prayers, imaginations, and intentions

The other day, my daughter called me on the carpet.  She was in town for the weekend and attended Cambridge Drive Church.   During lunch she raised a bunch of good questions about the direction of the church but the most important ones had to do with prayer, with imagination, and with intentions... and I think the three are tied together in an intimate way.

We're listening to Orson Scott Card's book, Xenocide, in the car.  It is an interesting and philosophical read - indeed, some folk have complained that it is too philosophical and needs more action.  In the book the Hive Queen describes the way new queens are formed as an imagining of what could be and a calling into the chaos for something to come and give shape to the pattern imagined.  In some ways, it recalls the New Agey idea of dreaming something hard enough and it happens.  It got me thinking about the role imagination plays in prayer... and how intentions are lived out when we have the courage to imagine them as real, present them to God, and live them out.

I have to admit that I've not had a very fertile imagination lately.  Cynicism has been more likely to hold sway in my heart than wonder and expectation.  That's not good.  It isn't helpful to the folk who are members at CDCC and it isn't helpful for those who need just the kind of community we are and should be becoming.  So... my task is to get imagining... to get intending... to get praying... and to see God's yearnings for us - wonderful, beautiful yearnings - filled full.

Imagine

One of my go to blogs is by Rami Shapiro. Rami is a rabbi who has a wonderful sense of humor, a sharp mind, and a keen sense of religion in the modern world. He writes a great deal about his own tradition - he is a rabbi - but much of what he says has clear implications for my tradition as well.

In a recent post he wrote about the problem for Jews when the historicity of the Torah becomes suspect after all but the fundamentalists had already given up any sense of supernaturalism in the text. You can read his blog for his brilliant take on his tradition.

As for mine, we have similar problems. Karen Armstrong speaks of religion as poetry. The truth is that far too many Christians experience religion as prose (and not particularly good prose at that). How many times have you heard someone refer to the Bible as an owners manual for human beings as if you could look in an index and find entries for how to deal with horrible life events on page 436, or "insert tab A in slot B" under sex? As Rabbi Rami says, we need to read the text with imagination. We must see the text as the sweeping story of our ancestors struggling to make sense of their experience of life and of the Holy. Their story is our model, not literally and directly but in what they sought and what they struggled with. Then it becomes for us a vital and living word, relevant to our daily experience and challenging us to figure out God's yearnings for all of humanity in the context of our daily lives and daily experience. Then it becomes poetry... read not as simple instructions but as deep and evocative images calling us forward as people of God.