Imagination and Renewal
“The antidote is humility. We must begin where the path always begins, by becoming empty in order to be filled. To be silent. To be still. To wait. To listen. To feel in our bones that we are creatures. To raise our hands, childlike, in the orans position, asking for grace.
To rejoice in our powerlessness, to find again our simplicity and thereby to discover our true greatness. To know that we are damaged but not destroyed. To learn that within us is a repository for truth and for love, and a potential for forms of creativity that are practically infinite. These are gifts, but they are not our possessions. They are not our power over creation but an act of love made with creation and in honour of He who lives beyond and within creation. He who is perfect beauty, perfect truth, perfect love.
Not until we see a movement of gifted people turning away from materialism, willing to be empty, willing to be poor, willing to be filled with something other than their ambitions and fabricated self-images, will we see a true renaissance, a second spring. I believe that a rebaptism of the imagination is already happening. It is small, fragile, but quite capable of overturning the culture of death. I believe that as it gathers momentum we will find again, to paraphrase Shakespeare, our home and our own true name.
A new iconography is waiting for us; it will be built upon all that the historical imagination has given, but reinvigorated by a new consciousness. Our perceptions, more accurately our soul, will be restored to divine order when we find again our proper place in the hierarchy of creation. In submission to natural and supernatural law, to the absolutes, in obedience and prayer, by opening our interior life and the intellectual life to the full authority of the Holy Spirit, we will germinate a little seed. And from it entire forests can spring, and may yet cover the earth.
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God...
And the Word became flesh
and dwelt among us.
And that has made all the difference.”
~Michael O’Brien
To rejoice in our powerlessness, to find again our simplicity and thereby to discover our true greatness. To know that we are damaged but not destroyed. To learn that within us is a repository for truth and for love, and a potential for forms of creativity that are practically infinite. These are gifts, but they are not our possessions. They are not our power over creation but an act of love made with creation and in honour of He who lives beyond and within creation. He who is perfect beauty, perfect truth, perfect love.
Not until we see a movement of gifted people turning away from materialism, willing to be empty, willing to be poor, willing to be filled with something other than their ambitions and fabricated self-images, will we see a true renaissance, a second spring. I believe that a rebaptism of the imagination is already happening. It is small, fragile, but quite capable of overturning the culture of death. I believe that as it gathers momentum we will find again, to paraphrase Shakespeare, our home and our own true name.
A new iconography is waiting for us; it will be built upon all that the historical imagination has given, but reinvigorated by a new consciousness. Our perceptions, more accurately our soul, will be restored to divine order when we find again our proper place in the hierarchy of creation. In submission to natural and supernatural law, to the absolutes, in obedience and prayer, by opening our interior life and the intellectual life to the full authority of the Holy Spirit, we will germinate a little seed. And from it entire forests can spring, and may yet cover the earth.
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God...
And the Word became flesh
and dwelt among us.
And that has made all the difference.”
~Michael O’Brien
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