Flat Imaginations, or Robust Transformations

Preaching along a Higher Plane

Have you ever noticed that many popular American children's tales are morality stories? First and foremost, these tales exist to teach right from wrong. Or at least these stories serve as warnings for bad behavior. Here are a few examples: The Boy Who Cried Wolf teaches about honesty, The Hatchet teaches self-confidence, persistence, and grit, and Anne of Green (Canadian) Gables trades on the themes of hope and perseverance. American audiences have also loved Aesop's Fables, which are classic morality tales. Similarly, they have taken The Brothers Grimm, which are dark stories (not very American) and focused on the practical lessons inherent in or retroactively placed in the story by Disney or What Have You. 

By contrast, much of the literature from the U.K. was rich with the fantastic and magical and involved the creation of new and strange worlds. British writers have influenced the imaginations of their audiences not only in terms of morality but also in terms of metaphysics. New cosmos, alternative systems of order, magic, and the world of faerie fill the pages of MacDonald, Tolkien, Lewis, and others. True, tales from these authors (and many more) contain moral content, but instead of worlds operating on a vertical, flat plane, they also intersect with a vertical plane that touches up to transcendence. 

Perhaps the American imagination is flat and ethical in focus because we are a Puritan-introduced Calvinist protestant society with its work ethic and moral attitude. The U.K. still has remnants of Anglo-Catholicism with a sacramental worldview that overlaps the supernatural with the natural in profound cultic ways. 

These observations suggest that the American imagination is flat--the ethical sphere dominates it. This is not wholly inappropriate. We need morality tales; virtue must be taught, caught, and put into narrative to shape a culture's imagination. But this stunts our imagination concerning metaphysics, religion, and the "big questions." This makes so much of American preaching, religious writing, spiritual direction, etc., flat-proclaiming moral action that most already know they need to do. "Why do I need to go to church and listen to be bored for a twenty-minute sermon to be told to do what I already know I need to do," someone once told me! Ouch! The truth hurts. And if audiences are exposed to moral action that they must change and disagree with that change, then the preacher has waded into the waters of political controversy. 

Is that the best we have going for us? Do we either trade in boredom and offer applications where the audience can say "no duh" or take up their previously held beliefs in comfort or do we live in the waters of controversy and argument? Yes, we need to tell people things they already know--orthodoxy means that not every truth is new. Yes, we need to wade into unknown territory and risk offense--growing hurts, sometimes. But those two options must not define our task of divine communication. We must take a cue from the more British imagination (over the American) and learn how to touch the transcendent with our messages, which, morally, can include creating worlds. But it does not stop with morality or ethics; it offers moments, glimpses, and touches with the mystery of being beyond being. 

Can our divine oracles be sacramental moments of grace? Can the proclamation of words spoken or written invite audiences into a mystery that boggles the imagination and causes the body to tremble with holy terror? Can our words not create a new world but re-imagine our world over again in a newly enchanted way? Can you speak in a way that the hearing is the purpose, not simply a mechanism to offer benign morality points? I think we can, and if we can, then maybe our voices will pierce through the chorus of competing voices in our increasingly secular world (a world not devoid of magic, religion, or God, but a world where the options are endless and people curate meaning for themselves, see Charles Taylor A Secular Age). 

I do not think that our secular world cares about our church's resolutions and moral pronouncements (especially if they are politically divisive). The world is not listening to us like it used to. Reporters are not at the general meeting of your denomination unless they are covering a scandal. The problem is not that we need to say more about ethics; we are not sharing a world with anyone compelling enough for them to care. Ethics follows Metaphysics in this way. We must give an experience of a transformed world; this is what people seek. Ethics will follow. Let our communication not begin with ethical high ground but with transcendent grounding, where divinity presses in on us and where transfiguration is worldwide, touching everything. Let's figure out if we must tell people how to live in such a world. 

A final note: ethics matters, please understand. And as communities of faith, we must stand for something. But we live only in that space, and thus, we flatten our imagination into moralisms and ethical equations, and when we do, we hardly engage the imagination required for transformation. I am not calling for one without the other but for us to deepen our divine messaging as a tool of graced transformation that will give grounding to true life and a society of virtue.