"Religion has not tended to create seekers or searchers, has not tended to create honest humble people who trust that God is always beyond them. We aren’t focused on the great mystery. Religion has, rather, tended to create people who think they have God in their pockets, people with quick,easy, glib answers. That’s why so much of the West is understandably abandoning religion. People know the great mystery cannot be that simple and facile. If the great mystery is indeed the Great Mystery, it will lead us into paradox, into darkness, into journeys that never cease….That is what prayer is about." Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs

If you receive the Star Tribune newspaper you may have read an editorial this past Saturday by an English teacher at St. Thomas Academy about "Why I assigned reading over the holiday break." It was an article that made my heart sing. It did so not only because it was well written and carried a message I believe in…the importance and power of reading…but also because it held a deeper truth about how we live out our spiritual lives. I made it ‘required reading ‘ for the two young men who share our home.

In the article Christine Brunkhorst explains that she gives her students the vacation assignment of reading a novel, any novel, and then discussing it with an adult in their home. She says she does so because she is "concerned for their imaginations, which in some cases are sorely in need of exercise." Ms. Brunkhorst goes on to explain a lesson in which she asks her students to imagine being driven to school where they go to class and then after school the basketball coach comes into the classroom to show the players films of players running drills. This is followed by going home, eating dinner, watching basketball players play games on television. They do this day after day. Then she asks the question:"Will you become a better basketball player?"

The answer of course is no. Muscles grow weak, flab sets in around the middle, eye/hand coordination loses its response, it isn’t so easy to see the quick move that will create a winning game. The same is true with our imagination. Without exercise our imagination grows stale,docile, unresponsive.

Of course, Ms. Brunkhorst’s goal was to help her students exercise their imaginations through reading, through entering into the lives of others through stories that open their world. The same can be said of the church and our spiritual growing. If we continue to worship in the same way, sing the same songs, pray the same prayers, observe rather than going out on the limb of participation, our spiritual imagination grows stale, docile, unresponsive.

For me, the great gift of the scriptures, the great gift of the life of liturgy, is that it invites us to be continually using our imagination, asking ourselves "Where is God in all this? How did the Holy show up in my life, in this story, today? What is Spirit nudging me to discover in this situation?" The stories of scripture beg us to interact with them, to question them, to look for the missing pieces, to use our imaginations. When we do we become actors in a Great Mystery play in which the curtain never falls. When we do, our very living, becomes a prayer…..an on-going act of communing with God.

What a big idea!