What is the greatest nation on earth?

That intriguing question is scrawled in chalk on a small blackboard outside the Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore in Paris. Having the question asked of you while in France presupposes an answer that would certainly not surprise any Parisian. Anyone who has traveled much in that particular country is well aware of the persistent attitude among the French that assumes that such an inquiry's response is obvious and utterly indisputable.

Which is all the more reason why the answer to this question was so surprisingly refreshing when I read further down the board and saw scrawled...imagi-nation.

This great nation comes to mind while watching dozens of neighborhood children heading off to their first few days of school. I remember those very early days. I wore a smock made up of one of my father's old dress shirts put on backward. There were jars and jars filled with richly colored paint and we were free to slap and slosh their contents onto our paper in just about any way we wished. Sailboats, racing cars, portraits of Mom and more were recognizable only to the individual artist. We were citizens of the greatest nation on earth.

So one cannot help but wonder what it is that happens to us that has such citizenship removed so early on in our lives. Picasso said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Our failure to solve that problem has, I am convinced, brought more destruction to this planet than all our bombs combined.

Some of you may remember from your more imaginative days reading George Bernard Shaw's play, "St. Joan". In it, the sainted young woman is being interrogated as to the legitimacy of her claim to hear the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret calling her to battle. When someone dismisses her assertion as being nothing more than a product of her imagination, she replies, "Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us."

Although I'm not sure I'd be willing to burn at the stake for it, I do share St. Joan's conviction. I know in my own work, I have often encountered people who see imagination as the enemy of religious faith. That child-like freedom to see things in ways that others might not is viewed as not just dangerous but damnable. Nothing can so quickly and efficiently kill the imagination as rules for right thinking and our world is filled with such regulations. I cringe each time I hear someone, so convinced of the certainty of their assumptions, claim to hold the truth firmly within their grasp. Such an attitude, I tend to believe, disallows hearing any messages from God.

Watching the kids, I wonder who among them will be the first to be expelled from the best nation on earth. Will it be that little guy with the new lunch box and matching backpack? Perhaps a teacher will unintentionally start the emigration process by gently suggesting that his pictures might be better if they made more sense or his stories might get a better grade if they stuck to the facts? Maybe the little girl riding her bike has a parent so certain of right and wrong, fact and fiction, that she will never get a chance to discover the truth for herself.

Isn't it odd that we often speak of an imaginative person as having "the gift of imagination" and yet we just as often treat it as if it were a curse? Residents of the greatest nation on earth are usually seen as troublemakers who disrupt good order and create chaos. Somewhere I remember reading that Albert Einstein was written off in elementary school as a kid who just couldn't concentrate. He was probably wasting his time dreaming of how energy might equal mass times the velocity of light squared. And we all know the sad story of Vincent Van Gogh, surely one of the most "gifted" of artists, who was dismissed by everyone but his brother for not following the rules of proper painting. My own religious tradition is centered around a figure who was killed because he dared imagine a world outside the rules.

Let us return to Mr. Shaw, "We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history."

As I watch the kids walk by my window, I can only hope that he is wrong.