..imagination

About month ago I was struck with the lack of imagination around me. I think I was in the midst of planning another program that had been done annually before, and therefore tradition was enough motivation to keep me going. It wasn't really. I also found myself in afew forums and advocacy discussions and inevidibly a hand would raise up at the end and ask the disheartening question of 'So what do we do now...?' I found myself gathering data on social issues, gathering theories in which to frame them, rooting them in theological reasoning without any imagination for something different that what I was seeing already done.

So for a while I championed this cute new idea of having a Christian imagination. I let it rest in my brain and I let it sit there until I felt smart and wise. For a while I felt nice because Shane Claiborne talked about these ideas in his book and I liked thinking like Shane. The problem with it was that I didn't really know what a Christian imagination was, I just knew what not having one looked like.

Over the course of the last week or so I have been struggling with the realities of a few of my current life situations. I didn't think that they had much to do with Christian imagination and put my pet passion to the side for a while. I began to learn that much of my tensions came down to the role of expectations in a group setting. I personally have so many expectations in most situations. I have expectations for myself, my morality, and my behaviors around other people. I have expectations of the group as a whole and the direction we are going. I also have expectations for each person within the group. For a group of four there are 25 different expectations and for a group of six, there are 30. I think that the tension I am feeling in these situations is the collision of idealism and reality. Idealism, to me, is based in the future, in the non-existent and I am beginning to realize that it is often based in ignorance, however blissful it may be. Living in a world of idealism is comfortable and happy. The world looks rosy and ideas become more important than people, making personal relationship contingent on the agreement of ideas rather than deeply abiding, sacrificial love across divides. The tension comes when this problematic idealism steps into reality and is met with busy schedules, limited resources, and the cold facts of a difficult life. This tension, if not quickly evaluated causes unmet expectations to fester and this leads to frustration. A wise friend once said that frustration is unmet expectation and his words haven’t failed me yet.

So this leads me to Christian imagination in a practical way. I think that Christian imagination is deeply rooted in reality, not idealism, because Jesus met us where we are and works with us in this world, not just mentally in our thought lives. So expectations are great, but should not be the primary force keeping relationships together because they will usually be unmet and that is dangerous territory to operate in. Ideals are great, but need to be less important that the facts of peoples lives and the difficulties in a lot of relationships. Permission into heaven is not intellectual, it’s relational. Ideals that are second class to people and a hopeful marriage of reality and those ideas is the birthplace of the Christian imagination. It is a difficult marriage it is definitely hard work but I think that this intelligent, relational hope is what God is calling us to. To me, there is so much more practical hope in the marriage of these ideas than in romantic, optimistic idealism that can often become caustic to other people in one’s life. I think that this is why I can have expectations, they are a human experience, and go to school to learn about the difficult realities of this world, and believe that it is suppose to be so much different, and blend them together in a way that is sustainable and lifegiving.