Anam Cara

Frequently the imagination can bring completely new eyes to such a situation. This is often evident in the workplace. The work team in a company or school have lost their vision and creative intention. The energy has lapsed and their work has lost its flow of desire. Things have become stagnant and lifeless. The leader can see no way out. Then a new person comes in and takes over the leadership. She refuses to inherit the bank of dead perception which preceded her. She refuses the language everyone has been locked into. She refuses to use the old descriptions. She trusts her own energy and instinct. Her fresh imagination enables her to see beyond the accepted freeze. Where others saw only a cul-de-sac, she sees a new pathway, one perhaps more precarious and uncertain but at least initially one that offers a way out to fresh pastures. As she begins to perceive this more deeply, her language strives to mirror it. When others begin to glimpse it, new possibilities awaken. The old grid of frozen inevitability gradually melts and people are suddenly finding new inspiration, motivation and creativity. After a while, a dead situation has been transfigured into a place of invitation and excitement.

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MAGINATION

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IVINE

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TRAIN IN

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The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream –

he awoke and found it truth.

JOHN KEATS, 22 Nov. 1817. Letter to Benjamin Bailey

THE DIFFICULTY IN BEING HUMAN IS THAT ONE CAN NEVER BE merely human. Whether we like it or not, each one of us has kinship with the divine. This kinship can remain dormant for a long time or it can find other forms of expression. Sooner or later, it will assert itself in a form that is no longer possible to ignore. The divine is one of the most intimate and unpredictable dimensions of the human heart and there is no way of foreseeing when or how it might awaken. The source of our creative longing and passion is the Divine Imagination.

It is puzzling that in the Western world we have concentrated on the divine intellect and the divine will. Yet the breathtaking flow of difference in the world suggests the beauty of the Divine Imagination which we have utterly neglected. When we bring in the notion of the imagination, we begin to discover a whole new sense of God. The emphasis on guilt, judgement and fear begins to recede. The image of God as a tabloid, moral accountant peering into the regions of one’s intimate life falls away. The notion of the Divine Imagination brings out the creativity of God, and creativity is the supreme passion of God. When we bring in the missing dimension of imagination, the perspective changes and we get a glimpse of true beauty, the glorious passion, urgency and youthfulness of God. This portal of insight always needs to be balanced against the unknown in God which remains beyond the furthest dream of the mind’s light.

God created the world because God had to create. The world was not created to satisfy some desire for experiment. One of the concepts from the classical period was the idea of the ‘pleroma’, or the urgent fullness of God. There was such a fullness brimming in the divine presence that had God not created, he would have imploded. God had to come to expression. Just as the true artist is always haunted by the desire to bring the dreams of the imagination to expression, the failure to follow one’s calling to creativity severely damages one’s spirit. Sins against creativity exact huge inner punishment and as artist, God had to follow his imagination and reach towards expression. In his Letter to Artists, the present pontiff says: ‘None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.’

Everything that is – every tree, bird, star, stone and wave – existed first as a dream in the mind of the divine artist. Indeed, the world is the mirror of the divine imagination and to decipher the depths of the world is to gain deep insights into the heart of God. The traces of the divine imagination are everywhere. The beauty of God becomes evident in the beauty of the world. I once asked a brilliant young sculptor who her favourite sculptor was and she said: ‘the divine sculptor’. The curvature of mountains, the angular stillness of rocks, the variations on the seashore, the white graffiti of stars on night’s high black wall, all belong to God’s masterpiece; and like any great work of art, it invites endless contemplation. It has an inexhaustible depth and a fluency of presence that can meet us in all the different phases of our awareness with ever surprising invitations. The divine imagination has infused the things of the world with secret depths. We are neither strangers nor foreign bodies in a closed-off world. We are the ultimate participants here – the more we give ourselves to experience and strive for expression, the deeper it opens before us.

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