Six impossible things before breakfast

Winter under cultivation
Is as arable as Spring
     Emily Dickinson

Sometimes, a poem is worth more than a long sermon, both those we hear and those we preach! I thought of this when reading a story to a group of preschool children recently at Old South Church. They are so ready, these four- and five-year-olds, to be enchanted, to make believe, to fashion sometimes outrageous stories into their lives. I give them a simple opening, asking whether they’d ever seen a real owl, since I had brought one of my favorite story books, Jane Yolen’s Owl Moon, to read with them. As soon as the question had settled in their minds for a flicker of time, their story-telling began. “Oh, yes,” quipped one bright-eyed five year old with an utterly serious look on her face. “An owl once flew into my house and sat right on my head!” She pointed out the exact place among the curls as if I’d missed the story, looking to me for reassurance that I’d understood what had happened. “Oh, you’re lucky,” I said, “I’ve never had an owl come into my house.” She gave me a curious look as if to say, “Well, why not? What’s wrong with your house?” And I knew in my own way what she did in hers: that magic can happen everywhere if you’re ready for it – if at times in an imagining that carries us beyond the only real toward the truly important. And which is better? The children don’t wonder, even if we adults are often hard-pressed to say.

We critical thinkers and hardened realists make the crucial work of imagining harder when we ask, “Really? Could that really have happened?” The children’s answer in such cases is usually “But it did happen; I just told you so!” And we begin to realize what they seem to know naturally, which is that it did somehow happen; it all depends on our readiness to risk “making believe,” our vulnerability to story. In our maturing years, we unlearn our natural capacity for the risk that imagination entails. We convince ourselves that the “real” is what is verifiable: we believe – and it is finally a matter of belief – that only the things we can touch and taste, see and hear, are truly real.

It is probably no wonder, then, that Jesus seemed to prefer children’s company to that of the stubborn, uncomprehending adults around him. For the children came to him as they always do with bright questions and an often absurd willingness to believe. After all, they were after the truth of story, story that mattered, story that made them larger and truer and more real. In their susceptibility to enchantments of one kind or another, they delight us, allowing us to indulge in a share of their fantasy. We delight in their capacity to make believe, these natural storytellers, without assuming them to be liars. The children in Jesus’ life and in ours are quite unlike Lewis Carroll’s skeptical Alice who regretted that “one can’t believe impossible things,” and more like the Queen who quipped that Alice must not have had “much practice”: “When I was younger,” she recalled, “I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

The imagination always stretches “the real” for the sake of some larger and, we might even say, truer truth. It lures us to see our world, to frame our lives, in more generous ways. The real question before us as adults is not whether what we believe is impossible, since the things worth giving our lives to are generally impossible or at least improbable – like love for the enemy or generosity toward the stranger. No, the deep question is a different one: whether our beliefs finally matter for the sake of others, whether they are true for the life of the world.

Jesus chided the disbelieving disciples: “Let those who have eyes to see, see.” The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas captures this point in a different way: “Ethics is the spiritual optics,” he suggests. That is, what we see depends upon how we look, and how we look has to do with what we desire to see. Our desires, like our beliefs, are the cradle of our morality, the heart of ethics. They invite us toward the good like wagers that call us to risk what might seem impossible – like mercy for wrongdoers, and forgiveness for our debtors – but is the only real path toward the greater good for all. Like “winter under cultivation” which, the poet reminds us, is “arable as spring.” Of this truth, or their imagining of it, the children are quite sure.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian in Residence, Old South Church (Boston)
Professor of the History of Christianity,
Andover Newton Theological School