Ministry Tip of the Week
by Seth Evangelho
A digitized world has its advantages, but the drawbacks are dangerous. The constant bombardment of images and slogans, ad campaigns, tweets, blog posts, video games and Facebook 'likes' threatens to dull (or even replace) our deeply human sense of wonder, reflection, and imaginative thought. Why research something when Google has already done the work for you, right?
|
Again, tapping into the universal consciousness we call Google has its advantages but, if we're going to avoid the dumbing down of our own personal consciousness, we had better be proactive; for the modern loss of the imaginative faculty is paralyzing our ability to exercise the gift of faith.
|
|
In order to understand this a little better, let's be clear on what the imagination is. First of all, imagination is NOT reducible to our ability to pretend. To use your imagination does not primarily mean to fantasize or to make things up. The Imagination is a faculty of the human soul and a fundamental means by which God communicates to us the divine realities of faith. When we use this God-given, human faculty we bring to mind images of a reality that isn't immediately present to our senses. It's a faculty of memory, but also of hope and vision for the future. Most important of all maybe, the imagination is a power of the soul that allows us to perceive present realities hidden from physical sensation.
  |
Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection wrote a timeless book based upon his spiritual habits of contemplative prayer: "The Practice of the Presence of God." Ultimately, he tells us that contemplative prayer takes practice and it's a question of continually recalling that we are in fact surrounded by the presence of Love Eternal. "As often as I could," says Brother Lawrence, "I placed myself as a worshipper before him, fixing my mind upon his holy presence, recalling it when I found it wandering from him. This proved to be an exercise frequently painful, yet I persisted through all difficulties." The imagination it turns out is a kind of spiritual muscle that, when exercised, creates in us a capacity to commune with the divine in our daily activities (Brother Lawrence was in charge of pots and pans in his monastery).
|
|
Without the imagination, faith can easily become a mundane list of facts and rote prayers. As "new evangelists" in the modern world, our job is to renew the imaginations of old and young alike. May this renewal begin first in our own souls; may the ease of modern technology be for us a tool and not an addiction; may we struggle and persist through all difficulties to keep alive the presence of God and a living faith in all that we do; and may we teach others to do the same.
|
|
"There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God; those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it" (Brother Lawrence).
RSS Feed