Imagination - lives and shapes our persons, making objective reality alive and interesting to us because or our imaginings about it...still for all that, we know that our pictures of God, personal or traditional, do not equate with God - the unfathomable mystery of deity abides....
Religious imagination - though we honor the different primordial lenses through which the invisible becomes visible in different ways to different people, we can't say it does not matter which lens we use, that all these pictures are relative to person or group or context, that one will serve as well as another...
Two reasons this will not do:
1.) the first is that such an attitude is too careless about God...when God comes to us, it matters very much how and to whom and in what form and where....a hallmark of religious experience is its specificity, even to the exact time and date - there is nothing vague or general about such an event....it is concrete, particular and it rips time in two and thenceforth everything is marked as before or after...it becomes a central date and moment....we gain our history from it...and our subsequent imaginings about the experience arrive in specific images and order not only our history, but all our shared history with others, delineating all we know as community.
2.) the second reason a loose relativism about god-images will not do is that it ignores the reality of the imagination...imagining is always rooted in the body, in time, in history...we make use of our instincts, of our active experiences, of the languages native to our own particular culture...we are finite and particular and must use what is most immediately available to us...the event invades and reorders us: altering the entire force field in which we live, making something new of us, not simply offering one among several alternative directions to us...
Ann and Barry Ulanov
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