Our Greatest Power

That Divine Mind, that Great Soul we call God, has given us 3 great gifts that empower us to create any life experience in which we can believe.   The first is will.  The volition or will power to choose a course of action and hold to it through thick and thin is the basis of our freedom of action as human beings. The second gift is intellect or mind.  This is the gift that allows us to adapt, to think, to reason and to triumph over adversity.  But the greatest of the 3 and the one that is the hallmark of humanity is imagination.

This is the most powerful Divine Gift of all because it allows us to move beyond the known, the present, the familiar and to create places never visited by a human, to experience things never before experienced; to reach new heights and create new wonders that have never before existed.  All of human advancement in science, technology, art, music, medicine, religion and philosophy is due to this power of imagination.  Without it we would be frozen in precedent; the known, the familiar and no advancement could ever occur.  Nothing new can be created until a mind first conceives it.  What we can conceive we may achieve.

The gift of imagination is the evidence of the Indwelling God within us for no other creature on this planet possesses the ability to create what has never before existed, to travel in mind to places never seen or never experienced or to enter alternate states of reality at will.  Imagination is the evidence of God within each of us.  All that exists began in the mind of God or a human mind and both depend on the faculty of imagination.

We can see the natural flowering of this great gift in our children.  Every child lives a vivid imaginal life full of imaginary friends, castles and kings, princes and princesses.   The tooth fairy and Santa Clause are each very real to a child who spends most of their day in the wonderful land of imagination.   What happens to so many of us to stifle that vivid faculty of imagination?   Our parents force us kicking and screaming into the present world of facts and things and discourage our imaginal flights and fancies.  Our teachers make us deal with the here and now instead of what could and should be.  Our clergy force our Spirit into an orthodox,"acceptable" version of God, Heaven and Hell which leaves little room for questioning or imagining.

By the age of 10 most of us have had a lot of our imagination blunted and the rest put on a starvation diet!   Most of us are taught that "Life is Serious Business" and there is no time for "wool gathering" or flights of fancy.  Rather than encourage our children to dream of things that have never been and worlds yet to be discovered; we force then into the hewn path of "facts" and reality.

The imagination is the font of all greatness so the blunting of imagination does not bode well for mankind's future.  Sometimes it seems we have no great people anymore, only more or less competent technocrats.   There has been greatness in the near past but it is becoming more and more the exception rather than the rule.   Perhaps this is because our way of life has changed from an imaginal based life to a life lived in and through technology.

I am not old, only 65 years old for a few more weeks, but in my lifetime I have seen the wholesale crippling of Imagination.  It began about 1950 when television began to take the place of radio as the chief medium of family entertainment.  You see, radio was a banquet for the imagination of the young and old.  It gave you the story in words but you had to paint the picture in your mind as the story unfolded.  You ran your own movie in your mind as the characters spoke their lines from the large console RCA or Philco radio in the living room.

I remember how much I looked forward to hearing the western series Gunsmoke on the radio.  (yes young people, Gunsmoke was first a huge radio hit and then came to TV about 1954).   William Conrad, the wonderful, large actor with the deep commanding voice, played Marshall Matt Dillon and to this day, he is Matt Dillon to me; even 20 years of James Arness in the TV role hasn't displaced in my mind Conrad's deep growl of a voice or the sound of his spurs walking down the main street of Dodge City, Kansas, USA.

Miss Kitty, the Marshall's love interest, was never seen but we heard her husky strong voice.  To us radio Gunsmoke fans, Miss Kitty was a proper lady business person running the Longbranch Saloon, not a madam of a brothel, gambling den and saloon as we were forced to realize when we saw her on TV.  You see we could make any pictures we wanted, it was our imagination that colored in the spoken story.  Radio demanded our active participation, we were partners in the play.  Television demands nothing from us, it is a totally passive medium, it provides the entire visual feast with no need for input from our minds at all.  Few fell asleep in front of the huge Atwood Console Radio but millions fall asleep in front of the TV each night.

Is it any wonder that so many of us lack the imagination to see a better world, to envision a planet free of war, disease, poverty.  We have been force fed all we need to know through a TV screen.  We are passive watchers of life, not participants; many have become mere spectators of life.

I invite you to experience what I am speaking of.   Sirius XM satillite radio has a channel called Radio Classics.  You can meet Fibber Magee and his wife Molly, travel America with Johnny Dollar, ace insurance investigator, or fight crime with La Mont Cranston and the Shadow, laugh with Jack Benny or the Great Gildersleeve.  You can experience the original Radio Green Hornet or hear tales of the Texas Rangers. You can enjoy full length theatrical productions on the Lux Radio Theatre.  If you have not taken your imagination out for a walk in a long time, tune in to channel 82 on Sirius XM Radio and enter a world you never knew existed.

I am blessed to be a Baby Boomer and just catch the end of the Age of Imagination and experience being a partner in the story and then to be an adult in the computer and post imaginal age where we are spoon fed our wisdom, opinions, values and prejudices 24/7 on cable around the world.

I don't suppose I have to tell you which I prefer!  Just an Old Dog trying to learn a new trick!

May God bless and keep you until next time:

Rev. Dore' Jacques Patlian