Today, Ash Wednesday, I have blogged at hopeful imagination. The site is set up by Andy Goodliff, and you should visit it during Lent if you want daily reflection and comment that encourages a different way of looking at the world, ourselves and what God is about around us. The title will be familiar to Brueggemann fans – the theological importance of both hope and imagination is that they are perspectives that refuse to take the way things are as the way things have to be. To pray is to lift up holy hands against the status quo – the thought is Karl Barth’s, and recalls us to prayer as an act of political significance.
Lent can easily reduce to a "pious grovelling around in our own souls" (R E O White, former Principal of the Scottish Baptist College in an unforgettably astringent lecture on pastoral prayer). There are few more selfish acts than prayers which are fixated on our own feelings, our own devotional aspirations, our sins, our desires, our view of what we want God to do here, there, then, now. Yes prayer is personal relationship – but the personal becomes selfish, and private, and exclusive – "oh that will be, glory for me" – if that relationship, like all Christ-like relationships, is not outward looking in self-giving love, generous compassion, hunger for justice for others. The picture above is of a child working on a construction site in Honduras. See the story and statistics on the UNICEF site here. Lifting up holy hands against the status quo….Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven……children….of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Self-concern is not one of the fruits of the spirit, and it might be an interesting experiment this Lent to monitor the frequent recurrence of the first person singulars in our prayers – I, me, we, us, mine, our. And to consider whether public prayers by those of us who lead worship reflect the wideness of God’s mercy, express hunger and thirst for righteousness, understood not primarily as personal justification, but as God’s call to the Church to embody a Kingdom that is justice, peace and joy. And it just might result in one of the most radical changes in our own spirituality when our understanding of the ‘ingrasping’ love of God,(the word is Charles Wesley’s!) opens our arms to embrace this broken beautiful world of ours, with a passion derived from Christ’s Passion, and with a self-forgetful commitment to the ways of Christ as the ways of life. That would be to pray with hopeful imagination!
Have a good Lent!
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