Sermon given by Intern Minister Tori Rosati, November 7, 2021
When my kids were little, people recommended a lot of parenting books to us. We had recently moved to the area and didn’t have much of a support system yet and life was hard. There were so many of these impossible moments when one of us would be upset and we couldn’t figure out what was wrong and if we did, didn’t know how to fix it. A lot of these books only made me feel worse. I tried all the ideas they offered and here we still were – mired in overwhelm. One of them, though became a touchstone for it pragmatic, easy to incorporate, and creative ways to engage with our kids. It is a now somewhat dated book called, “how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk.” It had all these little cartoons in it that showed ways that a parent or caregiver could reframe difficult moments to encourage better dialogue and cooperation. Some of these were like magic – in fact I found myself using them at work meetings, with friends, and relations.
One of the strategies we loved was called “Give a Child Their Wishes in Fantasy.” So, it would go something like this: one of the kids would want something impossible like say ice cream in January from the ice cream shop down the road that was closed until March. All kinds of frustration and crying and pleading would ensure. Things would begin to get overwhelming and then drawing on this strategy one of us would say something like, “If the shop was open, I’d get an ice cream cone with 10 scoops and share it with all our friends!” They would stop crying for a moment, picturing this, and then say, “I’d get a bowl of ice cream with so much ice cream it would fill a swimming pool and invite the whole town.” Then, “I’d get enough to fill the whole ocean!” “I’d ride ice cream waves! And so on…
Before we knew it, the desire for actual ice cream was replaced with world of ice cream waves where there was enough for everyone always.
This month’s worship theme is the Way of Imagination and I can’t help but remember back to this silly game we used to play. With businesses closed, some never coming back, limitations on our movement, supply change disruptions, and restrictions everywhere we turn – I can appreciate the way it felt for my 5-year-old kids so many years ago. But I also remember how easily, lightly, and creatively they were able to imagine there way through impasse. How rich and connective those moments were when we, frazzled and overwhelmed by conflict, found our way back to each other through our imaginations.
Now, I don’t mean to reduce or even compare our current moment to a desire for ice cream, but it makes me reflect on the power of imagination and offers maybe an invitation to a practice that can feel at times too simple a response to the intractable challenges we still face - but may just be --- the something missing in ourselves and wider world.
As we explored last month, our current moment has made us feel our vulnerability in so many new and different ways. It has brought us to the brink over and over again and opened us up to realities we are still learning how to hold. And things still feel cautious. At times they feel impossible. The way forward is hard to recognize and see. And we’re so very tired.
COVID hit a pause button and as we ease up on it, it seems like there is a collective call in the air to bring some intention and thought to how we return. And, at least for me, I have grown a bit weary from hoping alone. Hoping things will get better. Hoping our recovery will hold. Hoping our world starts to find solutions to the larger social problems we face. This hope, at times, has been hard to access and sometimes feels too light a response. And, as we continue this great emergence, I wonder if imagination might be a better posture. Imagination asks us to dig in. It asks us to see into the future something not yet there. It asks us to play, and through that play, create the world as it could be. And I don’t know, there is something in this call that feels sacred, that quickens my heart and helps me to see pathways forward – just beyond the limits. And in this time and place that feels radical – prophetic even.
John Paul Lederach, one of the world’s foremost experts on peacebuilding and reconciliation, in his book the moral imagination suggests that what he calls, “the wellspring – the source that gives life,” lies in our moral imaginations or “the capacity to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist.”
In this way, he explores the function of the artist as they might respond to some of the largest global challenges we face. He asks the question: what would happen if leaders of national and global politics invoked the artist? Too often, he says, artists are called at celebrations or when a world leaders decision need to be blessed…rarely, if ever, when faced with large-scale life-and-death issues to leaders invite artists – from musicians and poets, to painters, filmmakers and playwrights – to respond imaginatively from within their disciplines to challenges they face as leaders.”
I can’t help but think here about youth poet-laurete Amanda Gorman who stood up at the inauguration this past January and delivered a powerful and prophetic expression of moral imagination. Her poem didn’t just commemorate an event, honor a person, or even a country – it spoke to our tired, exhausted world as it was and asked us to imagine beyond it. “The new dawn blooms as we free it/For there is always light,/if only we're brave enough to see it/ If only we're brave enough to be it.” From this poet, this artist, we were asked to be brave enough to be artists ourselves – to create the world - we so achingly desire - to be made real.
And in here is also an invitation to re-imagine and expand our notion of what being an artist means. It involves what we traditionally think of as the creative arts (the musicians, poets, painters, filmmakers and playwrights) yes, --- but I think is also holds space for the ways that we all create the world. Creation is continually coming into being and imagination is its vehicle. The closer we engage with the creative practice of imagination, the closer we get to the Holy, the wellspring, the source of all life, and to a world that hopes through imagining. And this requires all of us.
We are participants in creation – it wasn’t just something that happened eons ago during the big bang or the books of genesis - with every story we tell, every song we sing, every breath we take, we imbue this world with possibility. We are all artists. Imagination is a creative act – at its heart, maybe it is the foundational creative act. It is born out of impasse when the promise of another way is precarious and uncertain. Imagination comes in to fill the space – reaches out its tendrils of possibility and, creates oceans of ice cream, and rivers that flow to, as adrienne maree brown wrote in our reading, the edge of our ability to dream.
But the way of imagination doesn’t just help us imagine the world as we want it to be, it also helps us to see the world as it is and for those of us who experience some level of social privilege – it helps us to see and believe that the world, may in fact be -- what it is. The first step here, then, might be that sacred pause when we bear witness to the impossibility of a moment – step up to that edge - and then dream past it.
Physicist, Chiara Marletto, in her recent book, “The Science of Can and Can’t,” points out that scientific breakthroughs require imagination, and a practice of pushing through defeat, contradiction, and failure - unconstrained by pre-conceived notions of what or how something should be. In the spirit of the fantasy game with my girls, she writes, “Declaring something impossible leads to more possibility.”
Here is where I think hope and imagination can be friendly companions. Where hope steps aside and we acknowledge the unvarnished reality of the impossible challenges we are living through, imagination comes in to offer a way forward that allows us to hope anew.
I remember this moment early in the pandemic. It was probably April or May. A dear friend of mine came by our house on a bike ride. We stood probably 10 feet apart with masks on outside straining to hear each other in the eerie quiet of those early days. She told me this story that she has given her blessing for me to recount. It has really stuck with me and became a touchstone during that first year of lockdown.
She had taken a walk a few days prior in the rain. All along the road were puddles of pooled water blocked up by leaves, sticks, and stopped storm drains. So much like our lives at the time and even now still. She paused for a moment to look at them and noticed, that despite her original assessment that they were puddles, contained and immovable by surface tension, she could see beautiful rivulets of water swirling in and out of them in the places where a small opening, an edge breached, a possibility of movement beckoned. In fact, the longer she paused and looked, she noticed they were full of them – tiny streams dancing and singing their watery song, re-imagining the landscape of the forest floor amidst seeming impossibility. And through this, hope was renewed by two friends.
Declaring something impossible leads to more possibility. It leads to breakthroughs and new formations and paints the world anew. And, like we found playing the fantasy game with the girls, it leads us back to each other.
This leg of our journey through and to our current moment still feels weary. We are gathered back here in this sanctuary, but things are different – they don’t feel the same. We are still held back by precautions and restrains. Not all of us are here. There is that puddled up surface tension from how we have had to gather, grieve, loose, and live together in community and yet I wonder how imagination might speak to us here and know? What is beyond the edge of what we thought was possible?
I was talking this past week with Bo about the work that he and others have done here in the past to start an arts ministry. Apparently, this has been circling around for a while and the Board has taken it up as a focus for this church year. In our conversation about the arts, Bo used words to describe what an arts ministry could offer this space like, ‘soul saving,’ ‘creating spirit and letting spirit create us,’ waking up.’
This is a moment that invites us to pause and then participate in creation. To be the artists of this congregation and to do this together. How might we re-imagine our ministry spaces here at UUCH? Where and how might the artist show up? Who is the artist? How might we imbue our gatherings (programs, small group ministries, worship, justice work, committee meetings even!) with practices of creation, postures of imagining where we can all take turns being the artist? I hope you will let us know what comes to your mind.
So in light of all of this, the imagination game we played with the kids so long ago, doesn’t seem so silly. It was flexing our muscles – it was inviting practices of creation – it was witnessing too the world as it was, while also playing with the world as it could be. And it was doing it together. So, let us call the artists. Let us be brave enough to be the artists of our world. Let us prepare - the way. Our closed doors leading to oceans of sustenance, riding the waves of milky sweet possibility, to crash on the shore of a new day. Let us invite hope to come alongside us as a comforting friend as we strain together out to the limits, the edges of our dreams – those points where may just fall off – but don’t – held in the gentle crook of each other’s imagining arms. The edge – that rich, vibrant place of birth – like a child’s game, an artist’s song, a poet’s call to a broken world on a cold January morning.
In the coming weeks, as we explore this notion of imagination – may we see places along the road where water breaks through the surface tension. May we feel that creating spirit, creating us. Notice where impossibility makes way for possibility – where the world opens up before us like some great and endless song that we can’t help but sing, can’t help but create, are forever and endlessly imagining anew.
Amen.