Shared Imagination

How I Started When I went to church that Sunday, I never dreamed my life would alter, but interestingly, the change did not happen during the religious service. The transformation began, although I was barely aware of it at the time, in a conversation with a wonderful woman friend after the church service. That combination of belonging to a church and yet finding a closer connection to the Divine through personal, spiritual interactions has become a constant element of my inner journey. I have felt for decades that I stand both inside and outside of traditional religion. This borderland is the only place I can be, but it can feel countercultural and a bit isolating. In church, as I hear prayers, preaching, and hymns, I am often agreeing and disagreeing in my head, thinking, “Hmm, yes, but… [insert slightly different idea here].” Both outside and inside church I must choose carefully with whom I share my experiences of the Divine, since there are people who would peg me as crazy and/or arrogant to think that the Holy One would even deign to bring experiences to me. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you how it started that Sunday so many years ago. I was speaking after church with Emily, a dear friend in the choir, who started describing her latest experience in a new church gathering called simply “the spiritual direction group.” Everyone in the group had been encouraged one evening to ask in meditation for help with some personal goal they were trying to achieve in their life. Emily told me that she was trying to lose weight. She described her meditation: “And then, in my mind, I saw all these helping hands reaching out to me, supporting me in my journey,” “Wow,” I thought to myself, “people see things at these meetings?! I have to try this!” So, I went to the very next Monday night meeting. There, even though I had never meditated before, I responded to the instructions of the group leader, Pamela, and dutifully closed my eyes. I was immediately struck by a sense of a holy, spiritual power that seemed present in the room. It was as if I had opened a door inside myself to an immense space that had always been there, but I had never known about. Both that inner room and the physical room in which I was sitting seemed filled with something powerful, something with substance, something like a thickness in the air. I think of that immense space now as “the universe of imagination” and that substance as “spirit.” On that first evening, as instructed, I put myself imaginatively into the suggested Bible story, and I spoke to God in my mind, heart, and imagination. To my complete surprise, I began to hear words coming back to me. I began to see images and to take part in unfolding scenes. I remember worrying that I must really have an overactive imagination, that none of this could possibly be from God. However, during the time after meditation, our shepherdess, Pamela, spoke as if she truly believed that the Divine One was speaking with each of us in our contemplations, and she somehow related all our comments – both about our meditation and about our lives – back to God. She didn’t preach, she didn’t tell us what to do or think, she didn’t even say “God” that often, but she spoke as if our thoughts in meditation and the mundane happenings of our everyday lives were both important to the Holy One. I was so excited! I was in my late thirties and had been a churchgoer all my life, but I had never felt connected to God outside of Sunday services. I had never imagined a Holy One who cared about every little aspect of my life and of everyone’s life. However, after that first meeting and meditation, I felt as if I had finally found a spiritual home. Years earlier, I had found my musical home inside the amazing, enveloping sound of an orchestra. Now there was another, spiritual world waiting to envelop me. Like the line from the Broadway musical that says, “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly,” I knew I had to swim and fly in that dense air of spirit and imagination. I was meant to exist in that space. It was my native land. It’s nice to feel so sure of all that right now in my life. Back then, some 30 years ago, I felt a mixture of excitement and doubt. I worried for quite a while that what came to me in meditation was only the result of stray firings of my overwrought brain cells. It took quite a few meetings and meditations, probably a year or so, before I was convinced that what was happening to me was really “shared imagination” – I was envisioning with the Divine. With Pamela’s gentle guidance, I gradually became convinced that my meditations and those of all the group members were a synthesis of individual imagination with God’s imagination. Experiencing and believing in that process changed my life. I not only received spiritual scenes and the group members’ gentle comments to ponder over time, but I also heard the other participants’ wondrous visual images which I could hold silently in my heart as additional touchstones of the Holy One. Over time, this envisioning process branched out for our group members in ways that might have seemed crazy at the beginning, but became for us amazing signposts on our spiritual journeys. How did such a life-changing group begin? The next chapter will describe the unlikely and inauspicious start of Pamela’s three-part meeting format.