Using Religious Imagination

a sermon preached by Khleber M. Van Zandt V at the First Unitarian Church of Alton on November 13, 2005

 

When I was thirteen years old, I asked my parents a difficult religious question.  They, like most parents, were ill-prepared to answer.  The question was:  Why should I believe anything religious?  I’d been raised in the church, I’d been taught in religious education classes, I’d listened to different preachers in the pulpit, and now, at the wise old age of thirteen, I was wondering what it all meant.  I was doubtful and confused because some of the things I was asked to take “on faith” – what’s that mean? -  seemed really mushy, nonsensical, unscientific, and unbelievable, at least to someone who needed concrete answers concerning the questions and quandaries of life.

So when I was thirteen, I finally found the ability to formulate a general but serious religious question:  Why should I believe?  And I wanted a concrete answer because that’s the only way I could think.

 

When I was even younger, I would look up at the 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 that seemed surrounded by thorn bushes.  I was told by some adult or other in the church that the dark little door in the picture was the door to my heart, and 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 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.

But then I turned thirteen.  And I looked at that picture with what I thought were 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 imagining a tiny supernatural Jesus waiting expectantly.

 

Dr. Ron Glossop spoke from this pulpit some weeks ago about “Stages of Life.”  He spoke movingly about the differences between and among people in various age groups and the path of change we take as we grow up (or at least grow older), becoming somehow different, while remaining somehow the same.  It got me to thinking about the ways our understandings of words and symbols change as we grow through our lives.

So let’s take a thoroughly non-religious example of the way understandings change.  Here it is, coming up on Thanksgiving, the stores all full of Christmas stuff, so let’s take Santa Claus, a secular, almost anti-religious symbol.  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.  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.  But I don’t think that’s the end of the story, the answer to the question, or the culmination of the process.  Let’s look closer and think about it using some imagination.

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 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 dear.

We become adolescents and we 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 little girls and boys.  And we reject the myth.  It’s silly. We don’t need it.  It no longer quenches our new 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 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 a child like that as well.  And I’ve been an adolescent who rejected that fake, impossible, concrete Santa out of hand.  Maybe you did that, too.  And I’ve been a parent who watched the wonder in my own children’s eyes on a Christmas morning.  Maybe you’ve seen 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.  Maybe you’ve noticed this, too.

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 spoke two weeks ago 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, and I was assuming, of course, that we are no longer thirteen, and that we can move away from misplaced concreteness, and that we can live into a world where imagination, especially religious imagination, plays a part in 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, we become aware that communication, like existence, is never one-dimensional, but multi-dimensional and multi-faceted.

Today, to practice using our religious imagination, I offer an ostensibly secular 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.

 

Did you hear any overtly religious language?  There’s not one traditionally theological word in there – no God, spirit, faith.  As a six-year-old, one might hear in this poem only a story about a parent teaching a little girl to swim.  That’s okay – that’s how six-year-olds are supposed to think – it’s just a nice story. 

As a thirteen-year-old, though, one might say, “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 – concretely, rejecting anything but the most rational explanation.

Now, when I read the words of this poem from the perspective of my own age and experience, I first hear them as a father who has helped teach a daughter to swim, one who has taught sons and daughters much more than just swimming, and not always in a good way if you ask them. 

But then, as I look again at these words and symbols with more imagination, I see that the poem is about more than just swimming or parenting or teaching.  It’s about how to survive, isn’t it?  - 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, at a deep level, what it is to be a human being and how important and life-saving and life-affirming it is to trust the existence of a power beyond imagination that we might call, in fact what I often call, simply, God.

When we allow the associations of the ideas in this poem to interact and flow and dance, 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, 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 next week.  I don’t always act as if the beliefs 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.  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 older, some of us can see that playing with the associative properties of words and symbols – using religious imagination – can and will break open up new ways of understanding the world and our place in it. 

 

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, 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 can. 

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

 

So may it be.