A Crisis of Imagination

The church, indeed the world, is experiencing a crisis of imagination.  I define this as the inability or unwillingness to see or imagine a world different from the one we have always know and thought would never end. 

As a country, we are being forced to look at our lack of imagination.  The current administration closed down agencies designed to prepare us for pandemics; it continues to try the old ways of stimulating the economy regardless of the current Covid-crisis. We all see it isn't working.  Racism, sexism, classism - it is all demanding a new vision.

The church fathers from the Amazon begged Rome to use its imagination to see new ways of bringing the Church to the peoples in their part of the world.  Again, a lack of imagination.  Rome just couldn't see how it could be different.  Not daunted, the Amazon church is trying something new.

One answer to these times is found in the hue and cry for more of what was!  Everyone in their place.  There is a certain gnosticism at work. They have the answers and the rest of us need to learn from them.  True for politics or religion.  

Many are paralyzed.  What can we do, poor individuals that we are, in the face of such massive dysfunction?  We care but have no answers.  We never had to be creative.

And then there is a third way. What if we listen to one another?  Take in the reality right in front of our eyes.  What if we truly listened - to on another, to our context, to those not like us - and then listen deeply for the invitation of the Spirit.  What if we were able to imagine a better world, a vaster way to be church?  T care for one another?  What if?

Change - It Just Keeps Happening!

Like so many others I am enchanted by the PBS series Downton Abbey.  For those of you not yet hooked, it is the ongoing saga of an aristocratic household in England during the early 1900s.  You meet and care for both the aristocratic family and their servants, all of whom are treated with much dignity and respect.  Of coure, like any other family, both upstairs and downstairs have their fair share of drama.

What has caught my attention is that over the period of a couple of decades we have seen this family move through a great deal of change, watching their world as they knew it fade away.  Some, like the head of the household, don't kow how to be in this world and would rather just not think about it or be open to change.  Others are embracing it, even as they try to hold onto old customs.  The metaphor for change can be seen in the matriarch of the family, played by Dame Maggie Smith.  She portrays an elderly dowager, both fierce and loving, who wears black and moves through life clutching the top of her cane. 

It is the 'clutching' that has caught my attention and it has made me wonder how we are moving through the change that faces us. Are we holding on for dear life?  In deep denial?  Or embracing it with all the grace we can muster? 

How we embrace it will make all the difference. While most people do not have that bird's eye view of the changing times provided by the Emerging Models Project, we all are facing the changes in our own parishes and dioceses. We do the best that we can in our own place. We keep our focus on following the mission of Christ in Eucharistic-centered parishes that are figuring out how to best serve our own people and neighborhood. 

We are being asked to think outside of the box.  How we used to do things probably won't work as it did in the past. This is an amazing time to be creative and open to change.  The big question for us is this. Are we going to 'clutch our canes,' holding on for dear life?  Remain in denial, trying to go back to the past? Or are we going to embrace it with all the grace we can muster?

The decision is ours. Change is inevitable.  It just keeps happening.