by Preston Moore, Guest Preacher

A sermon given March 26, 2006

My daughter recently told me about a new ultra-masculine cologne.  I thought this was one of her jokes, but she insisted she was serious, so I investigated.  It smelled nice, but actually was pretty disappointing.  It just didn’t live up to its image.  I guess I was expecting a little odor of octane.

The new cologne is called Hummer.  It comes in this squat, muscular box with the familiar chunky letters.  You can order it from this catalogue—called Hummer Stuff.  Two Hummerians are pictured on the cover, next to their Hummer, probably a whole mile off the freeway.  (If only St. Paul were alive today.  “Paul’s Letter to the Hummerians” surely would be a great read.)  They’re wearing Hummer jackets, shoes, and eye gear (formerly known as glasses).  They’re peering into their wi-fi Hummer Laptop, no doubt visiting the Hummer Stuff website, sizing up the next cool thing—Hummer barbecue grills, ballpoint pens, barstools, cocktail glasses, a $2,000 night vision monoscope for those dangerous safaris in the suburban jungle.  Nothing is left to the imagination here.  The Hummer trade dress can be the way you dress.  All you have to do is point, click, and consume.

Hummer culture is filling in the blank in one of the most important sentences rattling around in the human brain.  It goes something like, “I’m the kind of woman [or man] who BLANK.”  Hummer isn’t just marketing transportation, it’s marketing identity.

Hummer culture is not a fluke.  You can hardly buy a cup of coffee without running into identity marketing.  The marketing slogan at Starbucks is “create the experience.”  Not “create a great cup of coffee,” or even “create a great place to go sit and drink a great cup of coffee.”  The experience will be productized, sold, and consumed.  It will tell you the kind of man or woman you are.

If Hummers and Starbucks don’t seem relevant to your life situation, consider the practice of “staging” in selling homes.  It used to be that people walked into a house for sale and imagined their furniture, their taste . . . their lives being lived in that place.  Now, it’s different.  The culture is so saturated with media images of what “the good life” looks like, that there has been . . . a collapse of imagination.  If you get them into a candid conversation, the realtors will tell you that, on their own, many people walking into a home today cannot imagine themselves in it.  If you want the house to sell well, you have to cater to this disability.  You have to “stage” your house to look like the residential equivalent of a department store window.  Our culture has created an expectation that in almost any situation, a prepackaged set of images will be provided for immediate consumption.  A whole cottage industry called “real estate staging” has sprung up in response to that expectation.  The stagers figure out which department store window your particular house should look like.  Then they redecorate and refurnish your house to make it match that image.

I’m not a sociologist, but as Bob Dylan said, “you don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind’s blowing.”  Imagination is in a state of atrophy.  The interesting questions are not about whether, but rather, about why, and with what consequences, and what to do about it.

In our quest for the best, we concentrate more and more on doing the things we do well and delegating the other pieces of our lives to people we consider to be better at those other pieces.  One problem with this increasing specialization is that the muscle of imagination gets weaker as the range of our direct experience gets narrower.  An even bigger problem is that this delegating extends even to the task of finding out what we really want, which is to say, finding out who we really are.

We have outsourced this basic task of living to people we consider to be better at it—meaning they have better taste, better information, and most of all, better imagination.  They reflect the results of their efforts back to us through imagery that tells us what we want and who we are.  We are pickled in mass-media images, even as, ironically, our own imagination and thus our own self- knowledge gets weaker and weaker.  Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

Yet another problem with this delegating concerns what we mean by “better at” imagining.  In our culture, it means better at imagining things people will pay to consume.  So what we want, and who we are, is defined increasingly in terms of consumption.  The ancient philosopher Epictetus advised, “Know first who you are, and then adorn yourselves accordingly.”  How backward we have gotten that wisdom.  America is selling the mediated life, and a whole lot of us are buying it.

More is at stake here than the excesses of consumerism.  The phrase “failure of imagination” was popularized by Shelby Steele, an African American who is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  In an article called “Race and Imagination,” he observed that minorities are always asking the majority to understand what it is like to walk in their shoes, because this is how equality will be experienced and become undeniable.  “Minorities know,” he said, “that racism and bigotry are always a failure of imagination.  In the face of difference, imagination is the only way to common humanity.”

As important as racism is, the reasons to talk about imagination in church this morning reach even deeper.

In 1980, somewhere near Minneapolis, a man named Art Fry was singing in the choir at his church.  He put bookmarks in his hymnal to be able to turn quickly to the right hymns, but the bookmarks were always slipping out.  A strip of paper and scotch tape worked TOO well.  Hymnal pages are notoriously thin.  They tore when he tried to take out his taped-in bookmarks.

Fry was a new product development researcher at 3M Company.  He found out that another researcher had come up with an adhesive that had some interesting chemical properties, but didn’t stick nearly as well as tape.  One or two modest “Eurekas” later, Art Fry invented post-it notes.

Incidentally, published accounts of this invention record that Fry had his techno-epiphany during a particularly boring sermon.  My new calling continues to be a very humbling path.

Art Fry’s story had more to do with religion than just hymnal markers.  The lowly post-it note was a little piece of divinity, made real.  Somehow, Fry was able to be present in a different way with the chemistry, with the paper, and with how people keep track of information.  A different way that somehow made room for a new look.  In the mundane sphere of office supplies, Art Fry had a capacious imagination.

Imagination is a critical element in creativity.  The essence of creativity is novelty, the bringing forth of something truly fresh and new.  Planted in the finite world of time and space, if we focus solely on what is, on what is real, there is no space for the arrival of something new.  You can’t draw an image on a crowded piece of paper.  You need a blank one.  Creation requires emptiness, a void, the opposite of concrete reality.  Planted in the finite world, where do we go to find that?

One answer might be to say that we reach outside of time and space, to the domain of the infinite, to what I would call God.  A better answer might be to say that we become able to experience the connection with the infinite that was present all along.  In that experience, creation expresses itself first as image—the union of an experience of the infinite, with an experience of something known, from our storehouse of human living.  Presented with an image, we can complete the cycle of creative expression by converting the image to physical reality—by making something.

Since the dawn of history, humans have moved through this cycle of creativity over and over again?  Why?  We do it for love—the longing to see the things in our storehouse of experience for exactly what they are, and to accept them—even the painful and broken ones.  We do it because a sliver of the divine in our nature enables us to look upon creation and see that it is good.

Without imagination, without the capacity to convert a state of creativity into an image, the leap from creation to physical embodiment cannot be made.  We are left with a world of inert concrete reality unconnected to the divine; a world bereft of love.  As the Jungian philosopher James Hollis has observed, “The constriction of our imagination is our greatest tragedy and the source of our deepest self-wounding. . . . We have a soul, and within the soul is the power to imagine the possibility of breaking the old mold and experiencing alternatives.  Without compassion and imagination, our lives remain forever constricted within the small and the broken.”

The sorry state of imagination in our culture is not easy to face up to.  And yet, the situation is more hopeful than it looks.  The keys to this jail are in our own pockets.  We just need to reach for them.

This requires cultivating experiences that revive imagination, that restore our awareness of our connection with the divine.  An important source for such experiences is poetry.   The poet Shelley declared, “The great secret of mortals is love, a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own.  A person to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively,” he said.  “He must put himself in the place of another and of many others.  The great instrument of moral good is the imagination, and poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination.”

Poetic experience is not confined to verse.  We can be open to poetic transport anywhere in life.  So much depends on this openness.  The poet William Carlos Williams once said, “It’s hard to get the news from poetry, but men die every day for want of what is found there.”  I used to think Williams’ reference to people dying was rhetorical.  I don’t think that any more.

My call for more experience of the infinite in our lives is not a plea for renunciation of the material world.  Connection with the divine is only half of the cycle of imagination and creativity.  The other half is unmediated experience—an embrace of reality in the raw, without the interference of mass-produced images that distance us from life and from ourselves.  This brand of realism is very different from the brands constantly hyped at us by identity marketing.  We can ask too little of the muscle of imagination, leading to atrophy.  But we also can ask too much.  Unsupported by sufficient grounding in the real world, the muscle of imagination fails.

When I lived in Japan, the mass media image of Japanese culture was that of a people too group-oriented, suffering from a greatly weakened sense of individual responsibility.  The large number of signatures required on official company documents was often cited as evidence of this weakness.

Working with companies in Japan, I came to see that this wasn’t so.  In Japan, your signature is a promise.  The sense of responsibility for a promise is so great there that it is often too much for one person to bear.  So the responsibility is placed onto many shoulders.

When I lived there, every weekday morning at 7:17, a bullet train left Tokyo station, bound for Osaka.  It was scheduled to arrive two hours and 32 minutes later, at 9:49.  You could take this train and confidently schedule a meeting in downtown Osaka for 10:00.  The train would arrive at 9:49.  The printed schedule of Japan National Railways was a promise to its passengers, the summing of a very large number of personal commitments to the value of individual responsibility.

Taking promises this seriously may sound like a great virtue, but Japanese people pay a heavy price for their sense of responsibility.  Living in Japan, I realized I could never fully know what it’s like to be Japanese.  But with the help of at least a small chunk of raw, unmediated experience, I saw that my imagination could lift me out of the lifeless media images of Japanese people and into their shoes, at least for a mile or two.

This is where compassion comes from.  Since my time in Japan, I have pondered how many other groups I might be treating less than compassionately because of not doing enough to bring divine imagination and grounded experience together in my life.  We are all vulnerable to falling short in this way.  No one can afford to treat failure of imagination as someone else’s problem. 

I don’t believe I can have a healthy imagination without the support of others who share my commitment to this value.  I need a place where options are presented that go beyond consuming and being consumed.  Where my experience is unmediated, my connection to the divine is palpable, and outbreaks of novelty occur regularly.  I need a place devoted to supporting everyone in seeing themselves as large enough to spread compassion in a broken world.

Church has a greater capacity to meet this need than any other place I know.  I see it as an incubator of poetic possibility.  Being with you this morning reinforces this optimism in me.  May we strive to sustain and nurture this church, so that, in turn, it may sustain us in love’s labors, and nurture our most capacious imagination. 

AMEN.
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Copyright 2006, Preston Moore.  All rights reserved.