Prophetic Imagination

Friends, 

Each week as I settle in to write my Saturday Evening Post, my preference would be to begin on the most positive and hopeful topic that I can muster in my mind and heart. I am personally filled right now, for example, with the fullness of early spring, the development of exciting plans for the summer, reports of a friend's successful surgery, and the squeals of playful delight from the children who just moved in next door. The list could go on. I live with great gratitude and joy for all my exceptionally blessed life.

But as I sit quietly and begin to collect this evening’s message for my Saturday Evening Post the wider world comes over me like an evening mist. I can't avoid my awareness of the world-wide suffering that lingers over all of us in a mode of constant attention and alert. As someone not particularly impacted by the struggles of the majority of my fellow human beings, it certainly would be easier and understandable if I chose not to be so affected by it all. And I wonder if my readers would rather I not be so preoccupied with the troubles of the world.

But I am stuck with a "prophetic soul," and like the prophets, old and new, my “prophetic soul” has a compelling need to name and address the discrepancy between our quest for the wholeness and fullness of life amidst  our often tragic divisions that lead to so much violence and negation. In contrast I want to invoke the "force more powerful" based in love and kindness. 

So my Saturday Evening Post often focuses on denouncing all that negates or neutralizes our deep search for a just, peaceful and loving life. I believe that my/our primary purpose in life is, yes, to live into all the uncertainly and vulnerability in life and then to “see what love can do” in response. 

So I am drawn to try to offer what theologian Walter Brueggemann calls a “prophetic imagination.”* “The task of prophetic imagination,” he writes, "is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around me.” In other words, my goal in my life and writing is to denounce the perception that the militarism, violence, war, divisiveness, hatred, and a failure to meet the needs of the poor is an acceptable norm, and to offer instead the alternative of nonviolence and radical inclusiveness in the spirit of love. The message of “prophetic imagination" is the same whether it is from the ancient Hebrew prophets, Jesus,  Martin Luther King, Jr., the Dalai Lama or Dr. William Barber who heads the contemporary Poor People’s Campaign. The prophetic message is always one emanating from a deep love for all people - all of us, humans and all creatures, nature - in the Spirit of love that sustains and guides us to become who we are ultimately meant to be.

Even amidst all the great suffering and evil in the world, we can all still assume an attitude of deep reverence for all that is so hurtful as well as all that is so life-giving. I think that is the essence of what I am calling “prophetic imagination,” to use our imagination to rise above it all, and In spite of all that frightens and threatens us we can live “as if” our values of compassion, kindness and reverence will hold us each day, even in the most perilous of times, and endure long after we are gone. Even with the prevalence of so much anxiety and fear for our future, let us all invoke a spirit of "prophetic  imagination" that offers us hope and aligns us with the millennia of those who carried so faithfully, frightfully and courageously a prophetic mantle. 

Peace,
Tom
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*Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 1978.