Imagination widens the playing field for the Holy Spirit

The geography and stories, people and histories of our places are singing a parable to us

Hi friend,

If you’ve read my books, you know how often water shows up in the prose at pivotal moments. I’m a well-established lake rat. I grew up playing in and around rather humble and small Canadian lakes, nothing too majestic or noteworthy like an ocean or a great lake, but still: happy, free, bright, cold. A freshwater lake is still a sacred place for me. Brian and I cherish dreams of retiring near some sort of water - which would be quite a feat as prairie kids, but don’t bother us with facts while we are dreaming, eh?

A couple years ago, we took our four kids on an epic 51-hour road trip over the summer, which culminated in a week at a rented off-grid cottage on a small lake in Ontario within the traditional land of the Anishinabek Nation. As part of the rental agreement, we were allowed to use the owners’ kayaks on the lake and so we did. Our teens in particular logged many a paddle out on the water, exploring and enjoying sunsets together.

One evening near the end of our time there, Brian and I headed out on the water in the kayaks on our own for an hour or so, right at sunset.

As we slowly paddled across the lake in the evening light, my attention kept returning to one of my favourite features of that area: the trees grow right out of the rocks in scattered islands across the waters.

It’s an iconic phenomenon in the lakes of the Canadian Shield, right along with the evening cry of the loon. Being out on the water that evening brought us even closer to the island rocks with their unlikely forests.

As we paddled our way around the islands with their craggy, leaning trees and jagged rocks, I took a few pictures, wanting to remember this peculiar against-the-odds beauty. It’s a wonder, really, how these trees thrive and survive here, especially to someone like myself who somehow manages to kill even hardy IKEA houseplants.

Lithophytes: Or, an Unsubtle Metaphor

Later, I learned that these kinds of trees are called “lithophytes,” the botanical word for the trees that root in rocks and use whatever sunlight, rain, and minerals they can extract in order to grow.

Their root systems are different than typical plants in traditionally good-for-growing dirt. If typical trees root deep and wide and unencumbered, the roots of these stalwart survivors instinctively follow any crack and break in the rock, pushing further and further, deeper and deeper into/around/through the rock. Their roots connect and intertwine literally within a rock, winding back and forth, in a deeper and more tangled fashion than their counterparts, as they search for nutrients and water. That complicated root system ends up serving as their own private anchor, holding them steady in the face of every adverse element.

These trees grow wild and untamed in what should be considered an inhospitable environment. In other, hotter regions with similar stories, the trees have evolved to be extremely drought tolerant, too, rooted in rocks and still growing, still standing. They’ve all adapted in order to survive.

No, that’s not right. They don’t simply survive: they flourish, in their own way, holding fast in every storm meant to destroy and uproot. They are creating their own kind of undomesticated aliveness.

When we turned towards shore at last, I thought of us, of our stories. It reminded me of the Parable of the Sower. You may remember this one: Jesus tells the story of a farmer who scatters seed on all sorts of ground. The seeds which were scattered on rocky soil are described as springing up quickly but dying soon afterwards because the soil is shallow. In his parable, he later explains to the disciples that the seed on rocky soil is a metaphor for “someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.” For what it’s worth, the seed that fell on good soil “refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”

I’ve often said that God hides in plain-sight in our right-now lives.

So of course I think the geography and stories, people and histories of our places are singing a psalm to us, if we pay attention in our own context and moment.

We returned to the dock, storing the kayaks away along with our life jackets but some part of my soul has stayed there on the expanse of water, watching the trees rooted in the rocks ever since with that sense of wonder.

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Baptize Your Imagination

I have wondered if perhaps the story of the sower would have been told differently if Jesus were sitting at the shore of a lake on Anishinabek land, rather than the Sea of Galilee.

I think so. I hope so.

I’ve always appreciated the invitation to ‘baptize my imagination’¹ when it comes to Jesus and the stories of scripture - it helps me interpret and understand, sometimes to redeem other stories, and always to expand my understanding. Imagination widens the playing field for the Holy Spirit. There is something so lovely to that sacred work/play, the openness of letting the Spirit move and breathe into our lives through these re-imaginings or retellings from others, too. When we’ve been taught one way of understanding the stories of the Bible, it can be an unsettling experience to realise that whole cultures and social locations and experiences read the same stories completely differently. But if it at first that feels unsettling, eventually it becomes wonderful, expansive, even thrilling. Sometimes our own imagination also lets us play a bit, like children exploring with wonder and possibility.

A Parable of Untamed Grace

I say that because the tenacity of these unlikely parables on the island rocks reminded me that so much of Jesus’ teachings were rooted in his every day life. He looked around his place, his people, his time and told their shared stories. The widow looking for the lost coin, the farmers, the shepherds with wandering sheep, the patching of old clothes with new fabric or decanting wine into new wineskins, the labourers out for a day’s work, weddings. He knew his world and his people, he told his stories from their shared lives.

If Jesus lived among us today, we might be surprised by how often he uses the ordinary metaphors of our lives to repair our imagination about God.

So perhaps good soil could include this northern place. Perhaps the Word can take root and flourish in the unlikeliest of places and people. Perhaps if the parable’s sower scattered seed in rocky soil here, they might be surprised by what takes root against the odds.

Perhaps there was a parable there, hiding in plain sight, about those of us who come from places that were unforgiving and harsh, receiving the good news and somehow taking root and flourishing in an unstoppable faithfulness.

Perhaps there’s a parable of how we are shaped by the wind, by evolution and tenacity, by the cracks in our certainties, even by our own hunger.

Perhaps Jesus would tell us of the ways, even in the rockiest of places, in the most inhospitable of environments, we found a path to adapt and evolve.

We received the word in our own place and against the odds, despite the harshness of our environment, we pushed our roots down through rock, through every crack and crevice, searching for any water and mineral that will help us.

Our roots become our testimony of faithfulness. We persevere and survive through resourcefulness in adversity. We become a parable of untamed grace.

I wonder if you know how tenacious you are. Have you honoured the parables of unexpected faithfulness and flourishing?

I wonder if you know how hopeful it is to keep holding on, to let the wind sweep through your branches, to keep clinging to the rock of ages?

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Rooted and Anchored by the Search

Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if perhaps I was thinking of the wrong parable after all. Maybe it’s not about a “good soil” vs. “rocky soil” parable after all.

Maybe it’s actually a humble Canadian glimpse at Jesus’ teaching to build our homes on the rock, rather than on the sand: “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.”

Perhaps we’re the house built on the rock. Perhaps we’re the tree rooted in the rock, a different sort of home, one meant for birds and bugs, bears and imagination.

Perhaps every part of you that is searching, searching, searching means you are actually being rooted and anchored by that very search.

Our spiritual homes maybe aren’t domesticated and suburban and traditionally considered lovely. Perhaps our spiritual homes are rooted deep in a rock, anchored in unlikely places, always searching, still surviving, clinging to the Gospel against every wind that seeks to tear away.

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Parables in Plain Sight

Either way, I’ll probably keep wondering what kind of stories Jesus would have told if he had been here in Canada.

I wonder…

Where is God hiding in plain sight on a kayak, on a walk, in an office cubicle, in a bus shelter, in a garden, in a clear-cut construction site, in an online chat room, in a maternity centre in Haiti, in a church basement in Manitoba, in the place where you are sitting right now?

I wonder what stories God is telling from your place, time, people.

I wonder if there are parables hiding where you are rooted, too.

YOUR TURN: Where is God hiding a parable in plain sight in your own life right now?

Holding on,

S.

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This is my summer holiday week off - look at me! trying to rest! attempting to practice what I preach etc. I hope you enjoyed this edited version of an essay that appeared in Field Notes a few years ago.

1. I first encountered this phrase when C.S. Lewis wrote about the impact George MacDonald’s tales had on his own imagination but I’ve heard it explored by many other writers/theologians over the years. (My personal favourite is any time poet Luci Shaw writes about this topic in her work.)