26 Blog Post September 28, 2024 “Imagination”

“Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything” H. Miller

If this is true of God, and if God creates out of imagination, why is it that we no longer seem to have that same drive or vision ourselves when it comes to church? We traveled to the Tuscan countryside today on a group tour, stopping in Siena, San Gimignano, had lunch at a Tuscan winery and headed off to Pisa to see, you guessed it, the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The cathedrals really captured my attention though. We have obviously seen a lot of churches and cathedrals over the course of our trip. After all, isn’t that what all ministers want to do on their vacations? (Read that last sentence with sarcasm.) We are visiting so many Cathedrals because they are the places where imagination runs free, where surprising discoveries can happen, and where the story of God never gets old.

I experienced that today in a new medieval way—see what I did there? New and medieval mixed together might seem like an oxymoron, but I saw new things in the old works of art in these buildings that made me ask the question: Have we lost our imaginations when it comes to spirituality, religion, interpretation? Have we become monochrome in a brilliantly colored world of experience and expression?

Our visit to the Cathedral in Siena was timed perfectly because we were there during an annual unveiling of the mosaic floor. For only eight weeks of the year, the floor is uncovered and the stunning art of marble and stone workers is revealed. So in addition to the black and white marble patterning of the building, the floor had exquisitely detailed graffiti, or drawings and carvings on the surface of the floor of the Cathedral in this case. Alistair and I were not only impressed by the detailed hand carved images, but the subject matter of just one section was astonishing. The entire section featured stories from the life of the prophet Elijah. The prophets of Baal were there, the passing of the mantle to Elisha, and the assumption of Elijah into Heaven with fiery chariots was the largest and most detailed.

But our question was this—who even knows the story of Elijah anymore? How many people today would have recognized the story in these beautiful ornamentations on the floor where people walked? The Elijah section was only one small piece of an overall masterpiece with multiple stories from the Bible. So in addition to the black and white “striped’ marble effect in the cathedral walls and column, these ‘graffito’, or carvings, brought the Bible to life for people. It isn’t all about the stained glass windows.

The next Cathedral we visited in San Gimignano, the Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta, was completely covered in frescoes from floor to ceiling on both sides of the church. Frescoes are paintings completed on damp plaster walls. In this case, the frescoes were completed in the 13th and 14th centuries and one side of the church featured Old Testamament stories, and the opposite side featured New Testament stories. We had so much fun trying to guess which story was being depicted in each fresco (it wasn’t that hard!). Once panel depicted Noah and the ark, and the next one featured a very drunk Noah passed out in his tent. And once again I thought, “Why don’t we have a broader way of telling the story in our churches, kind of like these medieval artists?” I found their work fresh and refreshing.

But it wasn’t just the ‘old’ stuff that captured my attention. This particular Cathedral also features a beautiful contemporary stained glass rose window just installed in 2003. The colors are bright and unusual and the design is abstract. The window is called Iridescenze, created by local Siena artist Marcello Aitani.

My pictures will not do justice to any of these works of art I’ve mentioned, and that is so frustrating. The colors of the window will not be accurate, the scope of the work will not be clear, but I was captured today by the many ways we have to tell the stories of faith, so many exciting ways to animate, to colorize, the bring to life the stories that we know and that we would like to teach our children and grandchildren. I am NOT an artist, so I can’t really speak to this as well as others, but I know that the Bible become renewed for me today when I saw all these creative ways of sharing the stories with our actual buildings. I mean, seriously, where else would you find the story of Noah getting drunk and embarrassing himself in front of his sons?

As we age, have we traded familiar for surprising, have we held onto what we know and let go of what we might imagine, do we value the common over the unexpected? I am asking myself this question, trust me. Where is our imagination in church? How can we re-engage our imagination in order to see scriptures in a new way that wakes us up and reminds us who God is, and who we are. I am more like Noah than I am like Jesus, for example, so to see that whole story was important.

We had other great adventures today, including homemade pasta with a fresh ragu (the word for tomato sauce—did you know that’s where the brand name Ragu comes from?), and tasted .four wines with our meal, including a sweet grappa that we dipped biscotti into at the end of our meal. We saw beautiful countryside ripe with olive trees and grape vines, all of which are just coming due for harvest. I saw several pomegranate trees with bright red globes of fruit looking like a children’s drawing. It was a long and satisfying day. In fact, I was looking forward to it so much that I couldn’t go to sleep last night!

But I had no idea that I would have been so excited and inspired by these works of art from centuries ago that depicted Bible stories in unexpected ways, all of them hundreds of years old.

I was more than nourished today. My appetite was sharpened for new ways to tell the story I love so much. I don’t know that I am creative enough to do it, but I believe can work together to find creative ways of sharing this message. If 13th century artists can make the Bible exciting, I think we are capable of working together to do this, but we need to open our minds, perhaps work harder (which no one wants to hear) in order to re-envision how we connect people with God.

What sparks your imagination and sharpens your appetite to learn more about God in our world?
Blessings,
ML+