By Tom Hook
January 10, 2021
IMAGINE THAT! Can I? Can we?
When I chose this video for this morning, it was before the devastating attack on our Democracy this past Wednesday.
This video, titled “The Great Reversal” is based upon Isaiah 60. Isaiah wrote this for the Jewish exiles who are returning to Jerusalem after their captivity in Babylonia.
Cyrus of Persia, who had defeated the Babylonians, allowed the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and even provides funds to finance the rebuilding of the temple.
There must have been excitement and a glimmer (just a glimmer) of hope for the Jewish people. That they might imagine a brighter future given this new opportunity.
“Look up, Love, take your eyes off the ground, show your face!
Have the courage to see, not only the problems, but the one who remains with you holding the Light!
Power is shifting – and it won’t look like what we think – when love reigns.”
The events which occurred on Wednesday of this past week, have made it more difficult to embrace these words – perhaps impossible – for some of us.
However, we do have an opportunity for a “Great Reversal”. We have a new administration and Congress that give us the opportunity to imagine a brighter future.
This use of our Radical Imagination to dream a brighter future requires action on our part, for without action, we are simply daydreamers – destined frustration, fear, and anger.
We are, indeed, the benefactors of Radical Imagination, but, at the same time, We are victims of Radical Imagination.
We are the benefactors of technological, scientific, medical advances never
imagined even 30 years ago. Look at the speed with which we were able to develop vaccines to combat the Corona Virus!
We are victims of hundreds of years of imagining the “other” as less than human. Of colonizing, without regard to the sacred homes of indigenous peoples. Of raping Mother Earth squandering her resources in the name of progress. Of imagining Patriotism/Nationalism as synonymous with God’s Will and that any notion otherwise brands us Socialists and anti-American.
This is what is playing out in our country as millions now imagine and embrace conspiracy theories, stolen elections, and fake news.
In an article by David Albertson and Jason Blakely, they describe Pope Francis’
plea to “dare to dream (or imagine) a better way of doing politics. They write:
Politically, the United States is facing a crisis of the real. Yes, we confront political realities of an urgency and scale not witnessed in more than a generation—from ecological death and pandemic to the rise of authoritarian nationalism and militarized violence against Black citizens. In the midst of these calamities, millions of Americans struggle to discern real news from fake, science from conspiracy theory, political wisdom from magical thinking. As reality grows more and more menacing, fewer Americans are in touch with it. Politicians indulge nostalgic fantasies to distract our attention and shift the blame.
But we also face a crisis of the real in a very different sense. Namely, the politics presented for decades by serious politicos and wonks as the only “realistic” way forward seems with every passing day more unsustainable. Our entire way of life seems at once unchangeable and yet in need of radical intervention, lest we continue the downward spiral.
This problem of imagining more hopeful futures – amid a self-destructive, unrealistic “realism” – provides a key to unlocking the politics of Pope Francis, whose pastoral letters and encyclicals have stirred confusion and controversy
among conservatives and liberals alike. Pope Francis embraces a utopianism that is not grounded in violent struggle but in a deeply Christological hope for the transformation of people and communities—from the bottom up. With the release of his new encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” on Oct. 4, we would do well to revisit his critique of false realism and false nostalgia, and his call for all of us to foster a political attitude of faithful and daring dreaming, or in my words, Radical Imagination.
In his encyclical “Laudato Si’ (care for our common home),” Pope Francis has already railed against the dominant form of popular economic theory that presents financialized global capitalism as the given, inescapable order of things. Once capitalism appears as the only realistic way of life, many people succumb to the temptation to view it as the work and will of God. Capitalism is then deified and the distinction between the city of God and the city of man is erased.
Part of what has made Pope Francis’ politics so difficult to grasp is his refusal to limit himself to an abstract ideological platform. Instead, he asks the us to go deeper, to even undergo a conversion in how we relate to politics. This is a spiritual stance that refuses to idolize either present realities or some past golden age and instead asks us to risk imagining a very different political future.
Francis participates in the long tradition of Christian social utopianism. Beginning with St. Thomas More and sustained up through Dorothy Day, Christian utopianism has deployed the imagination to criticize current politics radically while daring to propose a sweeping vision of an alternative future. (Radical Imagining).
He does not dictate the content of our imagining or dreaming. Instead, he asks us to engage in this creative work together WITH him.
For Pope Francis, utopian imagining counteracts the world’s false realisms –
which suggest that the current state of affairs – (violent & unjust) – “IS what it IS”.
In “Querida Amazonia, (Beloved Amazon),” Francis utters his own youthful dream, a utopian program if ever there were one, strengthened by a lifetime spent exercising his imagination in Ignatian contemplation.
“I dream,” he writes, “of an Amazon region that fights for the rights of the poor, the original peoples and the least of our brothers and sisters,” even as global
capitalists have ruined local economies across Latin America for decades. He imagines a region that hastens to defend the dignity of indigenous cultures. He imagines preserving the overwhelming beauty of the Amazon, even as unprecedented fires rage through its heart.
Pope Francis asks us to disentangle ourselves from the world’s failing realisms, which only serve to excuse our indifference to the weakest and poorest all around us. His politics are neither liberal nor conservative, but a vision of fraternity grounded in utopian hope. We can remain frightened, grasping at the security of
a sentimentalized past. We can remain captive to the market logic of the present,
unable to imagine an alternative to its endless cycles of violence. Or we can devote ourselves to the task of earnest, daring and hopeful imagining of a radically different future, awaiting the most unexpected solidarities to come.
And from “Wild Imagination” by Geneen Marie Haugen, she states: “Imagination itself may be our best resource for experiential recovery of a
vibrant, participatory, and wildly sacred Earth.” She continues:
Somewhere in mists of ancestral times, all of us are connected with people who
once lived close to Earth, entwined with their places, entwined with the Others – people who participated and communed directly with plants and animals, dependent on Sun and rain, and the effect of storms and geological events.
For modern people, an animate worldview might seem a superstitious, primitive perspective, or an artifact from an “over-active imagination”. Meanwhile, the common – (and perhaps unconscious) – dead-universe worldview allows for, and maybe even insists upon, a cannibalistic relationship with unfeeling forests, mountaintops, rivers, creatures, and cultures.
Anguish over the diminishment of our world, the destruction of Earth’s life support systems, and the extinction of species is deep in our shared human psyche, though largely unexpressed. So many of us can only dimly imagine our way through the psychic and physical debris to a regenerated, thriving, Earth community. Yet the mysterious human imagination itself may be our best
resource for experiential recovery of a vibrant, participatory, and wildly sacred
Earth!
Decolonizing our own minds may be a lifelong practice – rather than quickly acquired, but psychic habits and habitual perceptions can be disrupted with intentional, radical enactments of imagination.
So much clamors for our attention, such noise, constant seductions and distractions. The electronic images vying for our attention are relentless and seldom rewarding. We struggle to turn our gaze away from the screen content that is provided for us. We live amidst the greatest colonization of the imagination ever known.
Right now, many of the images projected into the collective psyche are a nightmare of eco-degradation, governments unraveling, resource competition and violence – rather than a vision of a thriving Earth community, a collaboration of true visionaries, an honoring of the great mysteries of the cosmos.
Who could fault anyone for regarding the nightmare as the only reality, the only option?
One antidote to the colonization of the mind is the wild imagination. Cultivating the extraordinary human capacity to imagine alternate possibilities is, I believe, at least part of an essential navigation strategy for our times of multiple crises and ecological peril. Becoming conscious of the power of imagination in our lived collective experience may be an evolutionary movement, a call to participate with an emerging mode of human consciousness that may have many names.
The human imagination has brought us violins and nuclear weapons, Hubble and fracking, democracy and tyranny, and every other human invention or creation – changing the world over and over again, with consequences that perhaps no one fully envisioned.
Declaring the all-encompassing, foundational importance of imagination in her epic poem, Rant, Diane di Prima writes, “THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST / THE IMAGINATION / ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT.” Let us pause for a moment to ask, who controls the images that allure us, that may direct our efforts? Who is streaming the script? Without the vigorous occupation
of collective imagination by visionary persons who have no industrial, consumerist, or military agenda, planetary well-being is under siege.
Several weeks ago, Willow Kelly, suggested that we “Cultivate a practice of
Wonder”.
I would agree with her, and I would take if one step further – to incorporate the gift of Radical Imagination into our practice.
Imagination is not just creating a more perfect future – it pulls the sacred – the divine within us – to our conscious state.
It helps me to see all of creation – not as something to consume – but as something sacred and worth saving.
I can image that the wind howling through the deep forest is speaking to me as a wise friend – imploring me to recognize the sacredness of this place we call Mother Earth.
What is “Life” asking of me? Am I too old and set in my ways to imagine a brighter future? Can I see a path forward for my grandchildren?
Once Radically Imagined – then there is the hardest of tasks – TO ACT!
As I stated earlier, without action we are simply “Daydreamers” – destined for countless days of frustration, fear, and anger.
In this new year of 2021 may we see through the lens of Radical Imagination. To perceive the “common” as precious – perhaps even miraculous.
To bring to consciousness images that guide us toward purposeful creation,
toward human/Earth coherence and sacred intimacy.
To participate fully in the reimagining of our political state of chaos to a new state of equality for all humankind.
As imagined in Isaiah’s Prophecy:
Power is shifting, and it won’t look like what we think when Love reigns. Life will grow from unexpected places. The smallest and the least will be
welcomed into the center – and their perspective will matter.
Not only will violence cease, we won’t want to hurt one another.
Everything wrong side up is being upended. The table is extending, rounding. You have a place that is only yours.
And Everyone – Everyone at this table will have more than enough. So, stand up – Open up.
Take it all in –
And Shine! IMAGINE THAT! May It Be So…..