#171 | Transfigure Your Imagination, Pt. 1 | Malcolm Guite

There was an extraordinary presence there. There was a holy presence. It's very difficult to describe. It's as though at one moment, you know, I was the center of things, which we all are.

When we look out, you know, we see the world revolving around us like that.

And the next moment, I was right out on the furthest possible edge of existence, kind of hanging by a thread, while the whole of existence itself was taken up by this immense, unalterable holiness, before which I felt I could do or say nothing, and on which I now realized I completely depended. Literally, like a creature hanging from a thread.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus. Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

When I use the word imagination, what do you think of? I mean, what comes to your mind? Maybe you think, oh, not real. That's just in your imagination. Or maybe you think of children.

They're playing a game like house, and they're pretending, and they're using their imagination. But when we think of imagination, we don't often think of things for adults.

Now, what if I were to tell you, though, that the imagination is hugely important to the Christian life? You know, I want to give you this quote, and I want you to see if you agree. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.

Imagination encircles the world. Do you agree or do you disagree? Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. But is imagination more important than knowledge?

Maybe it would help you if you knew who gave the quote. It was Albert Einstein. Pretty smart guy, last I checked. But the imagination actually plays a huge role in our lives and in our faith.

You may not think about it that way. I know I haven't.

I remember years ago walking into a bookstore in Chicago, and they had all these Christian books, and it talked about a Christian imagination. And I thought, what is that? You pretend you're a Christian. Like, I could not even wrap my mind around it. But the imagination is actually huge.

And over the years, I've started to see and understand how much the imagination does play in our understanding of the Christian life. So that's why I wanted to bring today's guest to you. He's a poet. Yes, it's our first poet that we've ever had on the show.

And this poet is also an Anglican priest and this poet actually had King Charles request his haunting poem Refugee about the harsh circumstances of Christ's birth be read at last Christmas's Royal Carol service. Today is part one of my conversation with the one and only Malcolm Guy. And you're going to understand why he is the one and only.

He's a British poet and recently retired chaplain at Cambridge.

And we talk about the arts, about his story, and about why our imagination is actually crucial to our faith and especially in regards to understanding Christ's mission. Because really we need to have a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing how to go about what God has us to go about.

I mean, of course there are the things that never change. Prayer, reading the word of God, living a holy lives, understanding the cross and the resurrection and the virgin birth.

All of these things never change. But how we communicate, where we communicate, the connecting points, those do shift. And we need to think differently.

And the problem is that we often get stuck and we don't know how to get out of it. And this is where the imagination comes in. It helps us to, to think differently, to have a paradigm shift.

And if you are like us, you are looking for a paradigm shift, you are looking for something more. And if this actually rings true with you, then join us so we can do this together.

You see, we need watering partners who can help us in this paradigm shift. Difference makers who are willing to go against the current of the status quo.

And if that's you, just click the link in the show notes, select the amount that works for you, whether it's a one time gift or becoming a monthly watering partner. And know that by doing so you're joining a movement to water thirsty souls and renew the church wherever it's found.

Now let's get to my conversation with the one and only Malcolm Gite. Happy listening. Malcolm Gite. Welcome to Apollo's Watered.

Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be able to join you tonight.

One of the ways that we start off the show is with our fast five. Are you ready?

Bam.

Okay, now you're a musician. Many people know that. I mean anyone that follows you know that. But in your opinion, the greatest musician.

Of all time is, well, composer Mozart, Instrumentalist Clapton.

Oh, you were prepared for that question. Have you had it before?

No, never.

Okay, well how about this one? If you could travel with any rock group from all time, who would it be and why?

Oh, the Grateful Dead, without question, because their whole group was about community. There was scarcely a distinction between the band and the fans.

And I Think that that experience, the Deadheads experience, I mean, a very ironic name, of course, because you could scarcely find people more alive. But of course, Grateful Dead were called not, you know, in some kind of awful death metal way or anything like that.

The phrase the Grateful Dead is a phrase that cultural anthropologists use and also historians of folk tale because it's a strong motif in folktales in every culture where the questing hero on his journey does a complete favor by. By burying a dead person who's not been given proper honors. You know, he helps the widow bury her husband or whatever.

He does it where there's no possibility of return.

And then later on on the story, he's magically helped to get across the river or to, you know, and it turns out that he's been blessed by the Grateful Dead, those whom you've helped, you know, who are grateful. So that's. They. They. They were interested in, you know, folklore and anthropology, and that's where. Where the man's name originally came from.

So it's founded in mutuality and gratitude. And I think that would be the best on the road experience, I think.

Huh. I had no idea.

I need the substances, of course, because I have faith. But, you know, faith is also mind expanding, which is the true meaning of psychedelics.

Okay, number. Number three, how about this one?

Who is the one historical figure, not a biblical figure, but just historical figure that you would love to have a conversation with?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge? Why, he was one of the greatest conversations.

I mean, his prose and poetry are marvelous, but everybody says that his conversation was just extraordinary. He had this extraordinary flow. His face was animated when he spoke. He had read everything, he'd thought deeply about everything.

He could converse on any topic.

There's a famous story that when he was trying to get back from Malta at the height of the Napoleonic wars and was in fact on Napoleon's personal hit list because of his journalism, he ended up going through Rome with an American naval captain. And afterwards the American naval captain was said, what was it like being with Samuel Taylor Coleridge?

And he said, I ain't heard nothing like it since Niagara Falls. So there's Apollos watered for you, if you like.

He had this extraordinary journey back to a fully mature Trinitarian Christian faith in the second half of his life. And I wrote a long book on Coleridge's poem, the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, just called Mariner A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

So he's a great hero of mine.

How many books have you written? That's not one of my questions, but how many books have you written?

I think it's about 16. There's a lot, counting collaborations with artists and things like that. But yeah, I think there are 16 books with my name on the spine, as it were.

It's a lot, but. Okay, well, here's your next question. You've been to the States several times, but what's the one food you have come to love in the States?

Now, there's a good question, I think. I think tacos, actually, you know, because we don't have Mexican food here in quite the same way.

We have Indian food, we have fantastic Indian curries. But I quite like Mexican, I have to say. I also.

I mean, I normally drink either beer or whiskey, but I have to say I finally found out on a trip to San Diego what a margarita actually is. And this. You know, I used to listen to that Jimmy Buffett song wasting away again in Margaritaville. And I.

My naivety as an Englishman listening to this in our rainy streets. I thought Margaritaville was just some particularly laid back and loose place somewhere in Florida.

I had no idea that it was more a state of mind than a state of the United States. And so I was very. It was a great revelation when I finally had my first margarita.

And where was that at?

It was in San Diego.

San Diego, okay.

Not the home of the margarita, but, you know, I nevertheless had what I now know to have been a very good one.

Oh, that was not an answer that I was expecting, but that's okay. Okay, how about this one? If you could be one piece of literature, not your own, what piece of literature would you be and why?

I would be Keats, his Ode to a Nightingale. Because I think it's almost the most perfect poem in English just for the sheer sound of it.

Because it moves from a place of desolation towards a place of vision, or at least the possibility of vision. And because it has, strangely, just towards the back of the poem, this extraordinary image for which there's no logical presence. It just appears.

Where Keats talks about magic casements, windows, magic casements opening on perilous seas in fairylands forlorn.

And that image, which I first came across when I was a very sort of rather depressed and homesick teenager when I read it, opened up poetry to me and opened up somewhere within poetry a spiritual possibility. So, yeah, if I had to be something, I'd be Keecher's Ed to a Nightingale. Let's say it's a piece of pure perfection.

I've never read it But I want to.

Oh, it's just astonishing.

Every time I've watched any of your videos online, there's all these things that I'm like, well, when am I going to get to that? I want to read that. I want to read that. There's so much.

He was such a young man when he wrote it as well. I mean, he died the age of 25 or 26 of tuberculosis, and he had this sudden flowering a couple of years before his death.

He'd been an okay poet, and then suddenly, over two years, he became a transcendentally great poet. And then he died, you know. But Nightingale is, I think, the most perfect of his five great odes.

Well, watching your videos online, hearing about your poetry, reading your books, I want to hear a little bit of your biography. And I found this, by the way, in your wiki entry.

Yeah, I have no idea who wrote that.

I don't know, but it's the most. It's the most entertaining, insightful wiki I've ever heard in my life. This is what they wrote.

What would happen if John Donne or George Herbert journeyed the Middle Earth by way of San Francisco, took musical cues from Jerry Garcia and fashion tips from Bilbo Baggins, and wrote on the back of a Harley?

Actually, that pretty much covers the bases. I have to say.

That's the funniest, funniest thing I've ever seen for a description of somebody.

Yeah, it's funny, sometimes people use that as an introduction to my lectures and I think, like, well, where do I go from here?

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Get one today because understanding the Bible changes everything. And the NLT is the Bible you can understand. Well, tell us a little bit about your biography for those that aren't familiar with you.

I mean, you're very well known, you've written a lot of books, you know.

Yeah, well, it's. It's kind of. It's. I mean, everybody's story is a strange and interesting story, if one really takes it seriously.

And we'll hear them all in full, in heaven, delight in them. But. So. But I was born. I. I was.

People think of me as a very sort of, you know, almost a quintessential English professor, which I suppose in some respects I am, but I'm not. It's not the usual biography for such one.

I was actually born in Nigeria, and in fact, my first name is Ayodeji, which is a Yoruba name, which means the second joy, or joy again. And my father was a lecturer in classics, Greek and Latin out there, but also Methodist local preacher.

So I spent the first 10 years of my life in Africa, first in Nigeria and then in Zimbabwe, Rhodesia, as it was then. And that influenced me a lot, I think, in terms of just having a different, slightly different perspective on things. I loved my time there.

I had a happy childhood.

Then we went to Canada and around my teens, and just as I would have been getting ready to go into high school in Canada, my parents felt that I was losing my British identity, which is quite funny because I scarcely had one. I mean, we used to go back each year to England, you know, in the vacation. So I kind of knew my English and Scottish relatives, but.

So they shipped me off, which is a kind of habit of the English middle classes. They shipped me off to a boarding school in London. The school itself, it was part of a day school.

The day school itself was a great school and I had a fantastic education there. But the boarding school was just a small house of 60 boys who weren't very happy to be there and a few masters who weren't happy to be there either.

So it wasn't a very happy place. But somehow in the course of that, by the time I'd got into what's called the sixth form there, where you can really specialize.

We specialize earlier than in the States. You only do the last two years of high school. You're only effectively doing three subjects, one of which will be your university degree.

So I did English and history and French.

I was very fortunate to win a scholarship To Cambridge, to Pembroke College, when I went up in 77, in the course of the trauma of going to the boarding school, and also the usual traumas of adolescence and stormy youth and questioning, of all things, I lost my faith, or I think I probably fairly well discarded it. And it had been quite strong, a natural faith. Both my parents believe in Christians, which is a great blessing.

From my sort of early teens onwards, I became a very rigid atheist. We didn't have Dawkins so much then, but the big sort of materialist, behaviorist type person was an American called B.F. skinner.

I was, I'm afraid, a fairly precocious boy. And I was reading the Scientific American.

And I was also reading French philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and, you know, Camus under the bedclothes, as it were. So I was a kind of atheist, existentialist. And, you know, my favorite text was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for God, Air.

And all that suited my moody adolescence.

But in the middle of all that, because they couldn't afford to fly me home and some holidays, I would just be farmed out to relatives, one of these relatives dragged me along and literally dragged me. I didn't want to go. I didn't know what it was about.

Dragged me along to Keats's house on Hampstead Heath, the house where indeed he heard the nightingale and wrote the poem. And I read this poem in the place where it was written, and I was, as I say, a very moody teenager. And the poem was up on a wall in the room.

In fact, the manuscript in which she'd written it. Yeah, you may.

I don't think you know the poem, but it has this very sort of dark, low, kind of numbing start, which is where Keats is at, until the nightingale sings, it begins. And my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.

One minute pass, and Lethe words had sunk. Lethe, of course, the river of forgetfulness in Hades. I was just, like, ticking every box there, like, dull ache, sunk, drawing leafy pain.

And I was going, like, oh, yeah, I'm with you, man. Like, I totally get this. And then, of course, the poem suddenly changes, and he has. And he says, suddenly after that, Lethy woods had sunk.

You know, the next line goes, tis not through envy of thy happy happiness of thy happy lot does not through envy of thy happy lot, but being too happy in thy happiness that thou light winged dryad of the trees in some melodious plot of Beech and green and shadows numberless singlest of summer in full throated ease. I thought, what was that? I mean, just amazing. It's beautiful. And of course, you know, it's a very sensual poem.

He goes out into the garden to follow the sound of the nightingale. And it's dusk and you get this incredible because you can't fully see.

All the other senses are heightened, you know, I cannot tell what flowers are at my feet or what song Soft incense hangs upon the boughs, but in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet suit wonderful. And then as he goes on, his mind goes to thinking about the immortality of the nightingale.

And the nightingale by this time has become, although he almost knows it, not a full emblem of his soul. You know, because Keats is writing this poem, he's already got a death sentence.

He knows he's got tuberculosis, you know, so then he says, thou art not born for death, immortal bird no hungry generations tread this thee down. The voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by empress and clown. And then suddenly, out of nowhere comes a biblical image.

I mean, Keats was not a believer. His both his parents had died young, his brother was dying. He saw no good in the kind of stuffy churches around him. He vaguely.

And he knew the Bible, he knew the vocabulary.

So suddenly, in the middle of this poem, he imagines Ruth standing in the field of corn, hearing the nightingale that he's heard the self same voice that heard found its way into the sad heart of Ruth when sick for home. She stood in tears amidst the alien corn. And I was just feeling so homesick, like it really spoke to me.

And then of course he says, perhaps this bird, this voice will open these magic casements on perilous seas in fairylands forlorn. And then he comes back to himself and says, forlorn. The very word is like a bell that tolls me back. But he can still hear the nightingale.

And it goes further. It seems to be calling him beyond himself. And of course, the famous last line of that poem flared. Is that music? Do I wake or sleep?

There's the possibility of a complete spiritual awakening being offered in this poem. And I stood, you know, having been and read the poem and was astonished.

And then I read it again and I fel that very possibility, that renewal opening up. And one of the things I thought about, you know, on the bus on the way home was that this really blew apart my worldview.

Up to that point, I was willing to say that everything that happens in the brain is no different of chemical reaction than one that happens in a test tube.

It's just a series of meaningless events that have accidentally given rise to this epiphenomenon of brief consciousness that means absolutely nothing in an indifferent universe that cares nothing for us. It's just a result of blind chance. You know, we're all sort of billiard balls on a table of action and reaction. That's what I thought.

And then until that moment, and then I read this poem, I took it home. Reading it, I thought, whatever else is happening when I read this poem, it's a bit more than the unwinding of a selfish gene.

This isn't just enzymes and neurons firing. Something else completely transcendent is going on here.

Now, I didn't immediately become a Christian or call it religion or bring God in, but what it did, it was like a kind of little green plant coming up and breaking open. I mean, a lot of people are no longer stuck in the kind of.

But if you think about the rigid materialism of the 20th century and, you know, everything being explained away by Freud or Marx or. Or Darwin or Newton, you know, the way Rainbow everything was reduced to this mere kind of pointless series of physical level activities.

And there was not supposed to be any level other than the physical level. Or if you thought there was, it was delusory or it was private and subjective, but wasn't to do with the objective truth.

And here is a thing that really objectively happened.

So what happened then at that point for me, is that, if you like, poetry became my new religion, or perhaps I could say harshly my substitute religion. But C.S. lewis used to like to quote the saying that Romanticism is spilled religion.

It's something that was once held beautifully and in balance in the kind of chalice of the faith. And when people lost the faith, little bits of that.

Little bits of that deep yearning, little bits of that sense that there's a beauty which is so transcendent that must speak of a world beyond this one. All those things were sort of gathered up by the Romantic poets. Spilled, did they? But know it from the communion table of the Christian faith.

But at least they gathered a bit. I mean, and you know, if romanticism is spilt religion, at least a bit of spilt religion is better than no religion at all.

So I was spiritually opened up in some sense. And of course I became a great seeker and went into all kinds of things and read about Zen and Taoism and stuff like that.

But I came up to Cambridge, really, with poetry and imagining the poetic imagination itself. As the most positive thing in my life.

And then in Cambridge, of course, I decided to study Medieval and Renaissance literature, which was what Lewis was chair of. I mean, Lewis was after my. Was before my time, but his presence, in a sense, was still there.

And my very sensible director of studies said, well, you can't seriously read medieval poetry unless, first of all, you obviously read the Bible. And secondly, you won't understand Renaissance literature or English Renaissance literature if you don't read the Book of Common Prayer.

But also you need to read certain classics. You need to read St.

Augustine's Confessions at the very least, if not the City of God, and you should probably read some Bernard of clairvaux and some St. Francis as well.

So I started reading these great Christian texts, allegedly as a background to the understanding of English literature, but of course, I found them deeply compelling, and Augustine in particular, because one of the bad things about my atheism now shed into agnosticism at the time, was that it depended, like so much modern thought, on what Lewis rightly called chronological snobbery, on the idea that, you know, because we've been able to invent digital watches, we must be. We must be cleverer than Plato, you know, and this is not the case.

We become very good at certain minute and peripheral things whilst completely ignoring the deepest matters of life and soul and death and, you know, judgment and redemption and all those huge things to which we ought to pay attention, you know, but instead, you know, we have iPhones. But once I started reading St. Augustine, you know, it was a little paperback translation of Penguin Classics.

So you open this little book, and opening that little book was like opening. You know, if you go into one of the great cathedrals, there's a great door.

Of course, there's usually a little door in the door that you actually open and go through to get into the cathedral.

And opening the covers of this little paperback book was like walking innocently through a little door that you could hold in your hand and then finding yourself in this vast, spacious, beautiful realm of the mind of St. Augustine.

And when you do that, you realize you can never again say Christians must be stupid to believe, or, you know, believing in Christianity as intellectual suicide, or any of the things I thought it was, because here was a mind that was manifestly greater than my own and had previously not been a Christian and had been a perfectly good, you know, rhetorician, which is essentially what I was studying, the way language works. And he would come almost dragging himself, but had come to discover that Christianity was true.

And of course, he'd Come to discover it partly through his experiences of beauty. The most famous passage apart from our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.

In Augustine is probably the one where he says, late, late, have I loved you. Beauty, always ancient, always new. You know, I sought for you without you, with all those lovely things.

So I began, as it were, to feel that there might be more to Christianity than I thought there had been. And I found it in a very attractive format.

But also, I was just having essentially transcendent experiences reading poetry, which was often by Christians. So I could probably say again, along with Lewis, there's quite a strong parallel, in fact, in the way my mind developed in my faith came about.

Lewis effectively says in surprise by joy, that his imagination was baptized before he was. And that the rest of them just took a little longer to catch up. And that's kind of what happened to me in the end.

I was humming and erring and saying, well, I might be just making all this up, or it's a compensatory fantasy, all those kinds of things.

But then one day, towards the end of my second year at university, I was reading the Book of Psalms again, not as a devotional exercise, because at that point I didn't believe, but in order to understand European poetry. I mean, because the Book of Psalms, together with the Song of Songs, are one of the great sources for the whole poetic endeavor.

And I was reading Psalm 145, you know, where it says, the Lord is near to all who call upon him. And again, that he is near to all, such as fall. And suddenly.

I mean, very much to my surprise, because as far as I was concerned, I was reading aloud, because that's how you read poetry. And I was reading this Psalm. And suddenly and unequivocally, just undeniably, I was not alone in the room. There was an extraordinary presence there.

There was a holy presence. It's very difficult to describe. It's as though at one moment I was the center of things, which we all are.

When we look out, we see the world revolving around us like that.

And the next moment, I was right out on the furthest possible edge of existence, kind of hanging by a thread, while the whole of existence itself was taken up by this immense, unutterable, unalterable holiness, before which I felt I could do or say nothing. And on which I now realized I completely depended. Literally, like a creature hanging from a thread.

I mean, sometime later I found the passage in Isaiah that says, you know, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord Lifted up and mighty, and his train filled the temple. And when Isaiah has that experience, he doesn't say, wow, I've had a religious experience. I must be a very holy guy.

I think I'll go and start a cult in California. He doesn't say that. You remember what he says? He says, woe is me, for I'm a man of unclean lips, and I come from a tribe of unclean lips.

And I've seen the Lord like I'm. I should so not be here is basically. And that was my experience. Now, of course, as you know, in the story in Isaiah, God knows that he feels.

And the angel takes the. The coal of fire from the.

The blazing fire of God's very presence and love and touches his tongue with it, you know, and he's cleansed because he felt his tongue was the thing that was not clean. And maybe that's a foreshadowing of communion. You can think about it in different ways. But anyway, I had this experience and I kind of hoped.

I mean, to be honest, I hoped it would go away. I was hoping that this was some sort of episode and that it would be like the flashbacks were clear, but actually they didn't.

In fact, they got more intense.

So in the end, I did that thing you have to be really desperate to do, which is I went and saw my college chaplain and said, look, I'm having these experiences. Do you think there's anything you could do about it? You know, and he was very good. He was brilliant. I mean, he just.

He said, well, first of all, your mind, in self defense, will try to relativize this. Like you've tried to relativize and explain away everything else, like science tries to explain away everything.

But this is a real experience and you better pay attention to it. And he said, I think it's very clear what's happened. He said, you've taken the name of the Lord in vain.

You were speaking the Psalms, did you but know it too. And in the presence of one who you thought wasn't there, but he was there, and he's made his presence clear.

And he said, I think the best thing you can do is return not only to that Psalm, but to all the other Psalms. And this time turn to face the Holy One and say the Psalms to him. You know, he's given you words to speak.

And so he said, look, nobody ever comes to this chapel, but I say morning prayer and evening prayer in every morning and evening regardless. And morning prayer and evening prayer are essentially the Psalms with a Bit of topping and tailing.

So you come every morning and we'll say these psalms together and Tiffany, to God. And I found that was the best part of my day. The pressure, as it were, of this presence was relieved, you know, by doing this.

But he made a very interesting condition.

He said to me, malcolm, at the end of every psalm, as a Christian priest, I'm a Christian believer, I'm going to say, glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. And I don't think you should say that. You may know something perhaps, of the Father, but you know nothing of the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And you've already got into enough trouble with taking the Father's name in vain, so I wouldn't recommend that. And then I was about to answer him. He said, look, Malcolm, I know perfectly well that you could describe.

You can probably recite the Nicene Creed and you can describe Augustine's trinitarian theology to me, but that's not the kind of knowledge I'm talking about. So just hold back from that until the right time. So I did this for some weeks.

And then a friend of mine, with whom I was also studying literature, told me that there was a really interesting event happening in Cambridge.

It was actually at the Catholic chaplaincy that a Franciscan friar, contemporary Franciscan friar, but, you know, in the Brown habit and everything, was going to be giving a series of talks to which all students were welcome. And he said, look, this is exactly what happened in the Middle Ages. This is exactly how the university started. Yeah, preaching friars, the.

The Franciscans and the Black friars.

You know, we could go along to that and, like, see it happening in our own day, and it'll really help us to understand how Chaucer and people got, you know, their ideas. So, again, it was allegedly a bit of background. I mean, I think this guy knew more than he was saying.

He was a very devout Christian about Roman Catholic, and he. Anyway, there was a Franciscan friar who was speaking, was utterly brilliant. There was a guy called Eric Doyle in heaven now.

But so I went along, you know, and he started talking about dependence and vulnerability. And I remember I said this image. I felt like I was hanging by a thread.

I knew now that my entire existence was contingent on the will and the love and the look of another who was God, and that I wasn't making. And I was no longer the center of anything. I was hanging by this thread.

So this guy started talking about how A babe in the womb is utterly dependent on the umbilical cord. And that even when the baby's born and the cord is cut, it hasn't even got the muscles to turn itself over.

All it can do really is cry and hope that some parent will hold it tenderly. And I thought, God, I know what this is like. And then he turned.

He could have been looking at me, said, now, he said, you think that I'm going to say that that's how we are as creatures in the mere creatures, mortals in the face of a transcendent Creator. That's what you think I'm going to say. And in one sense, you'd be right, because he is the Creator and we are the creature, and we do depend.

But what I really want to say to you is that that transcendent God loves us so much that He Himself has become one of us, that he has become as dependent as that tiny babe. And he said, because he's love. And he knows you cannot love from a position of power. You cannot love from above. You cannot love anybody.

It's a terrible relationship where one person holds all the cords.

And so God loves us enough not only to become human, but to be born, to be this, to depend on the umbilical cord in marriage, to be the little child in the. In the straw. And that's how you feel about God.

But God in his utter love becomes as vulnerable as you are in Christ and comes and pleads to you to turn to him and suffers with you and for you. And in fact, he becomes so defenseless. I mean, he went on so, you know, that he becomes this. This wafer in your palm.

You know, when you could take that, you could tear it in pieces, you could spit on it, you could grind it under your heel. He has no defenses. That's why he's nailed to a cross. He cannot possibly strike you. And he who is almighty comes in all weakness to win your love.

And somehow, in the midst of his saying all of that, the penny dropped. And it's not that I ceased to think of God as all holy, but I also suddenly realized that God was here and within.

And actually, for the first time in my life, I think I felt it was okay to be human, that it was adequate to be human.

I mean, even my atheism was a very grim sort of atheism, which said there's a vast cosmos of innumerable stars and you're one tiny speck of accidentally thinking dust on the edge of it, meaning nothing. You know, you felt completely inadequate to be human in that kind of gigantist atheism.

So for the first time hearing this Gospel of the Incarnation, I felt it was okay to be human. And I felt I could turn in a new way to this God who was holy but was also incarnate, imminent as well as transcendent.

And I understood something of the movement of the Spirit between the two. So I went back to the chaplain and said, I think I can say the Gloria now. And he prepared me for confirmation.

What happened after that?

All kinds of things.

One of the things that I'd been most afraid of about Christianity, when I began to realize that intellectually and imaginatively, I was moving closer towards it, though I don't think I would have ever got there if God hadn't intervened in the way that he did when I was reading the psalm. But one of the things that I feared about the whole possibility of becoming a Christian again was.

I mean, I had feared that it would be intellectual suicide. And I knew now from Augustine that it wouldn't be. But I was afraid of stasis, do you know what I mean? Of everything coming to a full stop.

That, you know, I found the answer. I've ticked the box, I've said the prayer. You know, there need be no further disturbance of the gray matter. You know, I.

That idea, which was, I have to say, an impression that some ardent young Christians gave me that they'd now found the solution to everything. They were absolutely right about everything. Everybody else was absolutely wrong about it, and they wouldn't question it in any way.

I didn't like that I found that repellent. The only thing that kept me going was some sense that that might not be the case. Actually was the End of the last battle by C.S. lewis.

Because in the course of all that, I also reread all the Narnia books and that great cry further up and further in. And that picture of Aslan's country of Heaven is kind of running up waterfalls and getting higher and higher and closer to the source.

And happily that proved to be the case. You know, C.S. lewis, Saint Augustine's.

One of his great dictate was Credo Uchintelegan, which means, I believe in order to understand I won't arrive at Belief by the act of understanding, because belief is transcendent, it comes as a gift. But now I believe I've got somewhere to think from.

I've got a new and it turns out brilliant and beautiful way of interpreting experience in the world. And everything has to be reappraised and reimagined in the light of faith.

You reread all the literature you loved, including non Christian literature, and you find all kinds of movements of the spirit in it. You listen to all the albums you've loved again, you think, oh, wow, you know.

So what began then and has continued to this day was a great new, as it were, intellectual and imaginative work of discovery and rediscovery in which I get out of this kind of imminent frame, materialist mindset, and begin to see everything in the light of Christ. And then, of course, you start reading epistles like Colossians and you say, you know, he's the first of all things.

In him, all things cohere, all things hold together, everything. You know, it became an intellectual adventure. But of course it also was a challenge morally.

And I needed to lay everything down at the feet of Christ and take some things up again and not others. And all of that had to be done, you know, but. And I was a schoolteacher for a while. I thought that was what I was called to do.

And then I thought maybe I was called to preach. So I became a lay preacher, a lay reader. But eventually I realized that God was in fact calling me to the priesthood.

And I also realized that that deep desire I'd had ever since the Keats experience to be a poet myself was also part of that calling. And it took me a while to work out how priesthood and poethood as it were, worked together.

George Herbert, of course, and John Donne were extremely helpful in that. They were both Anglican priest poets. So I realized this was a thing.

And one of the things that had kept me from thinking I should be ordained was I couldn't see anybody among the clergy of the Church of England at the time I was thinking about it that looked or felt remotely like me. But on the other hand, I thought, if there's space for John Donne, who's a great love poet, but also, then there must be a niche for me somewhere.

One of the advantages of that, actually was that I've ended up having three goes at Cambridge rather than one, because I was there at the end of the 70s to read English literature and Then I was there at the end of the 80s to do theology. And then at the end of the 90s, I came back to be a chaplain and a lecturer.

And I've sort of been there ever since, except I retired from Cambridge a couple of years ago, allegedly. So, yeah, that's a little bit of an arc. All my walls are covered in words.

And while you sleep I mark my.

Goals and so earth and clear don't.

Let them see a hint of fear. Let's talk about imagination, because I. I did read your book Lifting the Veil. Imagination, the kingdom of God.

Yeah.

And why is it so important for us to even cultivate and talk of this imagination? Why is it such an important question for today?

I think we have to begin by clearing up a common misunderstanding. Because we use the word imaginary to mean something completely made up and not the case.

We can sometimes think if people talk about imagination or as Keats said, the truth of imagination, they think we're just wishfully thinking that stuff we make up might be true. And that's not what we're doing. We just have to say that at the outset.

Now, once we've said that, we can then say, but isn't it interesting how in a play or a story or a piece of art or music, you get a form or shape or a pattern which suddenly allows you to understand and realize and be moved by all kinds of really true things? You know, the story of War and Peace or Les Miserables or Hamlet or anything, you know, might be made up stories.

But everybody who's been there in the way some of those characters speak, everybody's felt, at least at some part, you know, what Hamlet felt when he said, to be or not to be. That is the question. You know, everybody knows what, what. What it is to love someone and lose them and that.

And be forced apart by parental politics and a kid's, you know. And when Hamlet says to Ophelia, nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.

Okay, There isn't a person actually called Hamlet, and there isn't a person but that moment of bitterness and parting and confusion when suddenly, out of nowhere, Hamlet the doubter asks for his ex girlfriend's prayers. That's real. Yeah.

Yeah, it is.

And so we noticed that there's all kinds of truth going on in Man Up.

But then Coleridge and others notice that, in fact, if you think about the senses, you know, the materialist picture is that all the data, if you like, all the streams of, you know, sensation come in through the windows of the eyes and the. And the vibrations of the ears and are somehow printed on us kind of as they are. As though we were, as the old people said, the tabla.

Rather a blank table.

How's that for an ending place? Obviously, my conversation with Malcolm didn't stop there.

In fact, his thoughts on the importance of our imagination were actually just getting started. I wanted to give you a sneak peek of where we were headed, though, next time.

At the same time, I wanted to pause for a second and just think for a moment about Malcolm's story.

There's a reason why we do the Fast five on this show, because we want not only to hear what they have to share with us, but about their lives, who they are and how their lives actually shape their own story and their thoughts. That actually brings it out even further. It can be easy to just skip past those things.

And I actually think that's one of the big problems in our world today. We just want to get to the good stuff because we're so busy, but in doing so, we actually dehumanize the people around us.

We could have edited his bio down and just included the questions like the last one in this episode, but we didn't do so on purpose. The stories, our stories are the things that actually shape us. They truly do matter. Your story matters.

Malcolm's story is, in a very real sense, the poem of God, his faith. It's not an abstract idea. It is not something pent up in a church building on a Sunday. It's his life.

His faith makes sense of the entire world he inhabits. It is not static, but always further up and further in.

It's not by coincidence that the Bible is filled with the stories of people who encounter God, like Moses or Elijah. We have Jeremiah and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Daniel. And they do so not because they are good or holy, but sometimes in and through their failings.

Jacob is shady at best. I mean, Moses is found by God in the backside of the desert after he fled Egypt because he killed somebody. And let's not get started on David.

The point, though, is not the problems of these people. It's that God loved them anyway. Loved them enough to pursue them. That is the story of Christ.

A couple of weeks ago, we ran a conversation with Vishal Mangalwadi. In it, he complained that the church has been captivated by story and not truth, that we have jettisoned authority.

And while I do think there is a certain amount of truth that he has pointed out to us because we have in many respects jettisoned authority in a variety of places. But in this instance, I don't think he's completely right. We find ourselves differing from him.

Guide actually points us to how More in the next episode. Truth and story are not opposed, just like truth and poetry are not opposed.

Stories, poems, music, any art, really, can be untrue, can mislead, but then so can statistics, right? I mean, what's the saying? Lies. Damn lies and statistics.

But as my friend Kevin o' Brien likes to say, stories are the most important things humans do. Stories are the way God communicates himself to us most intimately. Jacob comes face to face with God in a wrestling match at Bethel.

Moses, a burning bush. Isaiah, as Malcolm reminds us in a hot, cold touch to his lips in the very throne room of God. Stories do convey truth.

We tell stories about ourselves to ourselves all the time. We're always looking for another narrative, something to compare ourselves to. Because in it we find meaning, we find our place.

And that's where we also discover deep truth.

If we let these stories shape us, and I'm not talking about the stories we tell ourselves, but the stories that God tells us about who he is and about who we are. And if we seek to tell the truth in them, we'll see it even further. Malcolm's story brought him face to face with the vast holiness of God.

And then in turn, in fact, the transcendent Creator became one of us, vulnerable. Like us, the Almighty comes at all weakness to win our love. What could be more true than that?

What could require more imagination than to think of that?

Next time we will continue our discussion of imagination, why we have neglected it, and how it is a gift of God central to being creatures made in his image. But as they say, until next time, I want to thank our Apollos Watered team for helping water the world.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollos Watered. Stay watered, everybody.

Sam.