This reflection was written by Jesse Zink, for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community. You will find reflections from previous weeks here.

Dear colleagues, 

It is hard to know how to describe Marilynne Robinson. She is a novelist, an essayist, and, one might say, a public intellectual, who has won most of the major literary prizes. She writes from a place of deep and abiding Christian faith, as inflected through and shaped by the Reformed tradition. One of her best known books is Gilead, an imaginative re-telling of the parable of the prodigal son. She is one of Barack Obama’s favourite authors and when he was president he made the time to do a public interview with her, in which he interviewed her, not the other way around. 

Recently, I found myself struck by this line in an essay of hers from 2012: “I hope I have made clear my belief that the more generous the scale at which imagination is exercised, the healthier and more humane the community will be.” In other words, a healthy and humane community is one in which the imagination is being exercised and used to its fullest. This strikes me as true. Our mental faculties are given to us by God. Using our imagination to explore new possibilities, dreams, and options is simply an exercise of living into the fullness of who God created us to be. It makes sense that this would lead to healthy and humane communities. I am reminded of the line often used by Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., the late American politician: “some people look at things the way they are and ask why; I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” 

I came across this line from Marilynne Robinson not long after those of us in the Friday morning ministry seminar had been visited by the Rev. Anne Privett, who told us about leading a journey of congregational transformation at St. Andrew’s in Kelowna, BC. When one of us asked Anne what was the most important skill she had learned in seminary that had helped her in leading change, she replied—without hesitation—that it was “developing my theological imagination.” She spoke about how her classes, her studies, and her faith formation in seminary had cultivated in her the ability to imagine and wonder about new approaches and possibilities.  

In both the life of the church and in the life of the broader world, it can seem at times that there is a dearth of imagination. Too often, we seem locked on to a relatively narrow set of possibilities and outcomes for the future. The result is communities that are not as healthy and humane as they could be. What the church needs now—and what the world needs from the church—is leaders who are willing to give free reign to their God-given and Spirit-inspired imaginations and see what new things result. 

Faithfully yours,
Jesse Zink
Principal