Unitarian Universalists raise our kids to be imaginative. We encourage curiosity and out-of-the box thinking and we understand the value of a good story. We help fellow UUs of all ages to believe that how things are now isn’t how they must always be. But we need regular infusions of imagination juice: visioning conversations with friends, poetry, art, music, and story. These days, I’ve been enjoying fantasy audiobooks by TJ Klune and Becky Chambers. While driving around town and washing dishes, I’ve also been jumping through wormholes, making friends with other species, cheering with magical children as their foster dads fall in love, and following along as friendly ghosts wonder about what’s on “the other side.” These stories help me stay curious about the people around me. They help me inhabit possibility as I go about my regular life — and put me in a better mood.

Not all fiction stories have this effect, of course. I learned recently that season 6 of The Handmaid’s Tale is coming out. I shuddered, recalling the sick dread that came over me when I tried to read the book by Margaret Atwood a decade ago. When my housemates watched season 1, I plugged my ears. My low tolerance for stories with violence — be it physical, emotional, or structural — was affirmed when I began reading the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk. He taught the practice of mindful consumption, which includes both the physical foods we eat as well as the media we read, watch, and listen to. I nourish the seeds of compassion in my consciousness with good foods and avoid watering the seeds of fear, hate, and anger. Why would I watch a TV show that will make me feel sick? How could anyone else?

adrienne maree brown says this in her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (which is in our lending library):

We are in an imagination battle. Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous… Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. … I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.

Over the past months as violence in the real world has moved closer to home, the fictional stories I’ve avoided seem more and more realistic. The line between mindful consumption and avoiding reality has been shifting. I’ve opened up to the possibility that fictional stories of violence, even brutal depictions as in The Handmaid’s Tale, might support my deepening understanding of the truth and my calling in the world. Storytelling is a way to know and understand each other, and fiction about difficult topics gives us a bit of distance. Imagining how exploitation, abuse, courage, and integrity intertwine in a fictional setting has the potential to give us insight into our own resilience — past, present, and future. But we have to ask ourselves: When violence is depicted, does it traumatize us or manipulate us into patterns of domination or hopelessness? Or does it break open our hearts so we can feel deeper compassion for ourselves and others? Does it create possibility or narrow vision?

This month I encourage you to reflect on what media sources nourish your imagination and help you break free. What are your practices for consuming them mindfully? How does community help you heal from the trauma that inevitably shows up in the stories told around us? What “foods” are toxic to you, and how do you protect yourself from the ways they are deployed against you? 

Let us join together to engage our imagination and break free. 

Pastor Isabel