Some Imagine Well

awakening : Imagination/Church | posted by Shaun O

In her book Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard stitches words together like a fine woven fabric.  I stumbled on a passage that almost perfectly describes the "tension" (or you might say "play") between the different waking alarms in my life:  literature, nature, theology, love.  It seems even to  play at the fact that I recently moved 1,650 miles away and left church work intending to begin literature/nature studies ...and just 2 months later have found myself working within the church again.  I can't imagine where this is going.  (Or can I?)...  It is a wild ride. 

And here's what she writes,

"There is no one but us.  There never has been.  There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day.  Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace , that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved.  So.  You learn this studying any history at all, especially the lives of artists and visionaries; you learn it from Emerson, who noticed that the meanness of our days is itself worth our thought; and you learn it, fitful in your pew, at church."

So I say, again, see you Sunday. -s.o