If you’re in one of our covenant groups that uses the Soul Matters materials, you might be engaging in an exercise from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way this month. As we explore the practice of imagination, one invitation to our small groups is to imagine five alternate lives. These were meant to be inspiring, fulfilling kinds of alternate lives, not “it could be worse” kinds of alternatives. In Julia Cameron’s book, the imagined lives are all about what one might do, as if our being is defined by a career path or a job title. She writes:

If you had five other lives to lead, what would you do in each of them? I would be a pilot, a cowhand, a physicist, a psychic, a monk. You might be a scuba diver, a cop, a writer of children’s books, a football player, a belly dancer, a painter, a performance artist, a history teacher, a healer, a coach, a scientist, a doctor, a Peace Corps worker, a psychologist, a fisherman, a minister, an auto mechanic, a carpenter, a sculptor, a lawyer, a painter, a computer hacker, a soap-opera star, a country singer, a rock-and-roll drummer. Whatever occurs to you, jot them down. 

I happen to be fond of The Artist’s Way. But I push back a bit against this idea that being a computer hacker would somehow mean having a different life from being a belly dancer. Couldn’t one person be both? And couldn’t that computer hacking belly dancer also write children’s books? We create unnecessary limitations in our heads sometimes by how we label things. By how we label ourselves.

Then I begin to wonder, if a person isn’t defined by what they do, what is it that defines a life? If the same person could be a doctor and a performance artist and a scuba diver and a painter and any number of other things, what makes that person that person? Maybe it’s our way of being whatever it is we choose to do.

It’s true that we have to say no to some things in our lives. In order to say a powerful yes to something, there are other things that we must say no to. Certainly there are crossroads in our lives that are defined by the choices we make between two or more desirable things. And maybe too many of us imagine what if as a kind of regretful fear that we missed out on something, when we could focus our what ifs on how we move toward wholeness from wherever we happen to be in this moment.

And all of this business about imagined lives and alternate identities applies to a congregation as well. Who do we imagine ourselves to be? Do we draw unnecessary limitations around who we can become as a community? Are we collectively aware of what we say a powerful yes to, and what we must therefore say no to (perhaps trusting that whatever we say no to will be the very thing that another community embraces with the fullness of their being)?

What are the five imaginary lives of our congregation? Do we want to keep those lives imaginary? Or is there some way in which our imaginations are calling us toward a fuller expression of who we can be with/for one another and the world around us? 

I wonder if the alternate lives you imagine for our community are the same as what others imagine. Wouldn’t it be something if all of us held some vision in common for who we could be, but just didn’t realize that our imaginations all wistfully gazed toward the same possible future?  

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