Sheringham: St Peter

What captures the imagination? It’s a strange expression, isn’t it - to think your imagination can be captured or caught. It happens when some idea, passion, or image sparks a response in our minds, engaging our heart, mind or soul. Through such things as music, art, literature and poetry, we are absorbed and taken out of ourselves.

Our imaginations can be captured in unhealthy ways, by things that stir fear and despair, depression and mental health problems. Think of adverts that tell us we’re worth it. Apparently our lives are going to be transformed by shampoo. There are any number of ways, today, where our imagination can be captured, with destructive and devastating impact. The ‘Selfie’ becomes a nightmare of narcissistic addiction and the false ecstasy of drugs takes over our minds.

Instead, we can turn to poetry, the landscape, the seascape, to music, classical and contemporary. We can turn to art that offers resonances, a conversation across centuries. Taking the best of what has been thought and said, and by re-presenting it, we can expand the imagination to something new. To help us grow in moral and emotional knowledge, to help us recognise and articulate a more sophisticated range of emotions and make judgements that mean we live life more abundantly, we need to be open to having our imaginations captured. ‘They shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint,’ says Isaiah. With our imaginations captured, we sour like eagles, we run, we are energised, we live life to the full.

This is not elitist, but a recognition that today’s society is expanded by a wholehearted engagement with musical and artistic heritage of the very many different cultures that make a modern nation. We are all the better for having our imaginations captured, inspired, shaped by the rich feast of the past. The more richly and diversely we are formed, the more imaginative our contemporary offerings will be. Alongside other religious and cultural traditions, the Christian heritage continues to have a profound impact, over centuries, on how we imagine, how we shape our experience, how we frame our morality and emotions. Without those varied repertoires we are impoverished as a culture. It needs refreshing in every generation, a living tradition that continues to enrich human reality, in dialogue across the ages and across the difference of culture.

Today is Trinity Sunday. God, who is most richly experienced as the Trinity, creating, redeeming, sanctifying. God the Creator, who authors, who composes, who brings into being from nothing. Out of chaos comes order and pattern. Out of darkness, there is light. Out of non-being, being. Dorothy L Sayers said we create as we share in the mind of the maker. Our imaginations stretch into new realms when we contemplate God the Creator, for says Isaiah, ‘The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.’

God the Creator loves matter - created material that is hallowed by God’s only begotten Son who becomes human like us. The incarnation is the greatest affirmation of material imaginable. With all its hard resistances, it’s pain and suffering, it’s greed and cruelty, God redeems this world through a love stronger than death. And it doesn’t stop there. God sends his Holy Spirit to be with us: ‘remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ The comforter, the advocate, the inspirer, the enthuser. The Paraclete- the Holy Spirit who captures our imagination with a love that passes our understanding.

Today, we affirm our belief in God: Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier - Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God seeks to capture our imaginations by inspiring us with the stories of Jesus Christ, interpreted through the ages of musicians, artists, writers and poets. Let us rejoice today in that glorious, profound, intriguing, challenging heritage that is ours and give thanks to God for all the opportunities to create with imaginations captured, shaped and inspired by faith, love and hope.

With every blessing,

Christian

Sheringham: St Peter

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