As we all know, the imagination works in bizarre ways. What we imagine in our sleep, as dreams, is wildly beyond anything we could imagine while awake. Some people have a disciplined, practical but unimaginative approach to challenges. Others have flights of fancy that are amazing but lack all capacity to turn them into reality. In most areas of life there are the occasional geniuses whose imaginations enable them to forge new directions in hopeless situations or new ideas in a time without ideas, and who also have the knowledge, skills and discipline to make it happen.
Examples abound throughout history. In recent times we can think of Captain Sullenberger landing a crippled aircraft on the Hudson River in New York without losing a single life. He had no engines, no height and no space, but he both imagined and performed the landing. We can think of J. K. Rowling imagining a world with witches and wizards who hide in plain sight and writing seven volumes of coherent narrative that grips people of every age and contains a profound morality. She imagined, but then she wrote something that makes sense in its own terms. We can think of Václav Havel, a political prisoner of the communist government of Czechoslovakia, or Nelson Mandela of South Africa, prisoner of the Apartheid regime, imagining freedom, gaining freedom without a collapse into civil war and then building a nation on a basis of seeking reconciliation. Of course, things went wrong, but skill and imagination kept them on course as long as they were alive.
The list is endless. We can list names like St Hildegard of Bingen correcting and challenging emperors in the Europe of the Middle Ages, Elizabeth I, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, Churchill, or Washington, or Augustine of Hippo. It goes back to Homer, Dido, Cleopatra, Aristotle. Athletes like Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics, Lewis Hamilton in motorsport, Emma Raducanu at the 2021 US Tennis Open, are all a mix of ambition, determination, imagination, and skill forged in practice.
We are used in music, the arts, sport, politics, and every area of human endeavour to the idea of imagination. It is an indispensable part of success and nowhere more than in situations where conflict and disagreement have reduced hope and eliminated expectations of a better world. It is one thing to be imaginative when all is going well. It is quite another to be able to reimagine a future that is different and to develop the tools for bringing it into reality.
One of the supreme examples of imagination is the famous speech of Dr Martin Luther King Jr on 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, to a vast crowd who had marched for civil rights. One of the most often-quoted parts is: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!’ Not only was it rhetoric of an extraordinary skill but it gave a crowd and a nation, weighed down by racial division and oppression, a vivid idea of possibilities that they themselves had not imagined. It put deep hopes into tangible form, something to aim for, a vision not only for dreams, but also for practical ambitions. Even unknown people may, by an act of courageous reimagination, change the course of events. Seven years before Dr King’s speech, Rosa Parks, in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her bus seat for a White man. It was a major step in the struggle towards justice and civil rights.
Imagination is not a one-off moment after which the serious work begins. It is a process that is twinned with the use of skills and that leads to reimagination as progress is made or as setbacks occur and new ways forward need to be found.
In November 2012, the General Synod of the Church of England (a sort of church parliament) declined to support proposals that would have permitted the ordination of women as bishops. The mood in the days after the vote was very dour. The approach that would make it possible had been thrashed out over a great many years, decades even, and endless reports and periods of prayer and deep theological reflection. There was contempt for the failed process expressed in Parliament and in many newspapers. The general opinion was that it would be five years before another attempt could be possible.
However, in the immediate aftermath of the vote a group of people, both women and men, began to reimagine the possibilities of a different way forward. Much hard work was done on the legal detail and many conversations took place between people of differing views. To cut a very long story short, in July 2014 a simpler form of the legislation was passed and the first woman to be nominated a bishop was announced before the year end, a bare two years after the failed vote.
That was an example of reimagination, along the lines of ‘if this does not work, but its failure had an impact, let’s try a new approach, building on the new mood’. Reimagination has to happen again and again and that is why it is the third of the habits that the Difference Course seeks to inculcate. It links, obviously, to Lederach’s moral imagination, discussed in Part I.1 It is more than a practice, or a discipline, it has to be a habit. Imagination is not always spontaneous; in my case, very seldom. My default is to plod on. The habit of reimagination needs to grow to the point that it is always there, as part of the character of the group, or nation, or individuals.
The Bible is full of reimagination that opens the way forward to new developments and finds a way to deal with potential serious conflict. In the Acts of the Apostles 10.1-11.18 (Acts) there is one of the most significant reimaginings of the call and purpose of God for the people of this world. From very early in his public ministry, Jesus encountered Gentiles who were seeking help or advice. Earlier in this book we looked at the story of the Syrophoenician woman whose child was possessed by a demon. Jesus challenges her as to his mission but her answer in faith leads him to act. There are many other examples of boundary crossing, both by Jesus and by the apostles after his ascension. In Acts chapters 10 and 11 and thereafter the mission of the Church is pushed by the Holy Spirit of God into taking a decisive turn to the Gentile world.
As a result, over the following decades Gentiles of a huge variety of backgrounds and cultures became the dominant groups among Christians. The first reaction of Jewish believers was shock. In Acts 11.1-18 Peter tells believers in Jerusalem the story of his encounter with a Roman centurion (the events are recorded in Acts 10), after Peter had seen a vision, and of the centurion and his household receiving the Holy Spirit in the same way as the Jewish believers. From there the Gentile mission spreads to Antioch, through Asia Minor, to Greece and to Rome and beyond. It is the moment at which Christianity turned from being a Jewish group to a potential worldwide religion.
Throughout Christian history the response to radical change in circumstances has been a process of reimagining theologically the mission and actions of the global Church. With the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century ce, Augustine of Hippo rethought the shape of a church in a western world without a centralized and powerful empire, but a Church surrounded by anarchy. In Ireland, northern England and Scotland, long before Augustine of Canterbury came in 597 ce, Celtic missionaries reshaped the way the Church worked, with few or no bishops and with bases in monastic communities. At times of great decline and division in the Church, figures like St Francis of Assisi, St Benedict and St Teresa of Ávila have emerged with a reimagining of the transformation and reconciliation of the gospel. Where the institution was willing to be inspired by reimagination, the Church found purpose and renewal, was reconciled to God and to each other, and recovered a missionary zeal and a commitment to Christ. Where they refused, most notably for all sides in the Reformation, division occurred.
Reimagining is the means of retaining a vision when circumstances have altered.2 The events in Acts 10 and 11 were in the context of growing persecution, the murder of some of the Christians in the Holy Land and the scattering of believers all over the Roman world. Reimagining is both collective and individual but is usually much more effective in a group. It is not the unthinking acceptance of a new direction, but, as in the passage from Acts, a carefully tested and examined set of proposals that seems good to the consensus of those concerned.
God’s Call
The source of all good imagination, of vision and of hope, is God. The test of genuine reimagining is that it reflects the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ and testified to by the Bible. The limits of reimagining the extent of reconciliation are the limits of God, which is another way of saying that there are no limits. When we combine the work of God through Jesus Christ in reconciliation, we find that the call to be peacebuilders is a call to imitate God. It is not the work of specialists and technical experts. It is a call to the whole Church of God, every Christian person, and on every occasion on which each of us falls short of that call we fall into sin. Yet God knows our weakness. My own experience is of constant falling and failure, but also of the love of God who picks me up and gives me a fresh start. That is the constant tension all Christians live with.
Holiness is seen in many ways. For the wounded and oppressed it may be simply that they call out to God. Paul speaks to slaves in his letters, telling them just to try to work well. So does Peter in his first letter. God knows us, our sufferings, our weakness and our failures. To go back to my friend Désiré in eastern Congo, ‘Do what we can’ – the rest is God’s problem.
At a global level, holiness calls us to seek to reconcile the creation with human existence, even if the cost is very great, and our contribution very small. The creation is not ours; it is God’s. We are the stewards and our reconciliation with creation, including climate and biodiversity, is also an essential part of holy living in reconciliation with God.
At a global, national and community level, the reconciliation of race and ethnicity, as well as class, gender and sexuality, nationality and other differences, is a holy call. It does not mean that everything wanted by everyone is right, but that finding out what is right depends on a foundation of living in a reconciled disagreement that enables us to search for the will of God. We cannot live in holiness and hatred, or holiness and enmity. They are incompatible.
As a global Church we must not rest comfortably among our divisions and rivalries. Ecumenism grew up in the 1920s out of a desire for unity. That unity must be our constant desire and to the extent that it is not yet possible to find a common voice of unity institutionally we must do so by cooperation through love-in-action.
As a global Church we must seek to find ways of relating well to other faiths. Christians have always lived among other faiths, but have too often been tyrannical when in the majority. The intense need for interfaith engagement becomes stronger as the proportion of the world’s population in one faith or another grows and as faith becomes, in many countries, more and more a tool of politicians to define who is ‘us’ and who are our enemies.
God’s call is shown by God’s example in Jesus, who gave up heaven to become poor in this world for our sakes, to die for our sakes, for our sakes to rise and for our sakes to give the Holy Spirit so that a new body may emerge that crosses every boundary and exists in love and freedom and light in a dark world.
At the most local level we seek to be known as reconcilers and peacemakers in our families and communities. That is what is to be reimagined: not being blocked by the possibilities that we see but inspired to hope by the possibilities God sees and that we hear in solitary and collective prayer and study of the Bible.
Crossing Divides
I wrote earlier about my friend in America who visited the other churches in his area, not just the ones that were like his own. I also wrote about Brother Andrew, crossing the boundaries of the Iron Curtain with bibles and bringing hope to Christians being persecuted, later crossing other boundaries to meet terrorist leaders. In both cases they reimagined the situation with hope injected into it and with contact and humanity as part of it.
Not all of us, or even many of us, will have such dramatic opportunities as Andrew. However, the beginning of crossing a boundary is to try and imagine what everything would look like if that boundary were not there. After that comes the hard work that is described in the rest of this book. The six plates of Part II need to be spun and kept spinning. We need the habits of curiosity and being present. We need to know and understand the barriers. Most of all we will want our reimagined vision to be seen, even in small ways, so that it is caught more and more widely.
Crossing divides cannot be about us. It is easy – I have often seen it and even more often been tempted by it – to want to be known as a peacemaker. The recognition looks wonderful from the outside. Yet when you meet the winners of Nobel Peace Prizes, often they see it as slightly embarrassing to have been treated as the hero. They also know the cost.
A few years ago, I met a doctor who works with the huge number of women in eastern Congo who have been raped during the war. Denis Mukwege treats them physically and psychologically. His faith and work are utterly inspiring. He does not seek attention for himself but for them. He took the Nobel Peace Prize for them and he takes the death threats made against his work for himself. That is the reality of someone who saw the condition of the women and reimagined what could happen to them. Before he received the prize, he was almost unknown. He crossed the boundary to those who were excluded from their communities, unvalued by their attackers and without hope, and brought all those blessings of value, inclusion and hope with him. He also knew that he had not acted alone. In his acceptance speech he spoke of those women who had served with him at immense risk, and paid tribute to the survivor of sexual violence in conflict, Nadia Murad, who was honoured equally with him, and is equally remarkable.
The question when facing a boundary, whether it is resistance to global action on climate change, or to new patterns of interracial relations, or to reuniting a community that has fallen out, is what reconciliation would look like. It will very seldom if ever be in our image. It will even less often look like overwhelming victory for one side and the complete destruction of the other – evil ideas may need to be destroyed, but not people.
The second question is to reimagine the steps by which things could change. What relationships could be different? How could there be a way of dealing with the particular causes of division that put justice front and centre and gave dignity to all involved?
The third question is to imagine who I would like to work with, and then to ensure that the imagination is disciplined by an intention of diversity. To cross boundaries well we need to be in relationship with people on both sides of the boundaries, so that the collective decision making has the benefit of good navigators on both sides. Perhaps it is worth beginning by asking what you are praying for, and who.
Disagreeing Well
‘On some things we will never agree.’ So spoke one friend in Liverpool about another who was and is a ‘Blue’, an Everton supporter, as opposed to a ‘Red’, a Liverpool supporter. And they don’t. But they are friends. Those who come from Liverpool and are football supporters will understand that a friendship like that can be noticeable.
In their case it did not take a major effort of reconciliation. After all, they each married one of two sisters and are the closest of family as well.
Disagreeing well, in most circumstances, is very much more complicated. It may be over a fundamental point. I have several Muslim friends with whom I disagree on the most basic of issues: the very nature of God. Yet we are friends, we seek each other’s company and enjoy it when we meet.
Even that, though, is not disagreeing well enough yet, because disagreeing well is tested by the circumstances of disagreeing over something very important, and doing so with passion, and yet maintaining a relationship. Within the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, among the many people I deeply admire and whose example inspires me are a whole group of bishops who form close relationships with others with whom they disagree profoundly and publicly. They meet annually, in 2020–21 on Zoom, of course. They focus their discussions on the questions of human sexuality, same-gender marriage and a host of related issues. It is a very practical approach to reconciliation within the Communion.
At the Anglican Consultative Council of 2018, in Hong Kong, there was a motion put forward about human sexuality. Different people spoke with powerful views and different approaches. It was heated and difficult. Among them were some of those who had met in the group I had just described. They did not minimize the differences, hide their passions or settle for fuzzy compromise. They did speak to each other afterwards, listen to each other well, be present with each other and continue to meet. That is disagreeing well. They recognized that the subject being discussed was of immense importance, so much so that feelings and tempers would be touched. It was also recognized that those who disagreed might be wrong but were not evil. They were part of the family.
Practising Forgiveness
If disagreeing well is a steep hill, then forgiveness can be a vertical cliff face. The number of global and irreconcilable or deeply intransigent conflicts there are is a major subject of academic discussion on peacebuilding. We probably know of or experience relationships where forgiveness seems beyond reach under any circumstances. Many people simply cannot forgive themselves.
Forgiveness is not achieved by grovelling when one does not believe one has done wrong. It is often a way out of an argument. Metaphorically, you cross your fingers while saying sorry, in your mind feeling that you are right. All that does is store up a sense of bitter self-righteousness that will explode even more damagingly in the end. The same thing can happen at a national as well as an individual level. Feeling forced to admit blame in which one does not believe was behind much of the deep resentment in Germany after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. It leads to a desire for revenge, in the individual as well as the community.
There are many other ways, but they require reimagining as well as the other habits. It is necessary to ask oneself, and often others, what forgiveness would look like. An objective but loving and accepting view will help see one’s own responsibilities. The TRC in South Africa led many participants to a proper sense of their own participation in evil deeds and the need for them to accept fault and seek forgiveness. Conversely, hearing and seeing such transformation permitted forgiveness in some of the most unlikely of cases.
Reimagining forgiveness is a hard task as either perpetrator or victim. It is so easy to make it a duty that abuses the already abused. Survivors of abuse often rightly push back vehemently against cheap views of forgiveness or the immense pain that forgiveness will often cause to the forgiver.3 There are many ways of getting to the place of forgiveness far more slowly and circuitously in which the victim begins to see themselves in a new light and to sense that their power to forgive or withhold forgiveness is very great and in some cases puts the perpetrator within their hands. As has already been said, there is a big difference between forgiveness and forgetting the consequences. The statement ‘I forgive you, but you must still carry your punishment from the law’ is perfectly coherent. It recognizes that crimes and oppression are communal and not purely individual, even the dreadful ones of abuse and discrimination, even the most terrible crime of murder.
Reimagining forgiveness begins within oneself, in complete honesty with God and complete openness to learning to know that one is loved. That is a first step of many, but a strong one.
Risking Hope
Horses are not my favourite thing. They are lovely to see, some of the most beautiful animals, and I deeply admire good riding. Purely personally, however, I notice that they have teeth at the front and powerful hind legs and hooves at the back. They are intelligent enough to know what they want and big enough to choose it. As a child, when I fell off a horse, rather than getting back on I decided to go sailing in small, tippy dinghies. No teeth, no hooves, no brain. Less fear.
Getting back on is very difficult even in something as unimportant as a riding lesson. Getting back on is a wholly more difficult thing when you have fallen away from hope and risked everything in hope of reconciliation.
For exactly this reason most reconciliation work, or even mediation work within it, is better done in pairs or teams than by oneself. Recent work in South Sudan has involved remarkable teams from numerous agencies. There have been no solitary stars. Reimagining hope is a joint exercise. It is also a systematic one.
It starts with acknowledging the problem and the failures. It does not use euphemisms like ‘challenge’ or ‘opportunity’, as in ‘there is no such thing as a problem, there are only opportunities’, to which one of my work colleagues replied to our mutual boss: ‘in that case we are facing an insurmountable opportunity’. Honesty starts with finding reality because hope grows out of reimagining starting with where you are, not where you would like to be.
It continues with a reminder about the end vision. What is it you are trying to achieve? If it is for the COP conferences on climate change it might be world net-zero carbon emission by 2050 on a basis of just sharing of costs and benefits. There may be setbacks very early on but there will still be many other ways of getting there. The failed Copenhagen COP4 of 2009 was followed eventually by the success of Paris in 2015. Holding the end vision in sight enables one to see the whole countryside and not just the immediate roadblock.
It may be that in a family dispute the end vision needs rethinking. Perhaps, rather than putting the marriage back together, it may be parting well and with care for all those affected.
It involves essentially a great deal of trying of ideas, of thinking, and starting with what should be rather than with the resources. Imagine first, then look for the resources to get there, and only if that fails imagine again on a different basis.
Risking hope requires the highest level of reimagination because reimagination’s greatest enemy is despair. In the most intransigent disputes, hope is formed by coming back to my friend Bishop Désiré’s adage: ‘Do what you can, what God resources you to do, and leave the rest to God.’ In that way, bit by bit the reimagining will rekindle the hope.
Summary
• Reimagining is hard and seldom purely solitary.
• It is perspiration and detailed work as much as it is inspiration.
• It is a foundation for vision, which in turn feeds new and stronger vision.
• It is a habit, not an event. Every setback is met by it.
Points to Ponder
• Are you imaginative? Who do you know who is? How does it happen?
• Looking at disputes of which you are aware, try the exercise of seeing afresh what the vision for success looks like and work backwards towards the reimagining needed to get there.
• If you are in despair, or caught by bitterness because of suffering, do not surrender; imagine who can help you and seek support.