The men's book club recently read Azar Nafisi's book, Reading Lolita in Tehran.
A professor of western literature who earned her Ph.D. in the United States, a secular woman with a fiercely independent mind, Nafisi found she could no longer teach in the Islamic Republic of Iran under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini.
She left the university, started a clandestine woman's book club in her apartment, and invited a select group of women--secular and Muslim--to participate. Together, they read and critiqued works by Victor Nabakov, Jane Austin, William James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But more importantly, they read and critiqued their own and one another's lives, discovering that they too, as women living in the Islamic Republic of Iran, with its strictly enforced dress codes and stringent moral codes, were characters in an unfolding drama.
Nafisi's book is interesting on a number of levels, but what interested me the most was her reflection on the power of the human imagination, and how people use their imaginations to either enhance or diminish human life.
In Nafisi's view, Ayatollah Khomeini used his imagination to diminish human life. In his imagination, Khomeini constructed a picture of the ideal Muslim society, one that existed in a golden age long ago but then disappeared--a victim of the corrupting influences of the modern world dominated by the West. Khomeini set out to recreate Iranian society according to the ideal Muslim society that existed within his imagination. He twisted, bent, and shaped Iran, trying to make the nation and its people look like the picture of the Islamic Republic in his head.
Some Iranians shared Khomeini's vision, and readily conformed to his imagination. Some did not share Khomeini's vision, but conformed anyway, out of fear or convenience. Some resisted, and Khomeini destroyed them, forced them underground, or relegated them to the margins of society. Some, like Nafisi, tried to devise clever and subversive ways to resist him. Some just took off and left Iran.
For Nafisi, Ayatollah Khomeini represented the destructive use of the human imagination--the need to impose one's imagination on other people with no concern for the hopes or dreams, the need to force other people to look like and live according to the picture of reality in one's own mind.
But Nafisi is passionate in her belief that the most powerful resource people possess to resist these oppressive attempts at forced conformity is the human imagination. As Khomeini strove to force these women to conform to his imagination--to his mental picture of what the ideal Muslim woman should look like and how the ideal Muslim woman should behave--these women resisted by fueling the power of their imaginations through literature. Through their exposure to characters living in different times and places. Through their exposure to characters struggling with their own issues, within their own dramas, within their own realities.
For Nafisi and the women with whom she read, literature fueled their imaginations by reminding them that the reality in which they lived was not the only reality possible. Other realities were possible. Other realities existed. Another reality could exist for them as long as they could imagine it as a possibility. For these women, their imaginations were the final outpost of hope and resistance within a reality that was diminishing their lives and wearing down their souls.
Nafisi writes, "How does the soul survive? It is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination." (Nafisi 315).
This morning we have gathered here to read and reflect on the Bible, the church's literature, literature that hopefully fuels our imaginations.
We read from the prophet Isaiah.
The prophet Isaiah had a powerful imagination, and Isaiah's writings fueled his people's imaginations, for their imaginations too had become the final outpost of hope and resistance within a reality that was wearing down their souls.
Isaiah's job as a prophet was to fuel his people's imaginations to prevent them from falling into despair, to prevent them from giving up, to prevent them from accepting their current reality as the only reality possible. Isaiah presented his people with images--powerful images--of an alternative reality, and told them that this alternative reality was God's promise.
One of Isaiah's most powerful images of this alternative reality was the image of the New Jerusalem.
The New Jerusalem.
Two weeks ago we read a passage that I identified as particularly meaningful to me because it communicates in just a few lines what I believe to be the most fundamental message of the Biblical drama.
Thus says the Lord:
Behold I create a new heaven and a new earth.
I create a Jerusalem rejoicing.
Children will not die from want.
Adults will live to a ripe old age.
Workers will enjoy the fruit of their labor.
Former adversaries will live in peace.
Today's lesson from Isaiah is yet another elaboration of this theme: God's promise of a new creation, a New Jerusalem.
Today's passage focuses on wealth, prosperity, and abundance. The New Jerusalem will not be a place of scarcity and want, not a place where people scratch out a living and barely survive, not a place where foreign powers oppress you and force their will upon you. The New Jerusalem will enjoy the abundance of God's creation. It is to the New Jerusalem that foreign powers will look for leadership.
As a Biblical image, as a prophetic image, the New Jerusalem is a powerful imaginative construct, one that taps deeply into the psyche, the emotions, and the spirituality of the prophet's community, one that holds out not just the hope, but the promise, that the current reality in which they live is not the final reality. The future will not be a continuation of the present. The future will be transformed, and all will live at peace under the reign of God.
The prophet Ezekiel uses this image as well. Ezekiel offers a vision of a new temple in a New Jerusalem, and from the gates of this new temple flow streams of living water bringing new life to the city and to God's creation. Jesus draws on this imagery of the New Jerusalem, on this imagery of creation transformed and living in peace under the reign of God. Jesus calls it the kingdom of God. The Book of Revelation draws on this imagery, as the author imagines the New Jerusalem as a shining city descending from the heavens to the earth, with a stream of living water flowing from it bringing new life to God's creation.
Biblical Scholar, Walter Brueggeman, author of The Prophetic Imagination, claims the human imagination is the most important element of prophetic ministry, the most important element in any ministry that challenges the dominant status quo.
Brueggeman writes that the task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception that is an alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us. This alternative consciousness must dismantle the dominant consciousness, and energize people by its promise of another time. For a community of faith to enact an alternative to the reality in which it lives, it must first imagine an alternative to the one in which it lives. Hope, resistance, action, and transformation must be fueled by a prophetic imagination.
In the Biblical drama, the New Jerusalem is one of the most powerful prophetic images of this alternative consciousness, this alternative reality.
Ayatollah Khomeini was not the only person who imposed his imagination on other people, forcing them to conform to the picture of what they should look like and how they should act that existed in his mind.
People do this all the time, often with tragic results.
Some parents do this to their children. In their imaginations, they have a picture of how they want their child to turn out, and they impose this picture on their child, forcing their child into a mold, often with unhappy results for the parent and the child.
I think the neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration created a picture of the ideal Middle East in their imaginations, one that looked like a western style, pro-US democracy. They believed that by invading Iraq they could begin the process of recreating the Middle East so it would conform to that ideal picture in their heads. We are now left now with the unhappy consequences of that endeavor.
Nafisi warns us that we cannot impose our imaginations on other people. She reminds us that the soul survives through love and imagination. Imagination must be coupled with love and empathy for other people.
Let us be a church that is increasingly fueled by a prophetic imagination, a church that prophetically imagines a new world.
A world deeply grounded in love and empathy.
A world deeply grounded in righteousness and justice.
A world deeply grounded in mutual respect and understanding.
A world that has learned to live in peace by sharing the abundance of God's creation.
We cannot impose this vision on other people. We cannot force other people to conform to it against their will. To do so would contradict the vision.
Instead, let us be a church that articulates our vision as best as we are able, a church that proclaims it as clearly and as passionately as possible, and in doing so, a church that challenges the dominant reality and poses a clear alternative to it.
Let us be a church that continuously seeks to embody our own vision. Let us visibly manifest love and empathy, justice and righteousness, respect and understanding in our own lives. Let us be the change we want to see in this world.
And finally, let us invite as many people as possible to join us in articulating and embodying this vision. We cannot force others into our vision, be we can certainly invite others to share it with us. Invite them to join us in creating a community of love, hope, resistance, and transformation based on our shared belief that this is the vision of a new creation that God is calling us to live in our lives.
Let us imagine it.
Let us live it.
And let us invite others to live it with us.
