Imagining Ourselves Into...

Dear friends,

A couple of days ago I had the joy of being a guest speaker for a class at Bellarmine University entitled "Faith and Imagination."

Wanting to spark the imagination of students, I pulled out an excerpt from adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy (you can find the excerpt at the end of this blog post). We read the excerpt aloud and then I guided students through a group writing experiment. I invited students to begin to write a stream-of-consciousness response to what they had just read and heard. After writing for a couple of minutes, they passed their paper to another student to continue writing. And then another, and another. I told them that they could respond to the previous writer, continue along the same vein, or take the writing in a totally different direction. I had no idea how it would go or what would happen on their pages. 

At the end of the experiment, students received the papers they had begun and read all that had transpired. One student said the writing time was too short to get her thoughts in order. I replied that the purpose wasn't to get thoughts in order, but to get the thoughts on paper, which are not always the same. We had a little time to discuss what did find its way to paper: questions about imagination and reality, what they are, and how they interact; dismay that imagination is often encouraged in children, but discouraged as we move to and through adulthood; comments about how imagination can both lead us toward contruction and healing or destruction and harm. There was so much richness I wish we'd had more time to explore.  

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian season of Lent. Many people engage in Lenten pactices, often giving up something for the season (who among you Catholics or former Catholics has given up sweets or meat for Lent?) Three years ago, I decided that instead of giving something up, I wanted to engage my imagination and take something up. Each day I made a 4" x 6" watercolor painting with a reminder for myself. The first was "I am allowed to rest"; the last, "I trust in abundance."  This daily practice helped ground me during the early days of the pandemic, when it felt like we were being uprooted and tossed about. I didn't know how much I needed the creative practice and I didn't know that these reminders would become Cards for Remembering. My imagination hadn't taken me that far. It was only as I took step after step into creative imagining that I discovered the messages and images weren't just for me.

I use the cards now regularly. They still ground me, affirm what I know,  challenge me ("I am allowed not to know" has been appearing frequently of late), and invite me to imagine ("In challenging times I lean into cReaTivity"). As I type, I am considering what to take up this year for Lent. I don't yet know. I hope to find clarity soon. I'll take time later to allow my mind and heart to wander and imagine me into a practice. 

What about you? 

How do you engage your imagination?

What have you imagined into being?

I'd love to know. 

~~~

I imagine a world in which we are connected to our needs, our feelings, our body's wisdom (both individual and collective bodies) and, through that connection, we live into our core of love and we thrive. These imaginings fuel my work and I am excited to have a number of events and offerings coming up that I hope will take us a few steps closer to the world I imagine. 

At 1:00 ET today, my interview with Michaela Daystar in her YouTube series Reiki Crossroads & Connections premiers. We talk about intersections of energy work, art, peacemaking, mysticism, and more! You can listen when it airs or later on. 

I also have a number of Compassionate Communication offerings coming up. on Monday, February 27, join me for a 1-hour introductory workshop: What's Beneath Our Words?  Starting March 9, we delve into the foundational pieces of Compassionate Communication with my Meeting in the Field of Connection class. Whether these are refreshers or your first time with these skills, come join me! 

Finally, as my 50th birthday fast approaches, I've been imagining how I might celebrate with you! I'll soon be sharing special offers on my art- Cards for Remembering decks, prints, and original art! 

Wondering about and imagining our next connection, 
Cory

---

Excerpt from the introduction to adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy

A visionary exploration of humanity includes imagination…

Imagination is shaped by our entire life experience, our socialization, the concepts we are exposed to, where we fall in the global hierarchy of society.

Our ideas of right and wrong shift with time—right now it’s clear to me that something is wrong if it hurts this planet. But if we don’t claim the future, that sense of loyalty to earth, of environmentalism, could become outdated. Kenny Bailey helped me understand this—that justice, rights, things we take for granted, are not permanent. Once there were kings and queens all over the earth. Someday we might speak of presidents and CEOs in past tense only.

It is so important that we fight for the future, get into the game, get dirty, get experimental. How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material?

We embody. We learn. We release the idea of failure, because it’s all data.

But first we imagine.

We are in an imagination battle.

Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many other are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, racialized fear of Black people, are rarely held accountable.

Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.

All of this imagining, in the poverty of our current system, is heightened because of scarcity economics. There isn’t enough, so we need to hoard, enclose, divide, fence up, and prioritize resources and people.

We have to imagine beyond those fears. We have to ideate—imagine and conceive—together.  

We must imagine new worlds that transition ideologies and norms, so that no one sees Black people as murderers, or Brown people as terrorists and aliens, but all of us as potential cultural and economic innovators. This is a time-travel exercise for the heart. This is collaborative ideation—what are the ideas that will liberate all of us?

The more people that collaborate on that ideation, the more that people will be served by the resulting world(s)…

It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.

What we pay attention to grown, so I’m thinking about how we grow what we are all imagining and creating into something large enough and solid enough that it becomes a tipping point...

As Toni Cade Bambara has taught us, we must make just and liberated futures irresistible. We are all the protagonists of what might be called the great turning, the change. The new economy, the new world.

And I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility of wholeness in it. That’s how I work as a healer: when a body is between my hands, I let wholeness pour through. We are all healers too—we are creating possibilities, because we are seeing a future full of wholeness.  

Entering Mystery Through Imagination, Trinity Sunday Reflection

This morning, Trinity Sunday, I had the honor of sharing my reflections with my church community. It is ever humbling to have the task of offering my limited understanding. Still I offer what I can and hope that it will invite you into reflection, whether your understanding is similar or different from mine.

Hildegard' of Bingen’s Trinity: a blue masculinr figure in the center with gold and then yellow rings around him. The image is squared off and blue is in the space between the central circles and flowery border. Hildegard didn’t make it into the homily, so I offer this image.

Proverbs 8:22-31, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15

I was walking with my neighbor a few days ago and she pointed out a slime mold. My neighbor is an environmental educator and I learn something new from her every time we walk together. On this particular walk she told me how slime molds are single-celled organisms, often too small for us to see, but when food is scarce, these little beings come together to find food to ensure their survival. Presumably the big blob we were looking at was one such coalition. I think I said something like “Community organizing, single-cell style.” And then I starting thinking about how slime molds might fit into a Trinity Sunday homily. I’ll come back to that in a bit.

Preparing for today I learned a few things about Trinity Sunday, like that in the 4th century, an Alexandrian priest named Arius started spreading the word that Christ was not fully divine. In order to counter what was called the Arian Heresy and reaffirm the trinitarian doctrine of God as three equal persons, and Christ as fully divine, the bishops created a mass dedicated to the trinitarian doctrine, though there wasn’t any set time in the liturgical calendar for the celebration. It was centuries later that Trinity Sunday was set permanently as the Sunday after Pentecost. Apparently, that Sunday was “vacant.” Because many ordinations happened on the Saturday after Pentecost, Church official decided to address the “vacancy” during such an important time by setting this Sunday as Trinity Sunday.

Trinity: the mystery of the three persons/beings/elements of the divine that are at once distinct and all one. I will never fully understand the Trinity, I’m certainly not going to try to explain it today. Instead, I invite us to open our imagination to new ways of understanding our Triune God and consider how this belief might inform our human actions.  

In our first reading from Proverbs, Wisdom Sophia speaks of her relationship with God Creator, Mother who gave birth to her. We see the interrelation between two persons of the Trinity. Wisdom claims her place as the first child of a birthing Mother God, before Creation took physical form. Wisdom, Sophia, Spirit played like a child, was Mother God’s delight and she delighted in humankind. I think she still does. My heart swells with gratitude when I remember three years ago when Wisdom responded to St. William’s communal invitation to play by delighting us with the miracle on 13th Street, relieving us of the burden of a priest and deacon who would not have honored the charism of our community.

In the second reading and the gospel we see the play between the three persons, unitive, working through, with, and in one another, but let’s take a little time with the one most often called the Son. Through Jesus, we experience the divine incarnate, but this second person of the Trinity does not begin and end with Jesus. Richard Rohr writes “The first and cosmic incarnation of the Eternal Christ, the perfect co-inherence of matter and Spirit (Ephesians 1:3-11), happened at the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the human incarnation of that same Mystery a mere 2,000 years ago, when we were perhaps ready for this revelation.” He goes on to say, “This Christ is much bigger and older than either Jesus of Nazareth or the Christian religion, because the Christ is whenever the material and the divine co-exist—which is always and everywhere.” Christ is more than Jesus of Nazareth. Our Trinitarian God exists always and everywhere.   

Fundamentally, the Trinity offers us a model of interrelationship, interbeing, community, three as one, a model of stability. The names of the persons often describe both the relationship of one member to another as well as God’s relationship to us. In many Catholic churches the identities of the three persons of the Trinity are only ever referred to as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. While labels can help us understand, they also limit understanding. When we’re talking about mystery, why limit ourselves? As we make the sign of the cross at St. William in silence, we allow ourselves to name the Trinity in the way that best reflects our current understanding. Perhaps many of us think the words “Creator, Redeemer, Spirit Sanctifier” as we sign. Let me offer a few other names that might expand our imagination, too.

I wonder if we might use Paul’s words of perseverance, character, and hope as a way of understanding our triune God. I have a ring on my finger with three words: strength, courage, wisdom. Might these words help us understand the three aspects of the Trinity?

Doctor of the church St. Catherine of Siena experimented with many different names for the Trinitarian persons. According to Mary George-Whittle, some of Catherine’s descriptions include “remembering, understanding and desiring; power, wisdom and tender clemency [mercy]; O eternal Truth, O eternal Fire, O Eternal Wisdom.” We might also look to Julian of Norwich who named the Trinity in multiple ways, one being “God the Father, Jesus our Mother, and our good Lord the Holy Spirit.” Or what if we used these words: Creator, Liberator, Advocate or Source, Being, and Return to Being.

How might we understand our relational God if we choose no words, but instead simply allow images? Or textures? Or smells? Imagining into the mystery of the Trinity helps us to stay in creative relationship with the divine. As God is relationship, so God calls us to be in relationship, creating, loving, and delighting through and with one another.

And this brings me back to the slime molds. Like those single-celled slime molds, we often act as individuals, trying to survive on our own. We live in times of disconnection, sharp judgment, solid barriers between people or groups of people. Even though our God offers a model of intimate connection, shared empowerment, and permeable boundaries, we isolate, we compete, we cut ourselves off from one another and sometimes even from ourselves. Slime molds seemed to have learned a lesson from our God as coalition, God as community.

We humans sometimes get it right, too, when we come together on Sundays, when we serve our most vulnerable neighbors, when we stand up and speak out for justice, when we believe there is enough for all and act accordingly. Other times, when we most need each other, and I would argue that now is one of those times, we turn away from one another, believing the only way for our singular, or perhaps our particular group’s, survival is through competition, survival of the fittest, guarding what is “ours” rather than leaning into abundance, relationship, and cooperation.

Our God is ever-transforming through relationship. Slime molds, in their single-celled intelligence, seem to have gotten that message, too: “Hey, stick together. You need each other to live.” May we expansively, creatively, and delightedly do the same.