sacred imagination

God As Stranger

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

Far too often it’s presented as a tragic either-or. Either we conjure up enough soul force and believe in our received version of God (however untenable that God may be), or as wayward apostates we abandon God.

But maybe there is a third way. Maybe we also have the option of holding that God as mystery. Maybe it’s okay if the whispers and rumours of God long precede God’s appearance. Maybe this too is a valid creed: I believe in God the Stranger Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth…

Of course, the Christian faith is nothing if God is not our friend. Here I raise my Ebeneezer, hither by thy help I’m come. But here is a paradox: our faith also holds that each day we must meet God with a blank slate. Each day we must confess that we do not yet know you, O God, so in your mercy reveal yourself to us. Otherwise, what is the point of prayer? Or at least prayer as it is conceived of in the greatest prayer book of all, the Psalms. Time and again, the Psalms give us language to long for God, to seek after God, and even to live with feelings of alienation from God.

A couple in a flourishing marriage are both known and unknown to each other. Even after decades of marriage, each day together has an element of unfamiliarity, as if it were their first. Beginning their morning rituals, they approach each other as stranger-friends and this keeps them from getting mired in stagnation. 

How much more is this true of God, whose ways are unsearchable and past finding out.

It has been a surprise to hit my 30s and feel so much uncertainty about God. At first, I was tempted to feel bitter. I wanted to go to the divine customer service desk and demand my money back. But now I am oddly comforted by it. In this lack of certainty about God, I am beginning to see potential. Now, whenever God isn’t loving enough or big enough or wild enough, I hold a little funeral and look expectantly toward the dawn, awaiting a new conception of God. I repeat the prayer of Meister Eckhart from the 14th century, “I pray God to rid me of God.”

I now know that theophanies, though not wrong in themselves, will lack transformative power if they are rushed or premature. Freezing God in a static list of 14 fixed attributes or behaviours feels safe and perhaps nostalgic, but it will spell the end of our spiritual journey. A God of mystery, on the other hand, evokes endless wonder and possibility.

As Charles Wesley wrote in one of his countless hymns, “Wrestling, I will not let thee go, till I thy name and nature know.” Maybe the path lies in living as Jacobs—doubter-believers, pilgrims whose God is both friend and stranger, people who find God only after troubled nights. And even then a God who smites us on our hip sockets.

To pursue a God like that we had better settle in for the long haul, equipped not with a conjuring up of soul force, nor a divine customer service desk, but with a pair of durable sandals and a lifetime of patient wrestling.

The Sacred Work of Our Imagination

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

Sometimes when you read books the most random things stay with you.

For me, one example is the passage in Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline that talks about the role of our imagination in prayer.

When praying for a man who is having an affair, wrote Foster, imagine him “seeing his wife and being overwhelmed with a sense of love for her.” Envision him going on walks with his wife and experiencing again his first stirrings of love toward her. Foster even suggests using our minds to construct a huge brick wall between the husband and the other woman.

Confession: I don’t spend a great deal of time praying for other people. Often my prayers don’t progress beyond a few erratic and feverish pleas for God to supply my own immediate needs, and maybe on good days, the needs of my wife and kids. Nevertheless, I love, and aspire to, Foster’s thoughts on the imagination.

I also think the role of the imagination extends well beyond intercessory prayer.

In fact, and you’ll let me know if I’m completely delusional here, but isn’t the entire human task to partner with God to imagine what our world could be and then act on it? Isn’t our world just one gloriously inseparable mixture of the divine and the human?

And behold it came to pass that in the beginning, the Original Impulse for the Universe, a.k.a God, offered up building blocks, after which he/she/it/they had the following insane idea: Let us create humans in our own image (Genesis 1:27).

That, dear reader, was a significant moment in cosmic history.

I know it doesn’t, but I think that verse should totally continue with, “and let us entrust terrifying amounts of agency to these humans in which they can pretty much imagine the world as they will and name it as they will,” because that’s what happened.

Lest someone disagree, note the equally scandalous phrase that actually appears a couple of paragraphs later, surely one of the wildest phrases in all of scripture: And Adam (Humankind) gave names.

Ever since that phrase first became a reality, people have been busy doing it, by which I don’t mean doing it in the sense of copulating, although that’s true too, I mean busy doing it as in naming things. Madagascar and the Mariana Trench, the forint and the euro, VWs and Ray Bans, Andromeda and the Oort cloud, elms and hickories, baptisms and marriages, dissolutions of marriage. In each situation, it is humans who create paradigms and assign potential.

It’s what we do. We imagine and then name. We are always imagining and naming.

Once during my time at Faith Builders, in the autumn of 2008, a group of us traveled to Brooklyn to visit soup kitchens and generally solve world hunger. One evening we huddled together in a common area inside a spartan hostel where a second-year student named Javan led us in recapping the day’s events as well as reflecting on a passage from Isaiah.

I have forgotten almost everything that happened on that very important trip except for a comment Javan made that evening, quoting, I think, Walter Brueggemann: “We have to ask God to inspire our imagination. The Kingdom of God will not come to earth unless we can first imagine it in concrete ways.”

Today, in honour of that quote, I imagine what I hope will come to pass in my life, progressing from the individual to the collective.

  • In holy imagination, I experience greater freedom from the unholy trinity of lust, money and egoism. How would it be to go through a day free of resentfulness, competition, objectification of the opposite sex, fretting about money, and other ‘spam thoughts’? He who has begun a good work in me will bring it to pass…
  • In holy imagination, I see my parents and me expressing unconditional love toward each other—freely, lavishly, and forever. I envision a conversation with my parents where no one utters one word of blame, guilt, or anxiety. I imagine losing our sense of time and space, with everything receding except that we enjoy being with each other.
  • In holy imagination, I see God doing a work among my people, the Amish and Mennonites. I hope God will send leaders, unlikely leaders who might have been passed over because they don’t know the right shibboleths, or they look too worldly, or they look too this or too that. Leaders who will inspire our faith tradition where we have become ingrown and stagnant.
  • In holy imagination, I see God touching government leaders to seek the common good over a desire for power. I imagine now, as one of many examples, that the gatekeepers of the deathly gun laws in America would see the need to take action, to use their power and end this madness of school shootings and of 18-year-olds buying AR-15s long before they can rent a car.

And behold, divine wisdom foreordained that life should happen as Adam (Humankind) is in communion with God – imagining it, naming it, and experiencing it.

What is it that we, in loving harmony with our Creator, must imagine, name, and experience today?