Geoffrey Stephenson ran an event on preaching yesterday. There was a great quote from Barbara Brown Taylor on the place of imagination. Imagination is not only permitted, it is required in living the story we’re trying to tell. Taylor writes:

Imagination has no point to make, no axe to grind. It’s more like a child roaming the neighbourhood on a free afternoon, following first the smell of fresh bread in an oven, then the glint of something bright in the grass- led by curiosity, by hunger, by hope, to explore the given world from its highest branches to its deepest roots because it is wonderful and terrible and because it is there. When imagination comes home and empties its pockets, of course there will be some sorting to do. Keep the cat’s eye marble, the Japanese beetle wing, the red feather, the penny. Jettison the bottle cap, the broken glass, the melted chocolate with lint. But do not scold imagination for bringing it all home or for collecting it in the first place.

And it’s from the messiness that order and shape in preaching might emerge – rather than the other way round as it so often is. The quote is from The Preaching Life. (Barbara Brown Taylor’s also the author of Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, which might give the flip side to her preaching advice.)

Taylor’s quote about preparing to preach – however she feels about it now – reminded me that preaching is like writing just about anything – prose, drama, music, poetry. (Well perhaps not anything, although some of my report writing and income tax returns have been fantastical.) One of the best books ever on anything is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird where she quotes a preacher as saying hope is a ‘revolutionary patience’. ‘Let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.’ Just like preaching.

The light through the woods was great too, and there was the non smokers’ equivalent of a fag break to nip out and roam the neighbourhood.

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