Day 14 - The Ministry of the Imagination

Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) by Paul Gauguin, National Gallery of Scotland, 1888

How good is your imagination? How often do you spend time in your imagination? Perhaps we think that imagination is a bit ‘frilly’ for faith or worse, we worry that it stands in opposition to reality and what we believe are the truths of the gospel. I am becoming increasingly convinced that imagination is vital.

Paul Gauguin cuts his painting in half with the use of that tree-trunk. On one side are the Breton women in traditional costume and on the other side is Jacob wrestling with the angel from Genesis 32:22-31. Are they seeing a vision? Has the preaching stirred their collective imagination? Some are praying, some are staring intently into the scene. They even mirror it with their bonnets looking like angel wings. There are also 12 of them echoing the 12 tribes of Jacob’s progeny.

Our God-given imagination lets the Bible live again before us and within us. Worship can appeal to the imagination as well as the intellect. Accounts of long ago, become real again and the Spirit blesses us with fresh revelation.

Just as we exercise our bodies and minds, maybe we need to exercise our imaginations. Today read a Bible story slowly, close your eyes and imagine the scene. Are you watching it in your mind’s eye or are you within it? What do you feel? What might you want to say to the people who inhabit the Bible narrative or to God?

Sometimes the imagination is the only place we can locate hope and joy. It’s not always possible in the grim reality of the present. I suspect the lives of Breton women was a drudge, but the painting is full of colour. That doesn’t make imagination naïve fantasy … rather if we can imagine a better future then we can take heart and strength from that, and it can be the first step in its coming to be. We stand in the tradition of the prophets who, in the middle of despair, spoke in poetic terms of a God who would put things right, restore and renew.

The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann wrote: ‘Imagination is a danger thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of the imagination to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants us to urge as the only thinkable one’.

The ministry of the imagination is not frilly at all. Russian artists and protestors are being imprisoned because of it. Let us exercise it under the Spirit!

Suzanne Nockels