Pastor's Letter

Dear Friends in Christ,

Do you remember in the movie "Miracle on 34th Street", the scene were Kris Kringle invites the little girl to live in a new nation, not the French nation, or the American nation, but rather the Imagi-Nation? As we think about our celebration of Advent/Christmas this time around, I should like us to think about it as a call to live in the Imagi-Nation. My gripe with both fundamentalist religion and flat-footed scientism is that they fail to engage life imaginatively, passionately, purposefully. So, here are three points about imagination from the great British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead.

(1) "Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts."

Imagination divorced from facts is mere fantasy, and in terms of religion, superstition. Religion's immersion in human facticity we call "incarnation." It is what Christmas is all about. Here is a God not divorced from our factual lives, but one whom we meet in a homeless child in a stable, born of an unmarried couple--the girl a teenager. And yet here God meets us. The point of the story is to encourage usto see the world through new eyes so that when we deal with ordinary people in the manifold distresses of their lives, we can see that as a place where incarnation is waiting to happen.

(2) "(Imagination) works by eliciting the general principles which apply to the facts, as they exist, and then by an intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which are consistent with those principles."

Imagination is not just an abstract dreaminess, a form of wishful thinking. It is a different kind of intellectual labor from doing math or plotting business strategy, but it is intellectual labor. It tries to know "the facts" as thoroughly as possible, tries to understand them, tries to see how facts are pregnant with possibility.

(3) "(Imagination) enables (us) to construct an intellectual vision of a new world, and it preserves the zest of life by the suggestion of satisfying purposes."

Here we come to what Christmas is really all about. It is not what we would be forgiven for thinking it is based on the way most people celebrate it--an exercise in empty nostalgia. It is really a re-imagining of the world, a great exercise in "what if?" What if we saw the world from the perspective of homeless families or unwed mothers? What if we imagined that God is to be found among them? What if God is about a new kind of love that incites us to behave justly toward God's lost and hurting ones? What if God is love? Whitehead tells us what would happen then: the zest of life would be restored because our lives would have again the one and only thing that can make life zesty: a satisfying purpose.

So in wishing you a merry Christmas this year, I am really wishing for you a zesty Christmas that will fill your life with what Paul Tillich calls "ultimate concern," or to use Alfred North Whitehead's phrase, "satisfying purpose." Have a great Advent and Christmas, my dear brothers and sisters in the Christ, the God who is incarnate in all our messy, but potentially zesty, facticity.

Yours in Christ,

--Pastor Bastien