Notes for the Week Eighth Sunday after Pentecost July 26 2020

Dear friends,

Albert Einstein said that logic will get you from A to B, but imagination will take you anywhere. Just as one might be loathe to dare to enter into either of these, given our current world situation, a gift of hopeful possibility appears without warning.

So it was during my morning walk, be-masked and doing the six-foot dance with another walker encountered along the way, a little ray of hope for the future appeared before us. Into the midst of a mutual grownup awareness of our current world reality, this fairyland creation offered up a different kind of world. A world filled with attentive care, patient intention and inclusion of all, regardless of age or condition and regardless of whether one might be animal, mineral, human or something of another world. All these and more are included as part of this miniature world that looks rather like a cross between Narnia and Alice in Wonderland.

Seeing this world through a child’s eyes brought all the adult fatigue, the impatience and querulousness about the day-to-day condition, down to size. One’s mind, heart and soul felt its invitation to let go, felt its message of uncomplicated acceptance, as joyful discovery eased away the angst that works so hard to possess them.

Just as you might, I can remember creating similar scenes as a child, making miniature houses, grand castles, little roads, valleys and making up stories to go with each addition. It was not an unusual pastime in an era which knew no indoor phones, no television, no internet. For children there were chores, school, and there was time for play. Time for imagining wonderful worlds where all works together. Worlds that are deemed too beautiful to mar with war, murder and mayhem, and should any occur, no one ever left the front lines unreconciled before bed. These worlds are set apart and deemed inviolate by their creators.

Perhaps this garden reveals, not only the same capacity for a child’s imagination to take flight, but also the need to create from the chaos a dream of a better world, a different world, without fully realizing how very important that is. Perhaps dreaming of a world put to right which encapsulates all our wildest dreams, is one way to cope with the reality of a world far more at odds with anyone’s inmost desires. Don’t we all long for an opportunity to embrace all that is beautiful in the world, rather than to simply long for it?

Perhaps that’s what God had in mind when God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in it. A place of wonder, of beauty, for all to enjoy regardless of age, condition, or persuasion, whether animal, mineral or human. A place to capture one’s limitless imagination with its endless intricacy, infinite complexity and vastness that reaches far beyond all that human imagination ever could.

COVID or no COVID, every living creature and every living thing God created out of nothing, God expects to assist God in continuing to create, build up, expand, explore and take delight in seeing that it is good.

It seems we might have somehow lost the knack of how, but God never stops wanting us to try.

We journey together,
Mother Esme+

 ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3)