“Chancellor Lawson, Provost Terpstra, Vice-Dean Goghari, Dean Brittain, Members of Clergy, Graduating Class, Faculty and Staff, Alumni and Assembled Guests…”
I am pleased for the opportunity to address this Convocation and am deeply grateful for the honour I have received today. There is one disappointment I have and that is that my late wife Marion is not able to share in this occasion.
When I got a call from the Provost to inform me that this was in the works I was surprised and wondered if it might be an error. But apparently not, as here I am today. Though the assignment to speak to you on this occasion is unfamiliar, the setting is not. The very first event I cobbled together when I began with IMAGO in the fall of 1998, was held in this room. And Seeley Hall has been the venue for other IMAGO evenings over the years.
Let me go back for a moment to that November evening of 1998. I was to give a talk, but there was much more that gave shape to the event. There was a lot of visual art, hanging on display units at the back of the hall that caught the attention of all who entered. There was an area cleared near the front for a dance group to do their modern dance. The piano was well employed at the hands of a fine musician. And part way through that evening a woman came into the room with more than the average number of bags, not too well dressed and rather loud, even disruptive. She was ranting about how no-one seems to care and how people like her are ignored, marginalized and easily passed over. She spoke an unsettling truth and was an unsettling presence for all who had gathered for a celebration. Many wondered how they might get her to leave. Well, she was an actor who taught drama to street involved youth at an inner-city project called Sketch, a project launched by IMAGO a couple of years earlier. Her appearance was part of the program.
The arts have a capacity to arrest our attention. They help us to see things in ways we haven’t seen before. They are expressions of creativity that engage human imagination.
In this talk I will make a few remarks about creativity and then offer some observations about imagination in relation to theology.
And may I note here that I am well aware of how these two capacities can be employed for either good or evil. And perhaps this should move us to be careful about the narratives we embrace that will inform our thinking and shape our practice.
Neither the subject of creativity nor that of imagination loomed large for me in my early life or in the landscape of philosophical studies which took my attention while at university and in my years of teaching.
The career shift that occurred in 1998 brought with it new vistas to be explored. I had given my inclination towards the arts only limited attention over the years, and it did not have opportunity to flourish. Let me say to you who are graduating “keep attuned to those of your inclinations that are life-giving”.
First Creativity
Creativity is a kind of reaching out. It’s characterized by a posture of openness and attentiveness to the world around us. It speaks of a generative process whose outcome is not predictable through mechanical means and is not a product of the simple logic of cause and effect. Though such accounts are commonly given.
The renowned physicist David Bohm in a small work on creativity observes that:
“…for thousands of years people have been led to believe that anything and everything can be obtained if only one has the right techniques and methods, …certain things can be achieved by techniques and formulae says Bohm, but originality and creativity are not among these…”
The rhetoric of “creation” and “creativity” is deeply indebted to the Christian tradition. A connection between divine and human creation is often made: there are of course differences – Tolkien in his essay On Fairy-Stories referred to us as “sub- creators”. We are those who bear the imago dei and are called to image forth through creativity, to be “makers” not least through the arts.
The literary scholar George Steiner in his much-quoted book Real Presences (1989) makes the following observation:
All good art and literature begin in immanence. But they do not stop there. … poiesis (artistic creation) opens on to, and is underwritten by, the religious and the metaphysical. The questions: What is poetry, music, art? How can they not be? How do they act upon us and how do we interpret their action? Are, ultimately, theological questions. Says Steiner (p. 227)
You who are graduating have given yourself to the study of theology and no doubt have encountered the aesthetic in your studies, whether its Scripture, laden as it is with story, image, poetry and metaphor, or liturgy with its many symbols and dramatic rituals, or homiletics and the art of effective communication, or the call to innovative forms for ministry – in these and other ways creativity is woven into the fabric of the life of the church and of the spiritual journey.
Recently I read these words – “we live in the irresolvable tension between efforts and desires to make things and events predictable, manageable and controllable and our intuition or longing to simply let life happen, to listen to it and then respond to it spontaneously and creatively…” I think the difference here amounts to whether we view the world as an instrument for our use or view it as gift through which we discover something about ourselves as well as discern traces of the transcendent?
I turn now to Imagination – and will speak of it in a theological setting.
When I received the invitation to give this talk – I happened to be reading a recently published work titled, The Theological Imagination, by theologian Judith Wolfe.
For some time now I have been drawn to the subject of imagination. And it has come clear to me that to engage the imagination need not mean that you are dwelling in an imaginary world. Imagination is one of the ways we bring order and meaning to our sense perceptions and our many experiences. It’s also a means we have to get at the truth about our world and ourselves. And it’s a key element in theology and the walk of faith.
“Christian faith is …a mode of seeing the world, which beholds in that world an unseen depth of goodness, significance, and love which we do not make, but in which we can participate.” So says Judith Wolfe. Imagination allows for “depth perception”. We are able to see beyond appearances and discover there is more than meets the eye.
The 19th century poet Coleridge once noted that the great folly of his own age (and perhaps also of ours) was its submission to ‘the despotism of the eye’, the assumption that only the visible is real. Imagination allows us to discern the reality of the unseen.
There is a certain resonance here with the words of St. Paul:
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. …. so we fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal. (2 Cor. 4:16-18)
We often hear the call to live in the present moment. And there is certainly something to be said for attending to our immediate circumstances. However, I believe that to experience a robust sense of the present we are best to engage memory and hope – past and future. We are enriched as we look back and recall details of our personal journey or of our faith tradition. And it is part of what it means to be human to look forward, and to wonder what is ahead for us. The philosopher Kant spoke of three questions we mortals should ask, what can I know? what ought I to do? and what can I hope for? This last question speaks to our future orientation in life. It’s a deeply human question.
Imagination turns to the future and invites us to entertain possibilities about what might be. It also draws on memory to assist us in gaining a better view of our actual situation. Both of these perspectives release us from being trapped in present realities or blinded by our current circumstances. This is what faith does.
The longstanding practice of the sacrament of Eucharist embodies a call to remember and to hope. And it is one important location where imagination is required. The story we remember is one with a transforming power, as it invites us to live in a way that goes against the grain of prevailing values and practices. Its also a story pregnant with promise, reminding us that the world as it is, is not the world as it ought to be. We are called to await the day when all things will be made new; and we are invited to bring into the present, glimpses of the promised future. In both of these respects, imagination must do its work. It must be alert to what has been as well as to what can be.
There are many descriptors that could sit comfortably beside imagination: theological, poetic, prophetic, faithful, daring, empathetic, hopeful. Some years ago, a Canadian art critic published a fascinating book with the title Defiant Imagination. (Max Wyman) about art in Canadian culture. I recall wondering at the time how one could make defiance into a virtue. We draw on Imagination in our efforts to resist: whether to raise a voice for a fresh perspective or embrace a new paradigm or address dehumanizing practices in our troubled world. Unfortunately, we and the communities of which we are a part often have shriveled imaginations that are too weak to break out of prevailing patterns. The call is for well-informed imaginations that can address our discontents and guide us in times of crisis whether in church, culture or personal life.
Let me conclude with a few lines from the quintessential Anglican poet George Herbert from his poem Elixir. In these four lines Herbert captures what I have sought to say in this brief talk. We have the gift of double vision and imagination is vital for our capacity to see well. And it is up to each of us to decide how we will see the world.
A man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye,
Or if he pleaseth through it pass
And then the heavens espy
