What spiritual and psychological wisdom can Christian saints, mystics, poets, artists, scientists contribute to our awareness of the sacred in our lives?
The imagination is a glimpse of being able to experience the sacred from God’s perspective. Without imagination, Christian poets, artists, scientists, even saints and mystics, would lose their creativity and spiritual insights, thus their wisdom.
They all are seeking to know Truth, to know God, and to be able to allow God to know them. It is this union of God and Truth, in the context of Love and imagination, that is the liminal threshold we must cross to experience the sacred in the most minute aspects of our lives on a daily basis.
God is a hidden God, but does not hide from us. Our ego-dramas and addictions to distractions and spiritual sloth hide God behind walls of our own making. Saints, artists, scientists, and others risk traveling in the geography of the sacred by means of their imaginative mindfulness, creating openings for us to explore with our own imaginations.
The quest for God and the sacred does not end no matter how spiritually wise one becomes for we always remain children in this quest, always beginners. And that is a very good thing that we do. With the sanctity, innocence, enthusiasm, and imagination of a child, we can negate the false self and false idol that is our ego, and be crazed enough to see the beauty of living a holy life in an age that despoils and ridicules all that is sacred.
It is growth in wisdom to know that joy, truth, beauty and goodness are what endure, as our ego-pleasures fade fast and can turn into a path to desperation and despair if followed to the end. The “secret” of the saints and mystics of all sorts is that eternity includes time and permeates all aspects of it. The eternal and sacred define us now, in the experience of our daily lives, and are our destiny. It begins with seeing ourselves from God’s perspective.