“Use your imagination!” we may have been told as children,
when asking a particularly dumb, awkward or just embarrassing question.
Someone recently asked why a theological discussion group like
Wychwood Circle’s open forum would want to base a discussion on
a novel – even if the theme was the contemporary one of a priest and his family
caught up in very real moral and emotional dilemmas. “I don’t read novels,” she said. How familiar that phrase is, though more
often in the mouths of men: surely life’s too short to waste it on fiction? Yet I once heard a sermon in a church in Barnes
(where else?!) where the priest enjoined us all to read novels and see them as
sacramental. I think that means they
speak to us of life and of God. Well, the good ones, anyway, and they are the
ones worth seeking out. Give me Iris
Murdoch or Tolstoy any day, rather than the Encyclopedia Britannica!
In a religious or non-religious context there is no doubt
that fiction is useful to hone our morality or direct our moral compass. Stories allow us to enter into the
experiences of others, from which, however involved we become, we can remain
more detached and therefore more rationally observant than we ever can from our
own. Arguably you need to develop your
imagination before you can experience empathy – and unless you are a strict
calculating utilitarian you probably base a lot of your personal actions and
reactions (of compassion, of service, of respect for the other person) on
thinking you know how they feel and how you could help them. So anything which contributes to exercising
that imaginative muscle in a positive fashion is good for humanity. If the
novel helps you to relax and step out of the rat race of your life, that can’t
be bad for growth and balance either.
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| Ignatius of Loyola |
In the Hilary term at Oxford, the Thursday lunchtime series
at St Giles was on the theme of Ignatian Spirituality, with 8 different
contributors including the well-known author, walker, peace campaigner and
Jesuit priest Gerard W Hughes (God of
Surprises, God In All Things). St
Barnabas in Jericho also hosted a day with Father Gerry Hughes when he talked
about “Earthing our Prayer”. The last
half-hour of the day was particularly special as two dozen of us sat at the
feet of this grand old man and listened to words of distilled wisdom, gently
and serenely spoken from a lifetime of study, practice and reflection.
Ignatians are big on self-examination and reflecting on our
inner journey and Fr Gerry is keen for people to use their ‘felt experience’ in
discerning what God might be telling them.
People ‘feel drawn to God in the depths of themselves’. Where else would we find God, who, as St
Augustine might remind us, is closer to us than we are to ourselves? If we are to find God, Gerard Hughes says
elsewhere, ‘we must learn to listen to these depths, to the emotions and
feelings we experience in prayer and out of it, and use our minds and
intelligence to help us understand what these emotions and feelings are saying
to us.’ (In Search of a Way, 1986)
Prayer may be about meeting with God: it is also about
meeting ourselves, because (as he is fond of quoting) ‘in God we live, move and
have our being’. Prayer, he claims, ‘is
the most revolutionary and liberating activity in which we can engage’. He told
us to use our imagination in prayer, particularly in the very Ignatian practice
of reviewing the day. ‘Memory is an arsenal, not an archive’, was one memorable
phrase. He also told us to read the gospel
stories imaginatively: imagine you are
there – eg in the upper room in Jerusalem, scene of several big events in the
gospels including the Last Supper commemorated this week on Maundy Thursday –
and ask yourself: Who else is there?
What is the room like? Why are they afraid? Listen to them. What do they say to you? Talk to them…
We owe it to Gerard Hughes that he introduced us on both
these occasions in Oxford to the work of a French poet, politician and
philosopher, Charles Peguy (1873 -1914). His poem, entitled God’s
Dream, expresses a dream of God and begins, I myself will dream a dream within you…; it includes these lines which show God as
‘most intimately within’:
You will meet me often as you work –
in your
companions, who share the risk,
in your friends,
who believe in you enough
to lend their
own dreams,
their own hands,
their own
hearts,
to your
building,
in the people
who will stand in your doorway,
stay awhile,
and walk away
knowing
that they, too, can find a dream
[The full text can be found online, for instance here]
It's a nice thought.
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