The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
May 11, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 18

Everything But...
           A couple of German ministers were here for a conference, so we crossed the street for a closer look at Albert Einstein’s memorial. The four sides of the base are inscribed with a short biography and a number of quotations, none of which dealt with relativity. The first one is remarkable.
          
          Albert Einstein
          (1877-1955)
          E = mc2 (1905)
          "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world." (1929)
          
          Look around, when our world is really hurting and wounded, it is not because we cannot think or know too little, but that we have wounded our imaginations. How else did Einstein arrive at his favourite formula and theories? It was his imagination to see what no one else could see and comprehend that changed the way people looked at the world and the universe. In the church too we desperately need more imagination, more imaginative listening to the Spirit of God in our midst. And today is Pentecost, the day when imagination runs wild issuing from a God who is never tamed by human beings.
          Who else is required by vocation to be imaginative than mothers? Mothers imagine the world for their children – and for any one else within earshot – and enable them to see the world in a particular way, and even create new worlds. Mothers don’t teach imagination, they bestow it.
          Imagination does not so much create a new world as discover what is already there, veiled by our blurred and stubborn vision. Einstein saw what was relatively there already. He simply had to capture the image in his mind. Can you imagine?