Lonely Exile: A Daily Advent Devotional

Part Ten: Dreaming and Doing

“You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will live as one.”
― John Lennon, Imagine

Read: Isaiah 2:1-5

Before something becomes real it usually begins in the imagination. At some point somebody somewhere came up with the idea for the wheel. Can you imagine? One day, more than five thousand years ago, someone in Mesopotamia had an idea that, when it became reality, revolutionized the world. I’m sure the person (or people) who thought up the wheel could not have imagined in their wildest dreams what would become of their ground-breaking technology these thousands of years later. What began in the imagination entered our reality and changed the trajectory of human history.

All meaningful change begins in the human imagination. Another way to put it, before anything is ever created or innovated, somebody somewhere had a dream. This is not only true of technological change, but it’s also true of cultural and societal change. Dr. King’s dream led to 250,000 people gathering at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. The March on Washington is credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act less than a year later. Dr. King stood in a long tradition of prophets who imagined a different world and called others to join in making it so.

The prophet who wrote the first part of the book of Isaiah (chapters 1-39) also had an audacious dream—he envisioned a world that was free of violence. That sounds so naive and impossible, doesn’t? Especially in the United States, where we are more willing to sacrifice our children to gun violence than we are to enact common sense reform. Isaiah also dreamed his dream in a violent world. Swords becoming plowshares probably felt as unlikely for him as AR-15s becoming garden spades does for us. Yet, that’s where it must begin, in our dreams. If we can’t imagine it, we can’t create it. That’s true for iPhones and that’s also true for changing our world.

A prophet’s dream is a possibility, not a guarantee. The dream could only become a reality if the prophet invited others to participate in bringing that world into existence. In his book A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright puts the journey our species has been on into sobering perspective:

“ From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.”

Our ability to create ways to destroy ourselves has always seemed to outpace our species’ maturity. But, we are not fated to self-destruction. Whether through violence against our neighbor or enemy, or our violence against the planet we call home, the invitation of Advent, of the Jesus story, is to give up our addiction to violence as a solution and to embrace the path that leads to human flourishing. That is the world of which the prophets began to dream, and it’s the world we are invited to bring into our reality.

We’ve dreamed about it, and now, together, we need to do it.

Questions for Reflection:

Of what kind of world do you dream?
Does a world of peace and justice seem possible?
How can we begin, even in small ways, to bring that world into existence?