Imagination as Spiritual Tool
Katherine Hofmann
Learning Fellow, Church of the Larger Fellowship
Our dreams and imagination fuel childhood. The world encourages children to use their imagination through words and actions. We often hear an adult tell a child to use their imagination. This behaviour is encouraged through educational shows, playground structures (rocket ships anyone?), and toys. But then adults are told to “put away your childish things (C.S. Lewis),” as if becoming grownup precludes any need to use our imaginations.
Yet, if we want to experience life fully, we have to be able to imagine what we want our life to look like. How can anyone figure out their ultimate desires if they can’t imagine them? All the goal-setting gurus tell us to envision our futures and act as if it is already true. In other words, to use our imaginations to create our reality. I believe that our spiritual reality is drawn from imagination as well.
Our Unitarian Universalist faith encourages us to explore our own beliefs and to draw from a wide range of spiritual traditions and experiences. Because being a UU is about openness and freedom in spiritual practice, imagination plays an important role in how individuals connect with their faith. Rather than seeing imagination as something separate from spiritual life, UUs embrace it as a tool for deepening our spiritual journeys, building connections, and inspiring positive change. Using our imagination to develop our spiritual practice empowers us to envision new possibilities for ourselves, others, and even the world.
One of the core beliefs of Unitarian Universalism is the idea that everyone has worth and dignity and that everyone’s spiritual path is unique. This makes it a perfect place for imagination to thrive. Using your imagination allows you to engage with your beliefs in creative, personal ways. Whether through prayer, meditation, or everyday life, imagination helps open new doors to explore the divine, connect with the world, and grow spiritually.
Perhaps the most important way imagination is currently used in Unitarian Universalism is in the area of social justice. As UUs, we are committed to making the world a better place, and imagination helps fuel that work. By imagining a world where people are treated fairly, where the environment is cared for, and where peace prevails, we are inspired to take action and create positive change.
Ultimately, within our Unitarian Universalist congregations, imagination is a creative gift and a profoundly spiritual tool. It encourages personal growth, enhances communal worship, and inspires justice-driven action, making it an essential part of the UU spiritual experience. Unitarian Universalists can use imagination to connect to the divine, engage with each other, and work toward a better world. And that’s a dream that I hope we can all imagine.
Authentically and with a heart full of love, grace and a determination to do what I can to bring about liberation in all I do.
Quest March 2025
March 2025
“Without imagination, how will we know where we’re going?” —Rev. Leah Ongiri
Articles
Imagination as Spiritual Tool
I have always had a strong personality and for much of my professional life, I took that to mean that I can be a “good leader.” Read more »
Download the full issue and read all Quest publications:
Quest February 2025
February 2025
“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
—Elie Wiesel
Articles
Bearing Witness is a Blessing
I have always had a strong personality and for much of my professional life, I took that to mean that I can be a “good leader.” Read more »
Download the full issue and read all Quest publications:
Bearing Witness is a Blessing
AISHA HAUSER, msw, cre-ml
Lead Ministry Team, Church of the Larger Fellowship
Growing up in an Egyptian Arabic speaking home, we never just said, “hello” to greet each other. We would say “Ahlan wa sahlan” which translates to “easy family.” You are part of our family and it is easy to be together is how I would explain this. An affirmation of connection.
I learned that the Zulu greeting is “Sawubona” which means “I see you, I acknowledge you, I recognize you as a person.” What a powerful and life affirming greeting.
I acknowledge you.
I recognize you as a person.
This month’s theme is witnessing, and the greetings I describe above are a way of witnessing who we are to each other in community. As humanity has become more transient in the last few hundred years, many of us travel and live in many places throughout our lives. This means our friendships and connections are fluid. Before the internet, I would maybe receive a handwritten letter from a friend I met after they or I moved to a new town. This was a rare occurrence.
Now that social media is a pervasive part of our lives, I have found that I am able to remain connected to people that I got to know and care about during a moment in time when we lived in geographic proximity to each other. I can follow people as they acknowledge milestones in their and their loved one’s lives.
Through TikTok, I have learned more about non-famous people all over the world and here in the United States than I ever would have on any other platform. People who are interested in transforming our hurting world into a more healing and equitable place.
We all are continuing to bear witness to the genocide in Gaza, the Congo, Haiti, Sudan among other places, thanks to social media. Awareness has been brought to our phones. We can never again claim, “we didn’t know.”
We do know. What we do with that knowledge is part of choosing how we move forward as a collective.
The Church of the Larger Fellowship would never have the reach it does at this moment in history if it wasn’t for the internet and social media. We as the CLF are able to bear witness to the lives of our members all over the world, including our beloved incarcerated UU community.
Bearing witness is part of the ways we share stories of our lives and the lives of those we care about. Humans have been sharing these witness stories for as long as we have could communicate. It is a blessed thing to be able to bear witness to the joys, sorrows, horrors, celebrations and all that it means to be human. We will support and love each other through it all..
Authentic Leadership
AISHA HAUSER, msw, cre-ml
Lead Ministry Team, Church of the Larger Fellowship
I have always had a strong personality and for much of my professional life, I took that to mean that I can be a “good leader.” In time and with many experiences of leadership throughout my life and in different contexts, I have come to realize that leadership is not about telling people “what to do” or “asserting authority.” Rather, true leadership is about modeling and collaboration.
When in a position of leadership, that person is more visible to more people and what the leader does and says is under more scrutiny than others in any given system.
Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber is a Lutheran minister who has gained notoriety over the years for her progressive social views, while also being a devoted Christian and follower of the bible.
A few years ago, I attended a lecture she gave promoting one of her books and she began by talking about authenticity in leadership and how there is a lack of authentic leaders in the U.S. Bolz-Weber is almost six feet tall and has many visible tattoos. She is bold and unapologetic in how she asserts the teachings of Jesus, centering care for the under-resourced, underrepresented and targeted.
She told us that it is useless to try and hide some part of yourself when you are a faith leader, “Whatever you think you are hiding, people already know.” She was alluding to the fact that as a leader, you are always modeling and being true to yourself and others is the way to be a leader that people can and will trust.
It is hard to be both authentic and bold. In the age of social media, where people with any platform are scrutinized more than ever, it can be scary to show vulnerability and authenticity.
Even in the face of this, I assert it is important to model what it means to be true to the values and ideals you hold dear.
As a Unitarian Universalist, I have taken to heart the ways I can model what it means to center liberation, love and community care. I try to model what it means to move through the messiness of being human. I often share through my sermons and on the podcast The VUU, the ways I grapple with uncertainty, injustice and how to respond to the enormity of the ills in the world.
I almost never have any “answers,” what I do offer is what I think about and why. I offer the ways my UU faith informs how I imperfectly navigate the world. Perhaps the most important thing I do is show up authentically and with a heart full of love, grace and a determination to do what I can to bring about liberation in all I do.
Quest January 2025
January 2025
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” —Charles Dickens
Articles
Authentic Leadership
I have always had a strong personality and for much of my professional life, I took that to mean that I can be a “good leader.” Read more »
Download the full issue and read all articles on Issuu:
Quest December 2024
December 2024
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” —W.B. Yeats
Articles
Winter Magic
Around the world and for many thousands of years, humans of different cultures have created rituals of sympathetic magic intended to invoke unknown powers to act in our world. This kind of spiritual work asks us to make connections between objects and actions and the ways in which we want to affect the world. Read more »
Download the full issue and read all articles on Issuu:
Winter Magic
Rev. Dr. Michael Tino
Lead Ministry Team, Church of the LargerFellowship
“This being human is a guest house
Every morning is a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!”
— from “The Guest House,” by Coleman Barks, based on the original poem by Jallaludin Rumi
Around the world and for many thousands of years, humans of different cultures have created rituals of sympathetic magic intended to invoke unknown powers to act in our world. This kind of spiritual work asks us to make connections between objects and actions and the ways in which we want to affect the world.
In the northern hemisphere, it is winter now, and the farther north one goes, the shorter the days become at this time of year. Where I live in the northeastern United States, the darkest days of the year, clustered around the Winter Solstice, have just over nine hours of daylight in them, a full six hours less daylight than we enjoyed in June.
Our bodies feel that difference. For some of us, it is a welcome feeling of cozy darkness as the long nights wrap us like blankets. For others, it is a dreadful feeling of loss as the light dwindles and comes at sharper angles from a sun closer to the horizon.
And the sympathetic magic that many cultures from the farthest north places have developed to face the winter involves light. We adorn trees, festoon our houses, hang lanterns, and light bonfires. We welcome the fullness of the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow. We bask in the warmth of the blazing Yule log (or the psychological warmth of its digital equivalent on our TV and computer screens).
The Christmas trees that became traditional in the United States began as pagan German celebrations, hung with dried fruits to capture the color and scent of summer and lighted softly with candles. Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, people are celebrating in ways that were designed by the ancients to convince the sun to be reborn, to return to us and give us light and warmth. And, lo and behold, it worked, every year.
And yet, we cannot escape the reality that many people greet the winter—and the many holidays celebrated at wintertime in order to bring cheer to this desolate season—with dread, with fear, and with a profound sadness that no amount of merry-twinkle lights can break. Our spiritual houses are too often visited at this time of year by the guests of grief and sadness, loneliness and fear.
Sometimes the role of the religious community is to inspire us to action. Sometimes, it’s to mark the important moments in the cycles of our life. And sometimes, religious community exists just to hold us together for a little while. Sometimes, we come together in community despite the unwelcome guests knocking at our doors. Sometimes, because of them.
We need the touchstone of community, the embrace of love, the practice of reverent stillness, in order to summon the courage to welcome in those guests. To welcome in the crowd of sorrows that persists in knocking on our door again and again, demanding a room for the night.
To welcome in those guests, though, goes against our nature. Rumi suggests to us that such guests have something to teach us if we sit with them a while. To welcome these guests in, however, doesn’t mean we have to resign ourselves to their permanent residence in our spare room. Listening to our pain and learning from it is not the same as letting it take us over.
We have to learn how to encourage these guests to move on when they’ve overstayed their welcome. Nature does this automatically. The darkness builds through the fall, and peaks at the Winter Solstice. And then the light returns. We can learn from nature, especially at the darkest time of the year.
But we have to do this work ourselves. There is no tilt to our axis that leans us away from the sun—and then towards it again as we revolve around it.
Luckily, we don’t have to do it alone.
We do it together, beloved. Together, we create winter magic. We sing, we light candles, we bear sacred witness to one another. May your life be filled with magic this winter.
Post-Election Message
Rev. Dr. Michael Tino
Lead Ministry Team, Church of the Larger Fellowship
The results of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election have been devastating for many of us. The election of Donald Trump to a second term as President is more than worrying for all of us grounded in a commitment to love and liberation — we know that his fascist and authoritarian agenda threatens the lives and well-being of many of us and our beloveds. The following message was shared online by Rev. Dr. Michael Tino on the day after the election.
November 6, 2024
Beloveds,
I am trembling today with grief and fear. I am finding it hard to breathe, even as I force myself to focus on ways of breathing meant to calm my body. I hugged my child extra long this morning as she left for school—it was all I could do at that moment.
I am reminded again and again of my relative privilege right now. My BIPOC friends remind me that this is exactly who the United States has always been. It doesn’t make it easier. I am mourning a nation that has never really existed, and knowing that doesn’t make the grief less.
Perhaps you are feeling some of this, too. Please know that you are not alone.
At some point, we will figure out what we need to do next to protect those who are most vulnerable right now. At some point, we will be part of a movement to save the lives of those who are threatened by the fascist agenda that won the day in yesterday’s US elections. That doesn’t need to be today (even if we know it’s coming).
Right now, I am reminding myself that I am part of a faith grounded in love. A faith that always has been and always will be profoundly counter-cultural. I am leaning on my faith ancestors to guide me, and I am trusting that my faith community will rise to the challenge presented to us.
I invite you to pray with me (or center yourself, or meditate):
O love that will not let us go, remind us of your presence now.
Remind us of your power now.
Remind us of your tenacity now.
Fill us with your strength that we might know ourselves connected to a love greater than we can imagine.
For we will need that love as we move forward together. Amen.
Yours in faith,
Rev. Michael
Quest November 2024
November 2024
“We must take care of our families, wherever we find them.” —Elizabeth Gilbert
Articles
Post-Election Message
The results of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election have been devastating for many of us. The election of Donald Trump to a second term as President is more than worrying for all of us grounded in a commitment to love and liberation — we know that his fascist and authoritarian agenda threatens the lives and ...Read more »
The Promises of Family
Family is one of those topics that can be both celebrated and filled with tension. Sometimes at the same time! Read more »
Download the full issue and read all articles on Issuu:
