Dear reader,
At the conclusion of the fabulous book Every Moment Holy, Douglas McKelvey includes a benediction, “A Liturgy of Praise to the King of Creation.” Throughout this prayer he offers a refrain: “Our thoughts of you, O Lord, have been too small, too few.”
This refrain reminds me of Paul’s exhortation to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17). I most often remember this command when, as in the above liturgy, I offer a confession. I remember my failure, my lack. Thoughts too small and too few—I have failed to pray without ceasing, to think about God in ways that his glory requires. This failure is not occasional, but daily. What, I wonder, would the opposite look like? Can I even imagine what it would look like to pray without ceasing, to have my self so united to Christ that it would always be turned towards God?
Some of what is beyond-our-imaginations is a feature of our human limits; our inability to imagine or to comprehend exists because we are not God. Paul also declares that God is “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph 3:20). Our infinite God is beyond our imagination, constrained as we are by so many dependencies and boundaries of time and space.
And yet, I wonder how much my failure to move towards a certain good or virtue or habit is because I simply can’t imagine it? Even as we embrace our creatureliness, might there be a place to resist the smallness of an imagination that cannot see past failure or scarcity?
Here, I think of a comment by Dorothy Sayers on the Greek and Roman philosophers that Dante meets in Inferno. Like Dante the poet, Sayers acknowledges the wisdom of these pagans, and yet, she says, “the souls ‘have what they chose’; they enjoy that kind of after-life which they themselves imagined for the virtuous dead; their failure lay in not imagining better” (emphasis mine). Their imaginations, stunted by sin, never opened enough to consider the possibility of paradise.
The failure of imagination is not unique to these philosophers. Formed as we are in the secular West, our own imaginations too easily settle for what we can observe and quantify. We struggle to imagine that our world might really be the stage of spiritual warfare or visiting angels. Others in non-Western or non-modern cultures might face different challenges, but we all share a stunted imagination, an incapacity to see beyond what is or what we can perceive, to what could be or what lies beyond our perception.
Could we interpret some of Scripture’s stories in light of a failure of imagination? The Israelites grumbled and rebelled because they could not imagine the possibility of food being provided in a desert wilderness—and yet God was able to provide manna from heaven. Thomas refuses to believe until imagination is no longer necessary—until he touches Christ’s wounds for himself. Clinging only to what they could see or had experienced in the past, they were unable to hope.
In my experience, we don’t tend to give much time to the imagination in our models for discipleship and spiritual growth. My own tradition tends to focus on the intellect, with an emphasis on doctrine and “rightly dividing the word of truth” (1 Tim 2:15). Still, one of my pastors growing up often retold stories of faithful Christians in history. Their stories, I think, contributed to the enlarging of my imagination—I was given more examples of how faithfulness could look. Theologian Patrick Sherry writes that religious leaders, reformers, and saints can “give us a fresh realization of what [the requirements of God’s Law] are and to suggest new patterns of obedience.” In the stories of heroes, he says, “it is not so much that they do what ordinary people neglect, but they do what has not even occurred to the latter.”
Several years ago, I came across an analogy for the Christian life and the necessity of imagination: the analogy of a play. N.T. Wright compares the Old and New Testaments to the first four acts (Creation, Fall, Israel, and Jesus) of an unfinished play, arguing that the church has been tasked with completing this play. We have not been given a word-for-word script. Instead, we are called to enact our parts in consistency with and under the authority of the previous acts. I love this analogy, because it holds onto the authority of Scripture while offering a rationale for why we don’t simply obey every command in Scripture (i.e. the Levitical dietary laws) or simply reenact the life of Jesus in order to imitate him. To faithfully improvise our parts in diverse cultures and contexts, we need to have both a solid understanding of the Scriptures and redeemed imaginations.
“Our thoughts have been too small, too few.” What part of the Christian life do you find most difficult to imagine?
One consequence of the Reformation for the art world was the shift from religious subjects to everyday, even lowly, subjects. One pioneer of portraying peasant scenes in large paintings was Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569). The above painting is his work The Peasant Wedding. I’m struck by the simplicity of the scene, especially as its subject is a wedding. The celebration is told in the plates of food, the musicians, and the jars of wine. Yet, it takes some effort to find the bride and groom. Even here, the focus is on the common people; the servants and the performers dominate the foreground. Art and literature are often seen as essential to the training of the imagination, and I wonder how much of that is due to the reduced distance between ourselves and the subjects—the people we read about or study in art are, usually, not divine or superhuman, but ordinary, like us. We can imagine ourselves in their places. If they, then perhaps also I?
I finally bought a copy of Makoto Fujimura’s newest book Art and Faith. In addition to being a celebrated artist, Fujimura is an articulate theologian, and his reflections in this book on making in imitation of our Creator God are so nourishing. Pushing against what he calls “plumbing theology”—a communication of the Gospel that tells us that Jesus has come to “fix the pipes” without tell us “what the pipes are for”—Fujimura explores the implications of new creation, the tears of Jesus, and the resurrection of Lazarus for the creative life.
Fujimura also has a chapter in the recently published Reformed Public Theology, edited by Matthew Kaemingk. I’m hoping to write a longer review of this at some point, because I was just thrilled to find such rich theological work done out of the theology of Abraham Kuyper and Richard Mouw. Most of the reformed theology I’ve read recently seems to be turned inward, speaking only about doctrine for and to the church. In contrast, this collection of essays asks, “Is reformed theology good for the life of the world?” and answers that question in relation to a variety of global issues, including the refugee crisis, Chinese labor laws, fashion design, and Brazil’s populist movement. So much good work here.
My writing elsewhere this month: Becoming Beautiful Saints at Gentle Reformation, John Calvin and Creation as a Theater of God’s Glory and Michaelmas and Modern Imagination on my blog.
...Our thoughts of you,
O Lord, have been too small, too few.
For your claim over creation is vast. You are
The Lord of Antarctica,
The King of California,
The King of the Scottish Hills,
and the King of the Nile.
You are the weaver of
the unseen fabrics of the world.
You are Lord of the Atoms,
The Ruler of Electrons,
The Lord of Gravity,
and The King of Quarks.
Your dominion enfolds the earth and rises
beyond it to the furthest extremes of the stars.
You are Lord of the Vast Empty Spaces.
You are The King of the Constellations,
The Black Hole King,
Lord of Novas Exploding,
Lord of Speeding Light,
High King of Galaxies,
King of Orion,
King of the Moon.
And still, even still,
our thoughts of you
have been too small,
too few.
...You were before all things,
you created all things, and
in you all things are held together.
There is no corner of creation
you will fail to redeem.
You are Lord of Lords,
and King of Kings,
O Jesus Christ,
our King of Everything.
Amen.
- from “A Liturgy of Praise to the King of Creation” by Douglas McKelvey
On the road with you,
Laura