The following quote from Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor illustrates the power of embodied practices that not only inform the imagination, but also direct its desires. His quote reinforces James KA Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom.
“A great deal of scholarly attention has been given to the power of liturgy in forming identity and the shaping effect of narrative in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. The way we learn something is more influential than the something that we learn. No content comes into our lives free-floating: it is always embedded in a form of some kind. For the basic and integrative realities of God and faith, the forms must also be basic and integrative. If they are not, the truths themselves will be peripheral and unassimilated. It was with a kind of glad surprise that I realized that long before the academicians got hold of this and wrote their books, I had been enrolled in a school of song and story, God songs and God stories, said and sung by my God-passionate mother. Virtually everything I received in those impressionable years of my childhood had arrived in teh containers of song and story, carried by a singer and storyteller mother–everything about God, but also about being human, growing up to adulthood, becoming a pastor” (The Pastor, p. 34)