August 8, 2004
Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter,
D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH
Let us gather with gratitude. Let us come together with thanksgiving as children of an amazing blue planet. Sun and moon, blue sky and rolling river make this day joyful, a day to rejoice in. Amidst flowers and trees, we delight in our earthly garden.
We treasure in our hearts the stories we hear this hour. The struggles for good health, the hopes we have for our youth, the aspirations of families guide each of us in our search for higher, better day.
We hold in our hearts the
fears of our people. Terror warnings flash. There are rumblings that some weapons
of mass destruction might be detonated in one of the
cities of our country. We think of those we love, those we would be close to
regardless of risk.
Our concerns go beyond our own fears. We are reminded on these August dates of the fearsome things we humans do to one another. On this day in August, standing between the 59th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we seek simple connections with all human beings.
We gather to dream of better worlds. We unite to remind ourselves of the possibilities of a world free of anger and abuse. We gather to honor our hopes, to be restored in courage to dream anew ever more wondrously .
[silence]
Peace be with you. Amen.
What do you imagine I will be talking about today?
Imagining bin Laden...??
Such a title points to
the difficulties of titles. Do you imagine that I will be talking
about bin Laden? Or -- what about a sermon on ... imagination?
This morning I am talking about imagination and its confusions. But I cannot talk about imagining without suggesting what we might imagine. Imagining bin Laden opens the door to the confusions of imagination and how we fall victim to fantasies. We are confused, as a culture if not as individuals about bin Laden; we are confused about imagination, and more to the point, as a culture we are confused about religion.
I want to talk about imagination. Our reading this morning began with the remark that the title “The Angelic World” was one of the Sufi names for the 'imaginal realm.' Talking about the angelic world, I probably have lost a hard nosed rationalist or two.. The imaginal realm is not a much more attractive topic. Not imagination, but reality for us!
Oh, yes. And which section of reality are you imagining when you say that? Let us open our minds to other possibilities. Is that possible? For that is all imagination is about.
What is imagination? It is the possibility of change, the chance that things might be different. In a word, imagination promises us that there is a world elsewhere. Where is elsewhere? Already you seek to tame the imagination, get charge of it rather than open yourself, heart and soul. Let it rest that we imagine worlds elsewhere.
Consider it's names. Perhaps in our society, become so short on imagination that the secret names of suburbia and mall have left us all melancholic, doubtful of a world elsewhere, many seek a serious world elsewhere. They lift up the old name: heaven. Ah, heaven, the place where we are united with all our loved ones and watch in delight all the hated ones gnashing their bones in the tormenting fires of hell.
One of the Unitarian poets
of the last century, Conrad Aiken, knew more about imagination even than most
poets, who know the most as the author of our reading
suggested this morning. Aiken successfully petitioned to be excused from service
in World War I on the grounds that he was at work in the "essential industry"
of writing poetry.
Aiken wrote a poem, the title of which says it all, “Heaven, you say, will be a field in April.” Heaven, Eden: evocative even for a skeptic.
We have wondered close
enough to some of these more familiar worlds elsewhere to recognize that they
might have something to do with what passes for religion and/or spirituality.
I believe that spirituality finds it font in the imaginal realm, the country
of the outside.. But as they say in Twelve Step programs, religion is for those
afraid of going to hell and spirituality for those who've been there. Religion,
most particularly fundamentalism, is a sign of captivity. Fundamentalists have
become lost in the imaginal world, really do believe it is the angelic world
and know nothing of angels. Some think angels are those nice cuddling white
puffy things
you buy at Hallmarks. The movie DOGMA, often seen on Comedy Central offers a
wider view. The confusion of fundamentalism about imagination is nowhere more
apparent than with the popularity of Tim LeHaye's “Left Behind”
series.
This series of books is
the best seller depicting Armageddon, the rapture of all the Christian Zionists
as secularists and liberals are sucked into the maw of hell. The question arises,
from an angelic point of view, is the “Left Behind” series, fiction
or truth? .... If it is fiction, then what's the big whop? Why is it selling
to non-fiction
readers, fundamentalists, so much. And if it is truth, what ever happened to
the Bible? The “Left Behind” series may well be taking the place
of the Bible among
Christian Zionists. Such innocents abroad are captive to the imaginal world.
But we should not be quick to suggest that we are not also captive in the land of Oz. The great poet Wallace Stevens, in his book THE NECESSARY ANGEL, tells us that imagination and reality are not different, opposites. Reality is just a segment of the imaginal realm. And is not different from it nor opposed to it. The reality we refer to as our daily reality is simply the work of the human imagination that has become ossified, codified, and generally naturalized. (White 3) In our desire for the comfortable and familiar, our fear of the strange and unusual, we are all fundamentalists.
So we suffer from failure of imagination. That was what the 9/11 Commission said was the great failing leading up to the tragedy of Sept 11, 2001. We thought America was a gated community, a suburb without urban problems, a Norman Rockwell village. We the American people suffered a failure of imagination, though the 9/11 Commission imagined that the intelligence community suffered a failure of imagination though it yet remains to be shown whether that is a failure of imagination on the part of the Commission. While calling for “routinizing ... imagination,” (REPORT 344), the closest they come to recommending a 'Poet In Residence' at the CIA is expressing shock that Counter Terrorism Director Richard Clarke seemed to get his ideas from reading Tom Clancy novels (REPORT 347).
I suffer a failure of imagination almost every day I come to work. Often I come to the church office thinking about the things I want to get done. Other people here have other ideas. We all suffer failures of the imagination. You as parents know this most intimately. You have some fantasy as to who your child will be when she grows up. If you did not have the fantasy, you probably wouldn't invest in the joys and sorrows of parenting. Yet if that child does not shake up, challenge your fantasies about who she is, if you do not allow her to fail at what you need her to succeed in, you have failed the imagination.
And it is a truly great sin. In one of his poems, Wallace Stevens tells us about his necessary angel:
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic droneRise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings saidBy repetitions of half-meanings.
We need this necessary angel,
we need collisions with some world elsewhere. Without it we should fool ourselves
into thinking we do not live in an abusive world.
Wallace Stevens leaves no doubt of his intent:
In speaking of the pressure of reality, I am thinking of life in a state of violence, not physically violent, as yet, for us in America, but physical violent for millions of our friends and for still more millions of our enemies and spiritually violent, it may be said, for everyone alive. (White 5)
It is most particularly in a violent world, an abusive world, that the imagination, some necessary angel comes to keep hope alive: promising that things can be different.
There is no better example
of this in our culture today than that creation of the imagination, Usama bin
Laden. Have we been tilting at windmills in dealing with the
so-called 'Islamic terrorists?' One of the themes that the Anonymous author
of IMPERIAL HUBIRS is at pains to point out is that we need to stop dredging
the
imagination to come up with who bin Ladin is. We as a culture have been imagining
bin Laden more than dealing with him.
The author of IMEPERIAL HUBIRS collates imaginative epithets applied to this man with a limp hiding in the Afghan mountains. He has been called a “stateless psychopath” a man of “mad ambitions,” a leader of a “new breed of savage and suicidal terrorists. [who follow a] fanatical warping of Islam” An article in THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGANZINE says bin Laden “is evil personified.” (HUBRIS 105ff) Can you doubt that we have entered some imaginary world, complete with angels. Satan himself was an angel, according to Milton the most appealing. When bin Laden steps forth from the mouth of his cave, perhaps Persephone is on his arm.
The author goes on to urge us to deal with bin Laden as a very capable guy who knows what he is about and how to get it. Along the way, it appears that the author is a Civil War buff and at times seems to imagine himself as Ulysses S. Grant and bin Laden, Robert E. Lee. There are risks to entering the imaginal world, which even nonfiction writers must take to put pen to paper.
Perhaps nowhere more does the author of IMPERIAL HUBRIS suggest that we failed the imagination than in his recommendations about what to do. He goes so far as to say we need to stop imagining bin Laden is a terrorist! [HUBRIS 246]
Not a terrorist?
What might he be? He suggests a military genius. With the Islamic jihadists, we are not dealing with a small group of terrorists, but an ever widening, growing insurgency that must be dealt with as a full scale war. He goes on to add that if America deals with this Islamic insurgency only on the military level, we will end up, he seems to be saying, causing an Arabic genocide. The only way to limit a military approach is to combine it with a change of our policies towards the Middle East and the Arabic world.
I think Anonymous's most
important recommendation for dealing with the Jihadist threat is an imaginative
suggestion not to be found in the 9/11 Commission's
recommendations. The 9/11 Commission's Report is a failure of imagination because
all it does is point to the holes in the dike, asking how to maintain the state
of siege, not move beyond it. Is it possible that we do not need to live in
a violent world?
The author of IMPERIAL HUBRIS is a longtime counterterrorism official at the C.I.A. who previously ran the agency's unit that concentrated on Usama bin Laden. He makes what I consider the most imaginative recommendation, a recommendation that conceives of a world elsewhere, a world which Americans have denied for 30 years. To defeat the Jihadist threat to us and our children, we must, Anonymous tells us, “Demand energy self-sufficiency.” [HUBRIS 247]
Can you imagine that! Imagine that... energy self-sufficiency!
The top priority of our
military, of the U.S. Department of Defense, is to defend American access to
oil. In 1996, John C. Gannon, deputy director of the CIA
observed that ”We have to recognize that our nation will not be secure
if global energy supplies are not secure; we need a substantial quantity of
imported oil to sustain our economy.” [Michael T. Klare, RESOURCE WARS,
page 6.] The United States military is in the Persian Gulf region to defend
our access to oil. As long as we have military bases throughout the Arab world,
there will be a growing Islamic insurgency. We can either kill them all off
or develop energy self-sufficiency.
Let us imagine a world elsewhere.
I have long had an armchair
interest in the indigenous nations of North America. Recently I heard a member
of one of these nations remark that Arabs are now
experiencing the same thing that the native peoples of this continent did in
the 19th century.
Back about the time this city was founded, the U.S. Government was trying to relocate local tribes across the Mississippi river. The Shawnees didn't want to go. A great leader rose up trying to stop the white advance into the Ohio region, filling the local imagination with terror. Tecumseh teamed up with the British and became a major factor leading to the War of 1812, supposedly the last time a foreign power attacked our homeland. [Anthony F. C. Wallace, JEFFERSON AND THE INDIANS, page 304ff]
It is difficult to use our American history to understand our contemporary problems. We would have to imagine what it was like to live two hundred years ago, what it meant to chase the Indians out of Ohio. But if we can imagine that, we can imagine that Tecumseh might not be that different from Usama bin Laden.
That's how how I imagine Usama bin Laden. He is the Tecumseh whose lands we seek to control today. You know it is really weird. Two hundred years ago, Tecumseh was regarded by Americans as we regard bin Laden today. Ah, but the native Americans. As Thomas Jefferson taught us, they were destined to disappear into history in the face of superior white civilization. Yet today, you can go to Chillicothe to watch a reenactment of the life of Tecumseh. There is something very strange in that. It's like suggesting that two hundred years from now folks will travel to Kabul, Afghanistan, for a reenactment of the life of Usama bin Laden, and recall the way of life that Muslims once followed.
Tecumseh, the great enemy of William Henry Harrison, had a brother who was known as the Shawnee Prophet. His name, Tenskwatawa, translated into English means“ The Open Door.” A great name for an angel.
In terms of understanding the changes that bin Laden is making in the Islamic world it may be best to imagine him as a combination of these two Shawnee brothers, the war chief and the prophet. At the time of “The Open Door,” there was another revitalization movement in upper New York state led by a Seneca Indian chief, Handsome Lake. Both The Open Door and Handsome Lake where alcoholics. They were guided by angels in visions sent by the Master of Life and saw the evils of their ways, both drinking and in their culture. Their visions led them to develop new religious stories and rituals for their people, as we may assume Islam is undergoing with bin Laden.
The difference between
Handsome Lake and The Open Door was that Handsome Lake urged the Iroquois to
take up some of the ways of the whites, such as
agriculture. The Open Door urged the opposite upon Shawnee, Pottawatomie and
Kickapoo. He called upon them to give up white ways and return to their ancestors'
hunting ways.
Today we face a similar question: shall we continue in the old ways, or shall we seek a new world, a world elsewhere. The changes required to become energy self-sufficient are as great as the challenges facing The Open Door and Handsome Lake in moving from a hunter gatherer culture to an agricultural civilization. While the 9/11 Commission has challenged the status quo in Washington, the nation itself needs to be challenged. We Americans have come to a time of sacrifice. We can eithercontinue to offer our children up to die to maintain our energy dependence, or we can change our habits seeking a newer world.
What can you imagine? Can you imagine the country outside? Can you imagine an America friendly with the Islamic world? Can your imagine an America self-sufficient in energy?
Can you imagine a faith which is ever the open door to a world elsewhere? Always seeking new ways of rejoicing, new necessary angels to push back on the pressures of a too frequent violent reality?
Anonymous, IMPERIAL HUBRIS, Was, D.C. Brassey, 2004.
Edward Hirsch, THE DEMON AND THE ANGEL, New York, Harcourt, 2002.
Michael T. Klare, RESOURCE WARS, New York, Henry Holt, 2002.
THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT, New York, Norton, 2004.
Anthony F. C. Wallace, JEFFERSON AND THE INDIANS, Cambridge, Harvard, 1999.
Curtis White, THE MIDDLE MIND, San Francisco, Harper Collins, 2003.