Ritual is a means for unlocking the imagination. That is why so many of us are uncomfortable with ritual, because we are uncomfortable with imagination. That is the way most of us have been trained.

Don't trust your imagination!

"It's only your imagination," was the manner our parents used to tell us to grow up.

"Grown-ups don't have imaginations" is what we now believe.

But how can you have faith without imagination?

Without imagination all you have is knowledge...boring, dull, deadening knowledge. Quite frankly, some of the most knowledgeable religious people I know have no faith.

They have rules. They have regulations. They have orders but no faith.

Worship for them is nothing more than indoctrination. Learn all the facts and then go out and beat people over the head with them.

That’s not spirituality. That’s somnambulism. That’s the living dead.

Worship should be a holy time of reveling in the wonder of God’s love. We do that not by denying the imagination but by unlocking it.

Remember that Jesus used imaginative stories to proclaim the Gospel, stories that often had no neat and tidy ending, no doctrinal dissertation.

Jesus used messy stories.

We use neat and tidy creeds.

Interesting choice.