bequeathed to us by our spiritual ancestors and by experiences of the rest of the world’s seekers of the divine.  We miss the comfort and the challenge of remaining present when the old words break open to offer us new vistas of understanding.

As I cast about in my mind for symbols to use in today’s sermon, Linda and I happened to go into a retail store where the first display we encountered was a large Christmas display.  It’s September, but I guess it’s never too early to make a buck.  So if the retailers are already hawking Christmas wares, I hope I’m not jumping the gun on you too much to use some Christmas symbolism:  we’ve already brought up Jesus this morning, so we may as well talk about Santa Claus, too.

The myth of Santa Claus has become a watchword for ideas that are useful when we’re young, but then are seen as childish and immature when we’re older.  If you’re little and believe in Santa Claus, well, that’s okay; that’s what you’re supposed to believe in.   But if you’re older and haven’t worked out the Santa question with reason and intellect, then there’s something wrong with you – you shouldn’t believe in Santa Claus, those thirteen-year-old rationalist friends of yours will say.  Everyone knows he’s not real. 

Maybe he’s not real, in a thirteen-year-old’s scientific sense, but that’s not the end of the story, the answer to our question, or the culmination of the process.  Again, let’s step back a little and imagine.

When we’re children, the myth of Santa Claus lets our parents give us presents that they say come from some larger, more mysterious, outside source – Santa Claus.  It works for kids because they have active imaginations and the story seems real enough – the myth certainly pervades the culture, and kids don’t have any other vision of what the world is supposed to be like.

But then somewhere, sometime, somebody spills the proverbial beans – “There isn’t a Santa Claus,” they say, “and besides, you’re a big baby if you believe in one.”  And we’re left in limbo at age three or seven or thirteen not knowing what to believe anymore, and ridiculed by some for what we once held so dear.

When we enter adolescent-hood, it’s completely natural to start questioning all the things we’ve been taught.  And we decide there can’t be a Santa Claus – no one could fly around the world in a sleigh drawn by eight tiny reindeer, delivering presents to all the good little girls and boys.  And we reject the myth.  It’s silly.  We don’t need it.  It no longer quenches our newfound desire for concreteness.

And some people leave it right there, never getting past a thirteen-year-old understanding of the Santa Claus myth.  There isn’t a Santa Claus.  Period.  End of story.

But for many more of us, that’s not all there is when we put our minds and our hearts to it and let our imaginations out of drydock.  You see, I’ve been a child who believed wholeheartedly in Santa Claus.  Maybe you were, too. 

And I’ve been an adolescent who rejected that fake, impossible, concrete Santa out of hand.  Maybe you were, too. 

And I’ve been a parent who watched the wonder in children’s eyes on a Christmas morning.  Maybe you’ve witnessed children on Christmas. 

And I’ve watched my children and others reject the Santa myth only to return to it when they grow up a little and have children or nieces or nephews of their own.  And I’ve come to see the usefulness of the myth and the beauty and the truthfulness of believing wholeheartedly in some larger, more mysterious, outside source – something larger even, and more mysterious than Santa Claus ever could be.

 

I have spoken often from this pulpit about the benefits of thinking poetically, about trying to understand things in as broad a fashion as possible, and about our need for the language of metaphor.  I was assuming, when I said that, of course, that we are no longer thirteen, that we can leave behind a rigid scientism, that we can move away from misplaced concreteness, and that we can live into a world where imagination - religious and otherwise – can and does play a vital part in our understanding.

As Laurel Hallman said in our reading this morning, poetry and imagination allows us to break open words and symbols and become aware of new worlds of meaning hiding just below the surface.  When we allow the associations brought up by words and symbols to interact and flow and dance within and around us, we become aware that communication, like existence, is never one-dimensional, but multi-dimensional and multi-faceted.

Let’s imagine together some more.  Listen to this poem by Phillip Booth entitled “First Lesson”:

Lie back, daughter, let your head

be tipped back in the cup of my hand.

Gently, and I will hold you. Spread

your arms wide, lie out on the stream

and look high at the gulls. A dead-

man’s float is face down. You will dive

and swim soon enough where this tidewater

ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe

me, when you tire on your long thrash

to your island, lie up, and survive.

As you float now, where I held you

and let go, remember when fear

cramps your heart what I told you:

lie gently and wide to the light-year

stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

That doesn’t sound like an overtly religious poem.  No religious words there:  no God, no spirit, no faith.  And yet, it speaks to the deepest of religious questions.  I find it comforting, even as I hear it in several different ways.

The six-year-old in me hears this poem as a story about a parent teaching a little girl to swim.  That’s okay – that’s how six-year-olds are supposed to think – on the surface, it’s just a nice story.  You might call that interpretation a literalist, even a fundamentalist one.

The thirteen-year-old in me, though, listens to this poem and says, “Oh, baloney!  Nobody talks like that.  That’s not real.  Give me some hard facts, something I can argue with, something I can use.”  And that’s okay – that’s how thirteen-year-olds are supposed to think - rejecting anything but the most concrete explanation.  You might call this a rationalist interpretation.

Now, when I read the words of this poem through my present lens, from the perspective of my own age and my own experience, I first hear them as a father who has helped teach a daughter to swim, one who has taught sons and daughters quite a lot about much more than just swimming.  In fact, at that level I connect in a very personal way with this poem because of my own life experiences.

And then, as I look again at these words and symbols using more imagination than experience, I see that the poem is about more than just swimming or parenting or teaching.  It’s about how to survive, how to thrive, how to live one’s life in the face of the hard work of being alive.  It’s about relationships – father and child certainly, teacher and student perhaps, but also about the relationship of life to one who lives it.  It’s about, on a deep level, what it is to be a human being and how important and life-affirming and life-saving it is to trust the existence of a power beyond imagination that we might call, in fact what I often call, to use the simplest word for such a thing I know, God.  You might want to call this an existential interpretation.

When we allow the associations of the ideas in this poem to interact and flow and dance within and around us, we become aware of just how multi-dimensional and multi-faceted even the simplest of activities can be.  And doing that may allow us to break open old words and symbols, like God or spirit or faith, for instance, and it may allow us to become aware of how all-pervasive these relationships are and how intricately faith can be woven into even the simplest of activities.

 

Now just because I can read this poem and thrill to the simplicity of language and to the depth of this metaphor about the way life messages are transmitted across the generations doesn’t mean I practice its lessons for myself very well. 

“Lie back, and the sea will hold you.”  It’s a wonderful sentiment, and I think it’s true.  I’ve had moments when I’ve known that it’s true.  And yet, do I lie back? 

Do I trust the power beyond imagination that I sometimes know is there? 

Do I live my faith in that power beyond imagination in a way that is advantageous to me and to those around me? 

Not usually.  Not enough.  I push.  I strain.  I get stressed out by simple things that won’t matter at all in a hundred years, or maybe even won’t matter next week.  I don’t always act as if the beliefs and values I say I hold dear are the ones I live by.  Maybe you can relate to this in your own life.  Maybe not.

 

But what I can say is that I have moved in my belief system from one place to another, and I have done so more than once, and I continue to acquire new insights using the associative properties of metaphor and symbol and language. 

Such is the nature of the search for truth and meaning in one’s life.  I am no longer six or thirteen, and neither are you, most likely.  And now that we are of a certain age, we can imagine religiously and see that playing with metaphor and symbol and language can and will break open new ways of understanding the world and our place in it. 

And may even give us some comfort in the hard times, when bad things happen to good people, when we can’t seem to keep our feet on solid ground.

 

It was no less a scientific mind than Albert Einstein who said:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.  For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might discover and create.”

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  And when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways, and here are some of the ways I’ve done that:

I no longer believe that one jolly white guy in a big red suit makes it around the world delivering presents every Christmas.  But I do believe that there is some larger, more mysterious, source of gifts outside of ourselves.

I no longer believe my heart has a little wooden door on it, but I do believe my heart can be opened.

I no longer believe in a tiny supernatural Jesus waiting expectantly for me to let him in, but I do believe we are called in a special way to in fact open our hearts to those who show up on our figurative doorsteps, just as Jesus taught.

I no longer believe that I trust the universe quite enough, but I do believe that with practice and imagination I might do better. 

If I ever believed that it is enough to simply believe, I now know that faith is a practice, and that practicing faith means questioning and doubting and reasoning and feeling and imagining, and sometimes faith means just lying back and letting the sea carry you.  I want to imagine that’s comfort enough.

 

So may it be.