Spiritual Sunday
I’m current running the Adult Sunday Forum at our church, and today I share with you a talk from two weeks ago on Jesus’s literary imagination. Our theme this year is “community,” and Rev. Scott Lee, once a Sewanee College English major, contended that Jesus used his parables to prod communal imagining. Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats both showed up in the talk.
Because the first half of this year’s program is devoted to a historical take on religious community, Scott entitled his talk “Community in the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus.” After setting forth some of the sociological aspects of the period, he then laid out Jesus’s challenge.
This was to get people to imagine a very different community than the community they were used to—which is to say, to imagine the kingdom of God come to earth. Or as the Lord’s Prayer puts it, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” To do so, Jesus needed people to think outside of their narrow confines. His major teaching tool was imaginative storytelling in the form of parables.
At this point in his talk, Scott turned to theories of the imagination as expressed by Coleridge and Keats. As Coleridge saw it, the primary imagination is
the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.
Since we are made in the image of God, Coleridge believes we can repeat or echo a version of God’s own act of creation on earth. One particularly powerful way of doing this is through the arts, including poetically crafted stories. As Scott said of the parables, “they are an invitation, a doorway, into the mind of Christ—which is to say, into the kingdom of God.”
Scott also quoted Keats in the passage where, drawing on a scene in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam dreams of Eve and then awakes to find her a reality:
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth . . . The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream —he awoke and found it truth. . .
Here’s are the passages from Milton that Keats is referencing. The speaker is Adam:
Pensive I sat me down; there gentle sleep
First found me, and with soft oppression seized
My drowsed sense, untroubled, though I thought
I then was passing to my former state
Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve:
When suddenly stood at my head a dream,
Whose inward apparition gently moved
My Fancy to believe I yet had being,
And lived…
In his dream, Adam first tours the garden with God and then witnesses Eve’s creation:
Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape [God]
Still glorious before whom awake I stood;
Who stooping opened my left side, and took
From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm,
And lifeblood streaming fresh; wide was the wound,
But suddenly with flesh filled up and healed:
The bib he formed and fashioned with his hands;
Under his forming hands a creature grew,
Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair,
That what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained
And in her looks, which from that time infused
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her air inspired
The spirit of love and amorous delight.
Drawing on the passage, Keats says that Adam’s dream
seems to be a conviction that imagination and its empyreal [celestial] reflection is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition…
The artist’s challenge—like the prophet’s—is to convey celestial vision to earthbound minds. Scott noted that Jesus sets forth that challenge in Matthew 13:10-12. If one opens oneself to the parables, as one does to a work of art, one will “know the secrets of heaven.” (And by the same token, if one doesn’t, one won’t.):
Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
Scott added that Jesus elaborates on the idea a few verses later (Matthew 13:13-15). If one remains stuck in conventional understanding—if one’s heart has grown dull and one’s ears are hard of hearing—one will miss out on the vision. One must therefore use one’s imagination:
The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: ‘You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn— and I would heal them.’ But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.
Coleridge and Keats, of course, see their poetry as their attempt to reflect and repeat divine creation. Scott set up exercises to show us that Jesus’s parables are set up to do the same. Dividing us into four groups, he gave us the parables of (1) the lost sheep and the lost coin; (2) the unfair wages; (3) the mustard seed and the yeast; and (4) the sower. His goal was to show us how these artistically complex creations pull us into their creative vortex and set our imaginations at work.
From our discussions, we discovered that the parables are not just simple one-dimensional formulae but instead rich avenues for spiritual growth. Sometimes parables are enigmatic or even uncomfortable—there’s never just one interpretation—but that’s deliberate. After all, Jesus is trying to jolt people out of narrow vision so that they experience much more.
For instance, I suddenly realized—in discussing the parable of the sower—that the sower would have appeared to this agricultural society as a fool. After all, no prudent farmer would cast his seed on stony ground. Jesus is challenging his audience, however, to think of God as so generous that he gives all of us a chance to experience spiritual growth, even those of us with stony hearts. It was a dimension of the story I have overlooked.
All the groups experienced similar interpretive flexibility and similar revelations. In some of the parables, it’s not clear which character God is. Or put another way, sometimes God appears as different characters depending on the reader/listener. Like all great literature, the parables intend to inspire us to embark on our own spiritual journeys.
Years ago I reported on another talk presented to our Adult Forum, this one by noted C.S. Lewis scholar Rob McSwain, a member of Sewanee’s School of Theology. McSwain contended that the Anglican/Episcopal church conducts its most powerful spiritual explorations through literature, not through systematic theology. Our “theologians” are not Thomas Aquinas or Martin Luther but poets like John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lewis, and Mary Oliver. Scott’s talk this past Sunday provided me with further confirmation of that view.
He also confirmed my decision, in this blog, to at least once a week apply literature to spiritual matters.