Thought for the week: ‘What a terrible gift, and responsibility, is the human imagination.’

Judy Clinton’s sketch of the imagination

‘How can we individually, and collectively, make wise and loving decisions, conditioned as we all are by our backgrounds?’ | Photo: Jonatan Pie / Unsplash.

I’ve been lying on my back in the garden, looking up into a piercingly blue sky. A helicopter has been circling around and I’ve watched it, marvelling in such a thing being up there, like some great airborne insect. Once upon a time there was no such thing as a helicopter, or aeroplane, car, or any other fuel-driven vehicle. They simply did not exist. Now we take them entirely for granted; part of our familiarity, how life is.

My thoughts move on to so many other things that we take for granted: television, the internet, the marvels of modern surgery, food availability from all around the world and countless other things.

All of them originated in the imagination of an individual, or a number of people. From seemingly nothing, a thought came; and then, through a creative process involving any number of abortive attempts, set-backs and inspirations, something came into being that had never existed before.

How awesome is that? It is also true that the human mind has dreamed up such things as gas chambers, concentration camps, and other devastating horrors. The same creative process; but coming from a place of pain, hate and distortion. What a terrible gift, and responsibility, is the human imagination.

Even when human imagination has brought into form something which is of great life-giving potential – an aeroplane for instance – that same imagination can come in and, choosing to use this plane as a killer machine, annihilate families, homes and cities in a matter of moments.

We make choices and decisions all the time. We can not do otherwise – even if the decision is to do nothing. How can we individually, and collectively, make wise and loving decisions, conditioned as we each are by our personal backgrounds and culture, with all the gifts and wounds that we have individually received?

Isn’t this the process of discernment? I believe that our Quaker practices, shown most powerfully in a gathered Meeting for Worship for Business, have much to offer the world, especially at this turbulent and troubled time in our history. Of course we get things wrong, all of us being fallible human beings, but at least we find that when we wait in collective silence for the Light it can show us the way forward in love. It requires a letting go of firmly held personal views. It requires an ability to listen, to learn from others, and to allow a creative next step, which may be quite unlike anything else we have known before. We truly do have the ability to create heaven, as well as hell, on earth.

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