As an avid reader and a book-collector, I am resharing a piece I wrote in 2007 as a reflective ‘faith’ piece . Today being World Book Day (March 2, 2023 ) propels me to so do.

In a context of limited access to works of fiction and prose (as a teenager in Guyana), it was not uncommon to discover that in the midst of reading one of the well-used novels that I desperately wanted to read, a number of pages were missing towards the end or at some crucial point in the narrative. One had to let the imagination kick into a different gear and start working overtime to fill the gaps in. One’s imagination was further stirred, nurtured and expanded by the short stories and verses some of us penned as a result of such gaps, to share with each other.

Faith lives between stories: the stories of the Divine we humans tell and the story of the world in which we live. Our faith-talk is what happens when the stories meet. At the heart of that encounter is imagination. No wonder Plato had to concede: “I strain after images”; C.S. Lewis spoke of his “baptized imagination”. Derek Walcott penned: “I had no nation now, but the imagi-nation” and T.S. Eliot imaged the Church as a hippopotamus attempting to “take wing”. Try imagining that! Imagine also, the biblical writer on the Isle of Patmos (‘high’ on the holy herb) with the plea for his audience to “imagine a new heaven and earth and the whole of creation anew”. Can we ever begin to live a life we cannot first imagine?

All of life is in desperate need to re-discover new words, metaphors and images by daring to imagine a different world.  The imagination does what others cannot see. It evokes mystery: that is, not the absence of meaning, but more meaning than one can comprehend. Using their gift of the imagination, writers of prose and poetry help me to discover again “the strangeness of one’s faith” , the “deep mystery” at the heart of belief countering the world of explanations and exposing faith that is too safe, thin tame and prefers quick-secure answers to the ambiguities we embody.

To imagine differently is to find new stories and images to break the hold of the polarised views we are locked into. It is to give space to a variety of voices and experiences and to imagine worlds where ideas and stories move across cultural boundaries. My engagement with a variety literary works has massaged my imagination back into life to help me risk re-thinking, re-visioning and re-imagining in order to open up spaces where play, difference, transformation and paradoxes can live together. It is these spaces that the new is birthed, lives and breathes and finds meaning. 

Imagine!

caribleaper March 2 2023