Religious Imagination
“What,” it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” Oh no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, “Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” William Blake What do we say of one who fixes his gaze upon the sun but sees an infinitely greater light on “another shore?” And what of those ecstatic visionaries who tell us that they have come to bear even in their own bodies the stigmata of the Lord’s passion? Saints? Poets? Lunatics? Christianity has always involved the claim that reality is infinitely more than it appears to be: that there are things visible and things invisible. Our Christian life in the world requires an imaginative, visionary grasp of the world and human life within it that is less radical only in degree from that of the poets and the saints. Christians, among other things, are those whose imaginations have been so captivated by the Christian story and by the symbolic forms of the Church’s liturgy, art, music, and literature that that story and its symbolic expressions simply will not let us go. We are so grasped by that sacred story and lifted up into its sacred space and time that we are alive to the world, to ourselves and others, in new and startling ways, that we see-hear-touch-feel in ways beyond simple logical analysis and argumentation. This is why we are able to see in and through our Lord’s cross and his empty tomb the depths of our human struggle and the inexpressibly joyful gift of new life, things hidden from the eyes of the world and its wisdom. Or why we see in the barbarism and inhumanity of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – including September 11 and its aftermath – not simply a struggle with flesh and blood but with “principalities and powers.” That is why every broken and fragmented instance of healing and reconciliation occasions the visions of a “new heaven and a new earth.” Perhaps the “crisis of faith” in our time is not so much a failure of belief, of intellectual assent to the doctrines and teachings of the church, as it is a failure of imagination and will, a failure to be deeply moved. One of the objectives of our music is to move people in this way, to expand our spiritual vision, to open our minds and hearts to God’s reality - to things as they truly are.
