Imagination
A SERMON BY REV LINDA A HART
In our family, we have a few DVDs that qualify as the film equivalent of ‘comfort food’. You know comfort food, those dishes that you turn to when you need to feel like someone has given you a hug, that cheer you by just eating them, no matter the calories. Though I have no memory of how it came to me, my comfort DVD is an old film called Drop Dead Fred.
The story begins with Elizabeth who is preparing herself to go and talk to her recently estranged husband. She gets out of her car and goes in to talk to him. She wants him to come home, but the conversation goes awry almost immediately as he convinces her that she was the one who suggested that he go and live with Anabella, his mistress we assume, and he assures her it’s all for the best.
She drives back to work, but on the way stops to ring her best friend and whilst she is in a phone box telling her friend the sad tale, we see in the background that someone has broken the window on her car and stolen her handbag, and then someone else comes along and steals her car.
Finally arriving at her work, she is fired for being late. It’s not 10 minutes into the film yet. It’s been a bad day, and it’s not yet mid-afternoon. As she leaves the building, she stumbles upon a childhood friend who reminds her of her wacky childhood imaginary friend, that fellow from the title, Drop Dead Fred, and we see the first flash back to Lizzie’s childhood: a gardening grandmother looks up and has yellow paint thrown all over her. Another follows almost immediately as the friend remembers when Elizabeth borrowed his father’s electric razor. We hear the sound of the razor and the growl of a cat off screen, and see a flurry of hair flying and then see a cat shaved completely bald all around its midsection.
Drop Dead Fred returns to her life to cheer her up and help her get her life back in order, but not without causing a huge amount of chaos in the meantime. Unlike the image of imaginary friends that I’ve always pictured, Fred is a trickster kind of fellow who has her steal things in the middle of the night – causing her father to be arrested and the destruction of a lot of expensive china – or helped making mud pies in the best soup tureen in the house, or flinging corn flakes all over the dining room whilst her mother isn’t looking. Crashing into her adult life, he keeps up the same sort of antics.
Did any of us here have imaginary friends? Ever since my childhood I’ve thought that having such a companion would be grand, but have never managed to conjure one up.
Part of what I love about this film is the magical quality of Elizabeth’s life: the existence of another realm that is populated by friends whom no one else can see, yet who interact with, comment upon and cause havoc in the more ordinary world that the rest of us inhabit most of the time. I watch it when I am feeling glum and feeling that the world has gone too far awry to be mended because it reminds me that the is magic and mystery around me though I forget all the time that it’s there.
Frederick Buechner was the one who introduced me to the idea of being trapped in a ‘unenchanted forest’, and it’s a good phrase. In writing a story about the innkeeper at the birth of Jesus, he says that the unenchanted forest is just where the innkeeper is trapped. He cannot see what is happening all around him because he is concerned with the details of the days, of bed linens and customers and meals to be served and all that clutter and mess of running a business and the insanity of the census. In fairy tales, in those old stories about what life is really about, we are ever invited into an enchanted forest where witches live in gingerbread houses and breadcrumb trails can lead you home again, where trees watered by the sad tears of grief can offer ball gowns to disappointed servant girls, where tiny men make shoes, where brave princesses slay dragons and where transformations of every sort happen.
Perhaps it hasn’t happened to you, but I suspect that most adults get caught in that unenchanted forest quite regularly. It’s what adults do: cope with reality. The washing up to be done, the bills to be sorted, work, commitments and simply carrying on with what is demanded of us.
So today is a Drop Dead Fred sort of viewing, I hope, a reminder of the place of imagination in our lives and what it can offer to us.
There are three particular messages I hope you leave with today and for clarity’s sake I’ll tell you now what they are:
that every part of our lives can be fed by our imagination;
that we need to exercise our imagination to keep our hearts and souls alive;
that it is critical to celebrate and encourage imagination in our lives and in the lives of our companions.
Firstly, I don’t need to tell you that imagination can be used everywhere. From decorating to crafts to cooking to writing to design, imagination is at work. More, our day dreams and perhaps even our night dreams rely upon that muscle that is imagination. We know that if we think of it at all. Denise Levertov reminds us, though, that our imaginations take us further. She begs that the poets give us the imagination of peace, an imagining that we, too, can take part in. Imagination – and, I believe trusting in that possibility of something magical in the world – has the power to draw us to something different, to better and more whole living.
In these days of new year’s resolutions, there are no doubt countless pictures of slender selves being tacked up to refrigerators all across the globe. There are people who picture themselves as non-smokers, some who are imagining themselves to be nurses or doctors or therapists. There are women resting their arms on the bump of their bellies imagining themselves to be mums and men looking at each other with love in their eyes imagining family. It may not be the case that what we can dream we can do, but it seems certain that if we cannot dream something new, we won’t achieve it. Our lives grow by virtue of what we can perceive for ourselves in the dawning future. Our lives are fed by our imagination.
Secondly, we need to exercise our imagination. I forget – and I suspect that you do, too – that the world around has possibilities that I haven’t seen yet. I forget and become lost and glum, and all I can see is that unenchanted forest of must-dos and have-tos and the stacks of tasks and can’t find my way out. I think regular attention to that exercise helps us to remember. Reading magical stories, stepping into the darkness of a theatre to be totally taken to another realm, picking up paints or modelling clay or a sketch book, taking a piece of paper and writing, or standing in front of a pot of bubbling soup inhaling the aroma and crumbling a little bit of unexpected herb into it helps keep it exercised. Just stopping to take the time to day dream, to imagine other worlds, other ways you might be is exercising your imagination. It helps us to stay on our way.
Thirdly, it is critical to encourage and celebrate our imagination and that of those around us. The story about Cornelius Drebbel is a cautionary tale about what is lost when we dismiss what seems outrageous and outlandish. Though he designed a functional submarine, torpedoes and envisioned a heating system comparable to the solar energy systems by the 1630s, he is mostly unknown today and it was centuries before what he imagined then became commonplace.
What seems incomprehensible now may well be what could save us all. I keep going back to the quip I found somewhere on the internet that reminded us all that scientists in the 1960s sent men to the moon with less computer power in the whole of NASA than most of us carry around in our pockets on our smart phones. Star Trek imagined instantaneous communication through small hand held communicators. Who could have imagined then that we would all be connected to each other though just such devices?
It won’t be a single good idea that takes us to new and better places in the world, but we cannot afford to lose the potential and possibility in that web of creativity and imagination that can lead us into a better world and happier and more whole future. It’s needed everywhere, no where more than in our ability to imagine a future that is increasingly shaped by compassion and care, a future shaped by dreams of equality and equity and plenty for all of us.
At the end of Drop Dead Fred, Elizabeth is able to imagine her life as something totally different. No longer terrified by being without the love of her unfaithful and mean husband, no longer bound by the fear of disapproval to her cold-hearted mother, Elizabeth imagines a new life for herself where she is strong and free to choose what is good for her. Fred has to leave her as she doesn’t need him any longer. The closing scene shows her in her husband’s red Jaguar with the top down, driving along a road to a future that is wide open.
What can you imagine for yourself? Where will your day dreams take you? Let us together imagine that world that we wish to live in and this day take our first step.
Just imagine......
Amen.