Imagine! by Rev. Michael McGee, May 15, 2011

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”Imagine!"

Reading: “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal” by Naomi Shihab Nye

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.

Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew — however poorly used – she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said, No, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late, who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.

We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought, just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies — little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts — out of her bag — and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo — we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers — non-alcoholic — and the two little girls for our flight, one African-American, one Mexican-American — ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar, too.

And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands — had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate — once the crying of confusion stopped — has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen, anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

Sermon: Imagine!

What can you imagine?

Can you imagine yourself twenty years from now?

Can you imagine our world in one hundred years?

Can you imagine death?

Can you imagine God? Or no God?

Can you imagine yourself homeless, or in jail, or living in the Calcutta slums?

Can you imagine pure joy?

        Our imagination is incredible, isn't it? We can imagine so much about the future, even things that don't exist, will never exist, and will never happen. In fact, most of us are very good about imagining terrible things that could happen but never do. I believe that most of the problems in our world, not to mention in our individual lives, are caused by a lack of imagination. The ability to creatively fantasize the possible, the improbable, and even the impossible, is a gift that gives humanity boundless hope.

        Have any of you read the charming little book called “Flatland”? Written in 1884 by the English novelist and mathematician Edwin Abbot, Flatland is a metaphor about a two-dimensional world whose inhabitants are geometric figures. The protagonist is a square, who is visited one day by a sphere from a three-dimensional world called Spaceland. But all the square can see, being trapped in a two-dimensional world, is a circle.

        The sphere tries to explain the concept of a third dimension to the square, but the square can't begin to imagine such a thing, until finally the sphere yanks the square up out of Flatland into the third dimension. Looking down into the two dimensional world, the square is awestruck and horrified. Prostrating himself before the sphere, he becomes a disciple, returning to Flatland to preach the “Gospel of Three Dimensions” to his fellow creatures, but with no success.

        Can you relate to the square? I certainly can. There have been special times in my life when I have been lifted up out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary, moments of joy and wonder, when I've felt a deep connection with nature or another person or the holy. And there have been other times when I've felt trapped in a two-dimensional existence, unable to rise above my circumstances, unable to imagine the possibilities before me.

        Jonathan Haidt in his book “The Happiness Hypothesis,” relates the story of Flatland to our personal search for transcendence. He claims that we live in a flatland of two dimensions, but there's another dimension that the human mind perceives and seeks and hungers for, and that's what he calls “divinity.” Speaking from the perspective of a Jewish atheist, Haidt concludes that “the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.” This dimension of divinity has less to do with God and more to do with our imagination. We sense that there is something beyond ourselves that calls to us to spread our wings and leave behind our normal existence. Our imagination opens a dimension of sacredness, of holiness, where we feel a deep connectedness with the interdependent web of existence.

        I believe most of us have had these transcending experiences, these uplifting moments when our imagination sweeps us out of the mundane and into the meaningful, weaving our daily life into the fabric of all life. But too often we let these mystical moments be drowned out by the rush of job and family.

        This capacity to imagine the future and what is possible comes from our most recently evolved frontal lobes of the brain, and it distinguishes us from other primates. In our imagination we gaze out into the future and hope that the seeds we plant in the spring will provide food in the summer and fall. We imagine our baby growing into a child and then an adult. We ponder the meaning of our lives when we are dead and gone. Imagination enables us to envision the future, to hope for a better life, and then to create it in this moment.

        Our ability to imagine can help us through the most difficult of times. William Bridges has written several books on the subject of transitions, and our lay ministers' team is choosing different ones to read and discuss. I read “The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments,” which I've found helpful in my own transition towards retirement. Bridges thesis is that every transition involves a three-phase process. First, there is the Ending, in which we lose something significant, and we must learn to let go and move on. Then comes the Neutral Zone where we struggle to create new patterns and meaning in our lives. Finally comes the New Beginning in which we experience a renewed energy and develop a new identity.

        The most challenging stage and usually the longest is the Neutral Zone, which Bridges also calls the Wilderness. In the Wilderness, we wander around like the ancient Hebrews, getting lost, suffering, and being confused and frustrated. But the Wilderness is also where we have the potential to become our most creative, caring, compassionate, and innovative self. This is where we have the possibility to become transformed. But a prime ingredient for finding our way out of the Wilderness is having the imagination to envision what can be, what our possibilities are. Depression and suicide are usually the result of a person losing the ability to imagine a change that will bring happiness and meaning into their life, while joy and fulfillment come from always having a vision of the possible.

        One of my favorite quotes is this one by Albert Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” It's true that without imagination Einstein could not have developed the theory of relativity, Beethoven could not have written the Ninth Symphony, Shakespeare could not have written Hamlet, and Lady Gaga could not do whatever it is that Lady Gaga does. And without imagination we could not create a better world.

        I love the story by Naomi Shihab Nye about the Palestinian woman breaking down at the airport. The poet gives us a picture not only of this transforming experience but of the way we want the world to be. And this picture helps us to imagine that this world is possible, at least in certain times and places. And it gives us hope that we can help build such a world.

        That's what John Lennon did for us in his song “Imagine.” “Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try, no hell below us, above us only sky.” It's interesting that there are so many vivid, torturous descriptions of hell preached from so many pulpits, but how many detailed descriptions have you seen of heaven? If you look at our movies and television, you can see that our imagination is much better when it comes to describing pain and suffering and degradation and not nearly so creative when it comes to expressing ways to be loving and kind and generous.

        Even the gods we create show our lack of imagination. Can't we do better than picturing a god who looks and acts exactly like us? Why can't we imagine the Holy as a tree, an ocean – or we could use our imagination to gaze through all the masks of divinity and see instead into the heart of life itself. Now that takes real imagination!

        There's so much that stifles imagination in our world, with television of course being number one – someone has said, “I wish there was a knob on the TV so you could turn up the intelligence. There's one marked 'brightness' but it don't work, does it?” (Leo Anthony Gallagheras) – but right behind TV are politicians and preachers who use fear and deceit to indoctrinate, and an educational system that teaches facts and figures instead of inspiring with fantasy and creativity. We desperately need to seek out people and places to feed our imagination. Where do you feed your imagination? Mine is fed by nature, poetry, music, outrageous people, and most of all by this faith.

        You may have noticed that Unitarian Universalism is a faith of imagination. I told the 15 people in our New UU class yesterday that most of us leave behind the religious communities of our childhood because the gods and theologies and spirit are too small for us. We need the freedom to ask big questions about the divine and suffering and death and to enter into conversations about our beliefs and fears and hopes. And we need lots of room to imagine gods and theologies and spirit with no limits and no boundaries.

        You may have read John Kelly's column in the Post last week about the big Rapture scheduled for this coming Saturday, May 21st – so be sure to arrange your calendar accordingly. This is the day when all true Christians will be called up to Jesus Christ, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves. And frankly I'm not expecting a drop in attendance next Sunday. I'm impressed by the imagination of Bart Centre who came up with an effective way to make money from this fantasy. He started a business that promises to take care of the pets of those who get raptured, payable up front of course – he's no fool. He assures his true-believer customers that he and those who work for him are bona fide atheists who have no chance in the world of being raptured. And he takes Paypal. I'm kicking myself for not coming up with this idea as a way to raise money for our capital campaign. But maybe it's not too late: if you have friends who are planning on being raptured, let them know that we are here for them and their pets – at a reasonable rate.

        UUs have a completely different idea of rapture: we believe that rapture is being mindful and respectful of this world. Rapture is imagining a planet where the spirit of peace, compassion, and joy is the norm instead of an anomaly. Rapture is working to rebuild New Orleans and helping save the Mayans in Guatemala and supporting immigration reform in our country. Rapture is being inspired by people like Naomi Nye and Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. who remind us that the Kingdom of God is wherever people of different races and religions come together to talk and laugh and eat cookies.

        We are raptured not when we leave this planet but whenever we leave our body and imagine what it's like to be another person, to be an older Palestinian woman, to be a Mayan or a Libyan or a resident of the Ninth Ward or Buckingham Community, to be a CEO of an oil company, to be young or old, black or white, gay or straight, Muslim or Jew. This is perhaps the biggest challenge of our lives, to leap outside of our own skin and imagine being someone with radically different experiences. When we can do that, we are yanked up into the third dimension of divinity and sacredness where we incarnate the spirit of these words attributed to Plato: “Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

        And that's why we need a religious community like ours to come to on Sunday mornings so that we can imagine what can be. Where else can you spend an hour reflecting on life's possibilities? Where else can you go to a Fiesta that brings together our neighbors in Buckingham with UUCAers, which happened last night and was an Albuquerque Airport moment? Where else can you be in a church that imagines a place like Culpepper Garden and then makes it happen? Where else can you hear our youth group speak from their hearts about the possibilities of their lives and our nation, as they did last Sunday? And where else can you imagine the possibilities for our church making a bigger difference in the world and then giving to our capital campaign and stewardship campaigns to make it a reality?

        Let us have the imagination of Naomi Nye by proclaiming that, “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world... This can still happen, anywhere. Not everything is lost.” Then, after imagining, let us create...” And that is my sermon for next Sunday.

SERVICE PHOTOS

Sermon Resources:

• “Flatland” by Edwin Abbot
• “The Happiness Hypothesis” by Jonathan Haidt
• “The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments”by William Bridges
• “What Have You Lost?” by Naomi Shihab Nye
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