Imagine. “… you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.” -- John Lennon. Imagine.
Maybe I am a dreamer. I’ve been accused of it more than once. Maybe those who mock my dream of a better world are the wise ones after all. Maybe. But whether you believe faith can make the world a place of harmony where we “live as one,” or think that dog-eat-dog is human destiny, you can’t escape imagining what the future will bring. If we must plan for the future, why not look toward the light? If we anticipate darkness, darkness surely is what we’ll get.
Last Sunday on Meet the Press former congressman David Bonoir, now a professor of labor studies at Wayne State University, asked the panel and viewers to imagine what the world will look like when we emerge from our current shakeout. It seems certain, with our financial institutions failing and government absorbing unthinkable debt, that radical structural change is coming. We have no choice but to imagine what it will be. If we don’t imagine, others will impose their imagination on us. We people of faith have been letting self-interested unbelievers do this throughout history. This may be our last, best chance to take the wheel.
So I ask you to indulge yourself for an hour or two and do some imagining. If you were “king” or “queen” and could create a new realm, what would it look like? Don’t be fanciful. Be realistic, but don’t be a quitter. Don’t assume powerful interests can stop you. Assume that we live in a genuine democracy where the people are entitled to a society that benefits the majority and not just the elite few. Here’s what I imagine …
Imagine … that contentment prevailed for all people. Imagine anger, jealousy, depression and resentment replaced by feelings of completeness and personal fulfillment; imagine our ability to love the people in our lives unfettered by constant comparisons in which we always seem second best. Imagine the concept of superiority and inferiority, of black hats and white hats, being replaced by the confidence that each has become all we can be in mind, body and spirit. Imagine the relationships that could blossom between people who welcomed each other as equals. It brings a smile to my face.
Imagine … unlearning the habits of subservience and recognizing our ability to connect directly to God’s creative urge. We would no longer, as Jeremiah wrote, need to study religion. Why would we, when we hold in our hearts the intuitive understanding of spiritual truth? And being bathed in creative power, we would feel free to recognize and admire the creative expressions of others. We would all be living in a creative free trade zone. Sorry Hollywood.
Imagine … that all material poverty and scarcity have disappeared. In truth, the scarcity of basic resources we see today is a deliberately created condition. The world holds sufficient resources to clothe, house and feed its people, and to provide medical treatment as needed. Scarcity results from hoarding by some whose insecurity leaves them fearful of not having enough or of being personally insufficient. That fear of inadequacy, perhaps biological or sexual in origin, causes us to hoard material items as a measure of our adequacy. Others, in their desire to be “winners,” feel they must push the majority of men and women into an inferior status. “How can there be winners,” they ask, “if there are no losers?”
Imagine … removing all the guilt and second-guessing from pleasure, and accepting that God built us for pleasure -- ears for the song of the nightingale, eyes for the colors of fall, a nose for the scent of the rose, other parts for … well, you know about those other parts. They are the ones we feel most guilty about, and yet they are no better or worse than any of the pleasures God designed for us. As with all our pleasures, our capacity for sexual pleasure becomes a problem only when transformed from natural gift to object of commerce. Imagine the pleasure Adam and Eve knew in the garden, enjoying the birds and flowers, enjoying each other, walking naked before anyone convinced them they had no right to enjoy life so much. Imagine all that was lost … imagine
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
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