Baptizing Imagination

With respect to the title for my new blog, some have asked: Why ‘Baptizing Imagination’? The short answer is I don’t know. The longer explanation comes from a contemplative moment.

One day as I was sitting pondering these words in emails and sermons and now blog posts! which seemed to literally and forcefully be unleashed during the time of the pandemic, I found myself immensely grateful for baptism, immensely, and I found myself quite shaken almost terrified by the exposure of my imagination. And so one seemed to be a blessed assuring and consoling concept and the other a terrifying one because it had always been submerged in favor of traditional expected and previously approved actions and words. All of a sudden rational thought and self protection gave way to a contemplative mysterious yes. This was the opportunity which isolation and social distancing afforded me. I pray it is a holy opportunity.

And then the active tense...baptizing. I believe we are always forming, always transforming. I believe our identities while unique and endlessly diverse have a common divinity residing within...I believe God is baptizing us with the flow of grace which touches, inundates, and washes over us. Baptism while once and not to be “redone” is also forever a process of living into our identities in the One in whom we live and breathe and have our being. 

And part of the recognition of that power irradiating us and transmitted through us, requires a response, an imaginative one. Imagination may be the very aspect of our identities which is supremely unique and blessed. We all have hearts and minds which while biologically similar are also DNA different but our imaginations, fully expressed, bear little resemblance to one another. As soon as we try to assimilate we may have stepped out of our imaginations. Anyway, Baptizing Imagination is my way of attempting to escape any hegemonic binding and step out into freedom, with my whole messy broken self, but a self which is so in love with God, my family and my neighbor! Perhaps a truer and fuller self will be identified as I honor that love. 

I hope so.