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I'm reading a book called, Lazarus, Come Out!: Why Faith Needs Imagination, by Richard Cote -- and so far it's quite engaging. One of the author's introductory statements is "A vital point of contact between divine revelation and human experience resides in the religious imagination," and he refers to imagination as "our natural, inborn faculty for transcendence."
Cote is Catholic (an Oblate Priest, according to the back cover), so my references to the book are going to be Christo-centric, but I think that they carry into any spiritual tradition. He points out that our images of God are a combination of received images and our own spiritual imagination, and that virtually everyone's image of God changes as they move through life, as one by one those images become outmoded, too small, or otherwise insufficient.
He asked more than 60 seminarians to write spiritual autobiographies, "asking them. . . to trace the path of their religious imagination and the struggles they may have experienced at crucial points in their lives when they felt summoned from within to 'go beyond' their previously held images of God. . . . I invited them to linger long enough in these religious landscapes of the past to recapture something of the image of God that had inhabited them at the time, along with all the personal feelings, emotions and intuitions associated with this image." That, I think, is an exercise worth spending some time on.
One of his findings was that virtually all the respondents described moving from a very precise image of God to one that was more mysterious (and mystical).
I don't have time to write more this morning, but I'm really enjoying the book -- not just for it's own sake, but because I'm feeling more 'myself' when I read it. Being out of school these past few months have left me without a lot of intellectual stimulation, and this is giving me something to chew on, and toss out here for discussion.
Cote is Catholic (an Oblate Priest, according to the back cover), so my references to the book are going to be Christo-centric, but I think that they carry into any spiritual tradition. He points out that our images of God are a combination of received images and our own spiritual imagination, and that virtually everyone's image of God changes as they move through life, as one by one those images become outmoded, too small, or otherwise insufficient.
He asked more than 60 seminarians to write spiritual autobiographies, "asking them. . . to trace the path of their religious imagination and the struggles they may have experienced at crucial points in their lives when they felt summoned from within to 'go beyond' their previously held images of God. . . . I invited them to linger long enough in these religious landscapes of the past to recapture something of the image of God that had inhabited them at the time, along with all the personal feelings, emotions and intuitions associated with this image." That, I think, is an exercise worth spending some time on.
One of his findings was that virtually all the respondents described moving from a very precise image of God to one that was more mysterious (and mystical).
I don't have time to write more this morning, but I'm really enjoying the book -- not just for it's own sake, but because I'm feeling more 'myself' when I read it. Being out of school these past few months have left me without a lot of intellectual stimulation, and this is giving me something to chew on, and toss out here for discussion.
