By Cecilia González-Andrieu, PhD.
A few months back, I invited you to begin a process to help us meet the challenge Jesus presents to us. Sometimes, it is important to remember that being church isn’t about the trimmings, but about the “why” of it all. As St. Teresa of Avila famously said, Jesus has no hands in the world, no voice, no feet, but ours. To get us in touch with what it means to follow Jesus in our present world, we started by spending time in discernment. If we want to engage the world actively in a Gospel posture that is resilient, we need to build a roaring fire in our hearts.
From that posture of wakeful discernment, we then moved to accompaniment. If our discernment is the fire, then accompaniment is gathering the wood to feed it. True accompaniment sends us out into the world to encounter its raw and unadorned reality, la realidad, because God is indeed speaking in history.
Today, I invite us to undertake a third step, which is to expand our imagination by linking la realidad we are encountering with thousands of years of wisdom and the lives of our ancestors in faith.
Why does our imagination need expanding?
As Pope Francis puts it, “You have to go to the edges of existence if you want to see the world as it is.”
One of the most difficult questions any of us might have to answer today is, “Why is there so much hatred? Why is there so much suffering?” As we search for words they might add, “Nothing ever changes, this is hopeless.” Every time I hear this, it breaks my heart, and I invite you to allow it to break yours, too.
Ours is a faith built on the paradoxically sturdy foundation of hope. There seems to be a contradiction here because, for many people, hope is illusory and fragile. But that is not hope; that is simply wishing. Hope does the arduous work of demolishing the walls that proclaim, “This is the way it is. This is the way it has always been. Give up.” As we reach into the treasure of our religious tradition and the examples of our ancestors, we find that it is the walls of inevitability imprisoning us that are illusory and fragile.
Hope is a young couple seeking shelter, turned away repeatedly, yet finding warmth among creatures in a stable as their child’s birth nears. Hope is found in the poor, tasked with the exhausting work of herding sheep, who are able to imagine that the world is about to change because God is doing something new. Hope is the travelers from far off places, whose imagination coincides with the shepherds, as they also feel the pulsating earth beneath them and the shimmer of the stars above. Hope is the mysterious cosmic otherness. It whispers something the travelers and shepherds strain to understand. “God is here.”
Expanding our imagination to transcend limits and despair is as critical as oxygen today. A Gospel-infused imagination will keep creation alive. As we face an uncertain future not just for the United States, but for the whole of creation, we must harness a faith that replaces egoism with the selfless love of the Good Samaritan.
We must unleash the kind of hope the Scriptures express from the very depths of lament. As, like Ezekiel, we look out onto a valley of dry bones where God’s entire project for history seems to have crashed, we need to hear God telling us to speak up and remember who we are. We need to hear our God saying, “My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people” (Ezekiel 37:27). And from our vantage point today, we must realize that the “place” God is making is our cosmos, and the “them” is all that exists. Our lack of imagination has confined us. It is time to dream as God dreams. To see what isn’t yet but could be — because it is already in God.
Theologian Cecilia González-Andrieu, Ph.D., is a professor at Loyola Marymount University.
