Something terrible is happening these days. A lot of somethings, if I’m telling it honestly. The world—my world, at least, the one I’ve always depended upon—seems to be imploding and crashing in upon itself. Nothing feels reliable any more. Not the government, not the law, not the financial plans I set in place to carry me through retirement. Everything I believe about Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is being dismantled before my eyes.

It is, in short, pretty damned depressing. Not to mention scary.

Then recently, in two separate quotations, I found words that changed everything.

“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 imagination. . . to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”

Walter Brueggemann
                                                    The Prophetic Imagination

“Your inner artist invites you to participate in the great work of healing the world by lifting out of your senses creative images, words, and actions that inspire others to live lives of wonder and surprise.”

                                                          Macrina Wiederkehr, O.S.B
                                                    Foreword, The Artist’s Rule, p. xii.

Imagination is dangerous.

It is dangerous because it cannot be controlled. Imagination is a gateway, the power within us to envision something beyond what we already know—colors finer, brighter, more lustrous; music so lovely it makes the soul weep; poetry so gripping it can call us to rise up, stand strong, and change the world.

Imagination, in spiritual terms, is the Ruah—the breath of the Divine, breathed into us with our first breath on earth. The Spirit which enlivens and transforms everything.

Imagination is dangerous precisely because it is the power and spirit of Love It makes us co-creators with the Universe in reshaping the world we live in. We look around us and see smallness, meanness, viciousness, greed, and lack of empathy. We see the rich getting richer and the poor struggling to keep life and limb together. We see a callousness that crushes all hope out of the soul. We see, in the words of Yeats, how “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

But that is not the end of the story.

We can imagine a better world. We can envision equity and community, even if we can’t see how to get there just yet. We can conjure up a life where our Black and brown brothers and sisters live unafraid, in peace and tranquility. A world of acceptance inclusion for Trans people, for the non-binary, for Gays and Lesbians and all who do not fit in straight white society. A place where women find respect, autonomy, and equality. A place where courage marks our days, and sweet dreams take the place of restless nights.

We can write it. We can paint it. We can sing it. We can plant a garden. We can build a treehouse. We can make pies, and inhale the invigorating scent of fresh laundry. We can do the smallest positive act with intention and love. We can let our hearts soar on the winds of imagination to places our earthbound bodies cannot yet go.

Imagination is dangerous, because it gives us hope. It feeds positive energy into the Universe—energy which returns to us, in true karmic fashion, as a richness of spirit, a calling of the heart and soul, a passion which cannot be extinguished by the sordidness of the world.

Whatever our spiritual or religious upbringing, we can all envision and relate to the Universal Spirit who is within us all. In every breath, in every creative longing of the soul, in every passionate idea, and every unrealized dream, lies the Spirit who binds us together in the luminous, unbreakable web of life. You can call it God or Buddha or Spirit or Goddess, and it is all the same—the varying paths toward the same goal:  Oneness with the One who created us, loves us, and reminds us with every tiny miraculous glimmer of life, that we belong.

We belong, and so we create. We sing our songs, we write our poems, we paint our landscapes. We make our pies and build our treehouses. We use whatever gifts we have at hand and offer them on a sterling platter of love to the Universe,  expecting nothing back, but trusting that somehow, on some undreamt-of path, the offering will return to us in greater passion, deeper introspection, more creative energy.

The world as we know it does not appreciate imagination. It mocks the creative spirit that gives without hope or expectation of repayment. It reminds us, regularly and with increasing insistence, that acquisition is the path to fulfillment—the only path. That success lies in amassing millions and billions. That there is no such thing as enough, and the one who dies with the most toys wins.

But life is not a contest of winners and losers. And toys, like millions and billions, rot in the ground with the flesh of those who acquired them. We all go the same way, in the end. The difference is that some of us give back to the world what cannot be bought or sold: the fruit of our creative impulses, the spirit-breath that goes on in positive energy long after we have breathed our last.  

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis says that our smallest choices, ultimately, are the choice between heaven and hell.

“At the end of all things, the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”

What can we do to be a force of resistance against the tide of lies, negativity, and destruction in the world around us?

We can breathe. We can create beauty. We can inject positive energy into the world.

We can love.