"Joining Imagination to Common Purpose"

This line from President Obama's inauguration speech caught my attention. It sums up a lot about what I believe our call to be, whether "our" is defined as white anti-racists, or Christians, or U.S. citizens, or humanity, and whether the "call" is defined in terms of economics, justice, love, or all of the above.

First of all, we are called to join. Whatever the challenge in front of us, very little of significance can be achieved by one person alone. Our myths of individualism and manifest destiny do us no good now. Like the dishonest steward (Luke 16), who was accused of wastefulness and lost his job, we need to invest in community. As long as we rely only on ourselves, we will always feel the hounds of scarcity and never-enough baying at our heels. When we begin to support the people around us, and feel them supporting us, abundance begins to feel real and we can loosen ourselves from the frenzy of self-aggrandizing but ultimately unsatisfying greed.

I have learned this lesson over and over, in corporations and churches and gardening and even in the wee community of two I share with my beloved M. She is always reaching under my burdens to help support me; I am always looking for ways to help shoulder her load. We are regularly astonished at the changes this has wrought in our lives.

Second, we are called to imagine. A lot of us suck at this. Imagine the world after poverty and hunger have been eliminated. Racism ended. Classism unraveled. Patriarchy dismantled. Imagine conflicts that move directly to diplomacy without thousands of lives lost and billions spent on armaments first. Imagine a world full of people seeking to feed the planet and its creatures more than we take from it. Plenty of smart and impassioned people have imagined all of this and more ... all they need is our will to do it. That's the real trick to imagination: the will to believe, act, change.

Oh, the "c" word. Well, here are some more. I hear a lot of claims to confusion in the face of our economic turmoil, our world conflicts, even our neighborhood/family/relationship issues. Many of us stay with confusion because, frankly, it's comfortable. On some level, we know that if we get clarity about what is needed, courage can't be far behind: the courage to change what needs to be changed. If we imagine clearly, we will feel courage arise in the form of desire to change, so that we can build what we imagine: an economy that works for all of us ... living wages for meaningful work ... affordable housing ... good public schools that no one opts out of, for religious or elitist reasons, because the real world is all of us together, learning not just tolerance but mutual respect so that we can live together and take care of each other. The list is endless. So are we. Why do we think it is otherwise?

Third is common purpose. We already know what this is, too, as William Julius Wilson discovered some years ago, and described in his book, Bridge Across the Racial Divide. Wilson found common interests among middle/working class people of all races: Wilson reported research finding only small differences by race in such core values as work, education, family, religion, law enforcement and civic responsibility, and high congruence regarding challenges to these values, as well as preferences for government priorities. Many of us could name even more fundamental commonalities, such as the basics all humans need: clean air and water, shelter, nourishment, security of person and community, love and belonging, fulfillment, meaning.

Many have dreamed, too, of what you get when you put all of these ideas into that nutshell, "joining imagination to common purpose." Jesus' kingdom of God. Martin Luther King's beloved community. What I am beginning to think of as the commonweal, the common-well-being of us all, which all of us must tend for each other.

If we all put a shoulder under each other's burdens -- instead of trying to climb on top of each other's shoulders -- we can all find what we need: enough.

I have had Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak on my decade-at-a-glance for quite some time. I had read his Courage to Teach a couple of years ago, before teaching my first class at seminary, and found it thought-provoking and helpful. Thanks to Christmas generosities, I obtained a copy of Let Your Life Speak and read it last week. This too gave me plenty to think about. And then the other day I had a little spare time to listen to one of the Speaking of Faith episodes I have stored up in my iTunes, and I chose Krista Tippett's interview with Palmer on the unfolding economic crisis.

Tippett invited Palmer to consider a comparison of his description of his own struggle with depression to the current economic depression. Palmer agreed the comparison was apt. Here is their interchange:

Ms. Tippett: And what I kept thinking of was actually my conversation with you and you talking about how in the middle of a depression, a psychological depression, you had a therapist who said, "Parker, could you think of your depression as a friend, which is bringing you down to earth, ground on which it is safe to walk?"

Mr. Palmer: Mm-hmm. That's a wonderful connection. And in fact, I have had some of the same thoughts, Krista, the parallels between psychological depression and economic depression. I finally learned, with the help of this therapist, that depression didn't need to be pictured as the hand of an enemy trying to crush me, but rather the hand of a friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand. And through that realization, I understood that part of what took me into depression was that I was living life at artificial heights, at untenable elevations, so that the elevation involving a kind of inflated ego or a free-floating spirituality or a detached sense of "oughts" and in that sense a false ethic, or simply living intellectually in my head more than in my feelings and in my body, that all of those things put you at such altitude that if you trip and fall, which you're inevitably going to do, you have a long, long way to fall, and it might kill you.

But if you are in fact on ground where it's safe to stand, you can fall and get up and fall and get up again, which most of us do every day. And, yes, I do feel that we all knew at some level, if we took a moment to think about it, that there was a huge amount of artificial altitude, elevation, inflation in this society, that housing prices were ridiculous, that stock prices were way beyond value. And we now know in fact that a lot of that was a purposely contrived illusion. (From Speaking of Faith podcast; see www.speakingoffaith.publicradio.org)

As I received the wisdom of this story, it brought to mind the one with which I began this post: the story of the dishonest steward in Luke 16. The story is ambiguous: neither fault nor favor can be unilaterally assigned, just as in our times. But what is clear is the action at the center of the story: when the steward's world collapses around him, he chooses to invest in the community where he will land when he falls.

Many of us feel that our world -- whether we fully understood it or not -- has collapsed around us. The more isolated we are, the more individualistic we have become, the harder this fall feels.

I think Palmer is right, though. Thinking about his words reminds me of Peter Mayer's song, "Fall" on Million Year Mind. He sings:

What if the highest destination
of any given human life
was not a place that you could reach if
you had to climb
wasn't up above like heaven
so no need to fly at all
what if to reach the highest place you had to fall ...

Fall, finding a way of trusting in the ground
as if the highest and the lowest places
are the same

We have fallen: but perhaps not fallen low so much as fallen to a safe place, a place where we can clearly see the need to ... what?

Join. Imagine. Common purpose. You are not alone; neither am I. What can we do together, that we cannot do alone?

Only everything.

And when that seems overwhelming, we can start smaller. I will start by feeding the ground, and trusting in it. I will start composting again, and begin my latest garden this spring ... but not my last. I will have an abundance ... enough and more to share.