Life is about taking risks. By risks I do not mean jumping out of airplanes, playing chicken with a train, biking across America, or even chasing elephants. The risk I suggest is far greater and more difficult to sustain, particularly while living in the sweeping current of modern technophilia. The greatest risk we can take in life is one that suppresses our eager self-aggrandizement in favor of what Christ called meekness (Matthew 5).
Meekness is an inward disposition that bears concrete fruit in the choices we make and things that we do, but that disposition has roots in the imagination. The meek imagination is simple, uncomplicated, and fixed. It is harmonized with the sacred holiness of God as that holiness is found in the ordinary of our day to day lives. This imaginative harmony is a “sacramental attunement.”
An important distinction must be made between the Sacraments and sacramental attunement. The Sacraments were divinely instituted not only as a means of grace, but as physical pointers back to God. Christians learn from an early age to see through the sacraments to the reality they represent. A sacramental attunement, however, is a spiritual attentiveness to the way all bread, all wine, all water now points us back toward the divine. One of the most beautiful and meaningful things that Christ did was to take bread between his hands and tear it, offering it to his disciples as a memorial of his finished sacrifice on the cross. He took the ordinary and made it extraordinary, as God intended at creation, reshaping in our imaginations all such simple acts like eating, drinking, and bathing. These activities are not the Sacraments themselves, but they remind us of great spiritual things and invest life with a million markers of the divine. The meek imagination is sacramentally attuned to those markers and in this way it inherits all the earth (Matthew 5:5).
How then can we foster a sacramental attunement in our harried lives? This task, just like reclaiming the imagination in general, is particularly difficult in our modern world. I’m all for technology and all for the conveniences of modern living, but the fact remains that our lifestyle presses us away from sacramental attunement simply by the speed, multi-tasking, and brief attention span required to succeed. Chaos, like the ocean’s surf cascading endlessly along the shore, fills our ears and makes it difficult to hear the red-winged blackbirds singing in the reeds.
There is one activity, however, that inevitably nurtures a sacramental attunement and that activity is prayer. A strong prayer life is the warm center of the soul that lights the spiritual eyes and awakens the chilled limbs to action. It is the heated core from which all warmth emanates.
My father spent the summers of my teen years teaching me to guard the warm center. Whenever we went camping, he would allow my brother and I to build the campfire while he unloaded the gear. In our rush to build a bonfire, we lit a few sparse twigs and promptly snuffed them out with a pile of logs. After several attempts and following the same technique failed, we wished for a bottle of lighter fluid and shambled over to dad who was choking in the drifting smoke. He would stop what he was doing and, once again, show us how to meticulously build a fire.
“Look boys, you can’t rush a good fire,” he would say. Then squatting and thrusting aside our hasty smoke signal, he told us to gather some more twigs and dry grass. When we returned, he took them in his hands and built a small lean-to inside a small protected cove he had built with the larger wood. “Okay, see how I’ve used the larger pieces to build a wall against the breeze and then covered it against the rain?”
We nodded, remembering the previous summer’s lesson but forgetting it all over again in our desire to have the fire warming our fingers.
“Now we lean the little kindling upwards so that it can catch the flame and let it rise like it wants to. Then we put some larger kindling next to it, but not too much in case it won’t light.” This he did, and then he took the match, struck it, and set it in amongst the small kindling. Without fail, a small whisper of smoke slipped out from amongst the grass and twigs, then there was a quiet pop as the flame jumped to life. The process of building a fire was always a gradual and careful one, with well-timed blows from my father and a few adjustments of the kindling. Dad knew how to build a warm center and how to guard it. He knew how to maximize the space to accelerate the growing heat at just the right pace. In the end, the task we rushed to perform always became my father’s duty and his patience proved effective in getting us our campfire…even without using lighter fluid.
Prayer, likewise, is the warm center from which all spiritual attentiveness emanates. All the sacramental attunement that comprises a good life in the eyes of God has at its center prayer and all the activities summed up by I Thess. 4:11 begin with prayer. Those whom I admire for their quiet and deliberate work ethic are often prayer warriors in their own right, even though few of them would claim the title. Those who serve others with incredible sacrifice and sincerity are often prayer warriors who, like so many others, would not claim the title. Indeed, life in the ordinary takes on extraordinary character when seen with imaginative eyes. All the little things that pass for the mundane are actually holy activities, like the breaking of bread, but we easily brush them aside because our attunement is poor.
This sacramental attunement has been and will remain a rather gradual process for me. I have found, however, that my greatest growth comes not from my individual efforts toward this attentiveness, but from living in community. This realization should not surprise me since God is three persons in one, a community. I was made in his image and designed to function best when living within a community. But a sacramental attunement, in particular, becomes more attuned by being around others who are so attuned. It also learns to practice that learned attunement on others. So family life is the loam, the rich soil, where sacramental attunement takes root, grows, and bears fruit.The kind of attentiveness required for sacramental attunement is difficult to both attain and sustain, but it needs brothers and sisters who eat together, play together, clean together, read together, and sing together. In these environs the sacramental attunement is both more effective because it forces a proximity with the divine stamp in others and it forces a self-forgetfulness necessary for attunement. Social networking, while convenient, is a virtual community in which sacramental attunement is nearly impossible because it intentionally limits the physical, concrete, opportunities for self-forgetfulness.
Eating dinner as a family, real people crowded together in real time, has become a precious commodity in our home and one that I hope my children fully take for granted. I want them to be surprised at the possibility that some families don’t eat together. There are many reasons for my desire, but one of them is because the dinner table forces a geographical proximity, a closeness difficult to replicate during the hustle and bustle of the day. Sure, the conversation is not always sparkling and we never try hard enough to follow the etiquette rule book, but the meal provides plenty of opportunities to practice self-forgetfulness. When my children, for example, say, “After you,” they are learning not only to defer their own gratification, but also learning to be more attuned to that other person as a human being made in the image of God. The simple act of putting others first is an important habit to form and this habit will be the natural byproduct of sacramental attunement as we play, eat, sing, and labor in community.
That is exactly why personal transformation is not a personal matter. It is not simply a matter of making better choices for myself based on sound reason and judgment. Nor is it a matter of choosing what works or what will serve my interests. The kind of transcendent transformation many of us are looking for is a matter of redirecting the imagination toward a vision of the good life that is rooted in community and has at its center, God.
God has given us the entire world chock full of communities, and there are many forms, to become more self-aware. He uses these folks in their own way to lift us above our petty pleasures and so we might follow alternative visions of the good life. Our lives are extended parables and communities are nothing less than the convergence of many parables. We would do well to live this parable more intentionally, remembering that future generations will hear our story and learn how to live well or how to live poorly.
Our pilgrimage comes equipped with a map given to us by which to navigate the difficult terrain. What we do, however, along the way and how we go about traveling, reflects the story our imagination tells us. That story feeds our desires and loops back to feed those same desires toward either a spiritually healthy or destructive end. There is good reason for why people perpetuate destructive cycles in their lives: the story in their head has no alternatives, no exits, no loopholes.
Christ came to provide not only spiritual salvation, but an alternative way to live. The primary way he expressed that alternative was through parables. His teaching method was story-shaped. When Christ spoke in parables, he was not only teaching the truth about God and our relationship to Him and to others, he was providing alternate imaginative pictures. He knew that our understanding, our thought life, has a narrative shape. We see things not only as they exist in space (trees, people, rain), but primarily as they exist in time. Stories are a function of time, we are a function of time, and our thoughts run in narrative grooves.
Those grooves often define how we live, what we do. Our hands will do something. What they do, what we do, is birthed in the imagination. Lasting transformation—the kind of transformation that keeps us actively pursuing the straight and narrow pilgrim path—is a matter of being captivated in the center of our being—our imagination—by God.
