#257 | Exploring the Depths of the Christian Imagination: A Conversation with Malcolm Guite, Pt. 1

And suddenly, I mean, very much to my surprise.

Cause 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, 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, 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.

Welcome to those who Serve the Lord, a podcast for those at the front lines of ministry.

You've given your life to serve.

But what happens when the well runs dry?

If you've felt the weight of leadership, the tension between tradition and change, or the challenge of staying faithful while engaging.

Culture, you're not alone.

I'm Travis Michael Fleming, founder and executive director of Apollos Watered, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

I've been at the front lines for over 25 years, leading churches to become thriving testimonies of God's grace.

I've wrestled with the same questions you're facing, and I've seen how God brings renewal even in the hardest seasons.

Each week we have conversations with pastors, theologians, and cultural thinkers as we seek to equip you to lead well and stay rooted in Christ amid shifting cultural tides.

So grab your coffee and listen in, because your faith matters, your work is not in vain, and the Lord is.

Still with you every step of the way.

Welcome back to those who Serve the Lord.

I hope your summer is going well and that you found moments to rest and recharge wherever you are today, I'm thrilled to share one of our most talked about episodes.

We often hear from listeners about conversations that have resonated deeply or left lasting impact, but this particular conversation stands out Now.

I can't remember if it's the first part or the second part of the conversation that touches people so much, but I know this.

It's generated more responses than any other, and the overwhelming reaction is it's moved people to tears.

That might sound weighty, and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure why it strikes such a chord.

Perhaps it's because of the depth, the beauty, or the unexpected ways it speaks to the soul.

Whether it's the first part or the second that grips you most.

I can say this.

It's a conversation worth hearing.

It's with Malcolm Gyt, the priest, poet and scholar.

We recorded it a few years ago on St Patrick's Day, and we had a lot of fun doing it.

And it remains one of the most enlightening and encouraging dialogues we've ever shared.

At its heart, this episode is about cultivating a Christian imagination.

I'll let the conversation speak for itself from here.

So wherever you're listening from, I hope it blesses you as deeply as it has others.

Here's Malcolm Guy.

Happy listening.

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?

I am.

Okay.

Now, you're a musician, and 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 Dead Heads Experience, I mean, a very ironic name, of course.

Cause 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 folktale because it's a strong motif in folktales in every culture where the questing hero on his journey does a complete favor 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 in the story, he's magically helped to get across a 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 they were interested in folklore and anthropology.

And that's where the band'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.

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 psychedelic.

Okay, 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 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 Wharton for you, if you like.

He had this extraordinary journey back to a fully mature Trinitarian Christian faith and 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.

Okay, well, here's, 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 that'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 there's, you know, I used to listen to that Jimmy Buffett song Wasting Away Again in Margaritaville and my naivety as an Englishman listening to this in our rainy streets.

I thought Margaritaville was just some particularly laid back and louche 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 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 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 OD 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 as 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 Keats.

His head to a nightingale.

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.

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 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.

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, throughout the years.

Yeah, well, it's kind of.

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 and delight in them.

But.

So.

But I was born.

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 a one.

I was actually born in Nigeria.

And in fact, my first name is Ayudeji, 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 a 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 a strong and 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 bed clothes, as it were.

So I was a kind of atheist, existentialist.

And, you know, my favorite text was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Goddard.

And all that suited my moody adolescence.

But in the middle of all that, because they couldn't afford to fly me home and I was 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, 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 passed, 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, drunk, Lethe 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 says, suddenly after that Lethy woods had sunk, you know, the next line goes, do not throw 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, singest 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.

Cause you can't fully see all the other senses that you know.

I cannot tell what flowers are at my feet or what 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.

Cause 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 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 the biblical image.

I mean, Keats was not a believer.

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.

I read this poem, I took it home, read again.

I thought, whatever else is, 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 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, where 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.

Spilt, 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 Daoism and stuff like that.

But I came up to Cambridge really with poetry and imagined 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.

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've 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.

You open this little book, 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 form there.

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 the 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 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 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 antiphonally to God.

And I found that was the best part of my day, the pressure, as it were.

Of this presence was relieved by doing this.

But he made a very interesting condition.

He said to me, malcolm, at the end of every storm, 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 and said, look, Malcolm, I know perfectly well that you could describe.

You could 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, this guy knew more than he was saying.

He was a very devout Christian, devout 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 baby in the womb is, you know, utterly dependent on the umbilical cord.

And that even when the baby's born and the cord is cut, that can't even.

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 gonna say.

And in one sense, you'd be right.

Cause 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.

So God loves us enough, not only to become human, but to be born, to be this, to depend on the umbilical cord in measurement, to be the little child 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, that he becomes this wafer in your palm.

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 great matter.

You know, 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 Azlan's country of heaven is kind of running up waterfalls and getting higher and higher and closer to the source.

That was deeply attractive.

And I think that's a better picture of heaven than, you know, everybody standing around with a harp, singing hymns.

5084, you know, that was attractive.

And happily that proved to be the case.

You know, C.S.

lewis, St.

Augustine's one of his great dictate was credo ut intelligam, which means I believe in order to understand.

I won't arrive at belief by the.

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, as it turns out, brilliant and beautiful way of interpreting experience in the world.

And everything has to be re appraised 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.

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.

My walls are caught in words and while you sleep, I mark my go stand.

So think 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 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.

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 notice that there's all kinds of truth going on in man at the.

But then Coleridge and others noticed that, in fact, if you think about the senses, the materialist picture is that all the data, if you like, all the streams of sensation come in through the windows of the eyes 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 ras are a plank table.

That was part one of my conversation with Malcolm Guy.

I hope the conversation stirred something deep within you, whether it made you laugh or it stirred wonder, beauty, or simply a fresh glimpse of God's grace through the power of your imagination.

And there is so much more to come.

Like I said before, I couldn't remember if it was the first part of the conversation or the second part that touched people so much.

So if you found yourself weeping in this one, then it's the first part.

And if you didn't, well then you need to listen to the second.

And if this episode moved you, we'd love to hear from you.

Your stories and reflections help us to know how these conversations are making a difference.

And if you know someone who would be encouraged by what you just heard, consider sharing it with them.

Join us next week for the second part of the conversation.

It is sure to bless yours soul.

As always, we're here to help you water your faith so that you can water your world.

Until next time, stay rooted, stay refreshed, and keep serving the Lord with joy.

Thank you for joining us on today's episode of those who Serve the Lord, a podcast of Apollo's Watered the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

We trust that what you've heard has inspired and encouraged you in your walk of faith.

Remember, serving the Lord isn't just about what we do.

It's about who we are becoming in Him.

Whether in the small moments or the grand gestures, each step of service brings us closer to his heart.

If you found today's discussion meaningful, we invite you to share it with others who might be encouraged.

And don't forget to subscribe.

Subscribe and leave a review.

It helps spread the message to those.

Who need to hear it most.

Until next time, may you continue to serve the Lord with joy, humility, and a heart full of his love.

God bless you.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off.

Stay watered everybody.