One of the books I love looking at in my children’s book collection is simply entitled Imagine a Day. It is a companion book to one entitled Imagine a Night. it is a fascinating foray into the imagination. Illustrated by a Canadian artist the book stretches the limits of visual exploration with its few words and stunningly breathtaking illustrations which encourages both child and adult to look beyond the limits of the everyday world and imagine.

Neuroscientists tell us that our ability to imagine makes it possible for us to entertain what is real and what is not so real, to conjure up images that soothe or images that induce fear and anxiety. Through technologies like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and position emission topography (PET) scans, we can see how the brain comes alive with electrochemical activity during imaginative activity. A network of many millions of neurons with axons, dendrites, and neurotransmitters between synapses, create pathways for information to be processed at great speeds, making imagination and memory possible. These pathways of learning imply that the more we “practice’ a mental exercise such as imagination, the more creative our minds become.

The season of Advent which always begins the new year of the Christian calendar is supremely that season which calls us to engage possibly more than in any other of the Christian seasons in the strenuous and crucial task of imagination.

And, at the very beginning of this season it is the prophets who call us forward in imagination, pointing towards the importance of waiting, anticipating, and trusting in a promised future that seems so very far removed from the current circumstances we find ourselves in locally and globally. In Advent, we live in the unsettling tension between what is and what will be.

The Advent prophets speak out of the frame of a peoples devastated by the invading ‘colonial’ superpower of the day, Babylon. Once again Jerusalem and the surrounding region has been completely devastated, its inhabitants scattered from their homeland, sent off into exile as spoils of war, to live as a subjugated people in Babylonian captivity. The prophets and those receiving their words know intimately of this tension between what is and what will be.

For those living in exile, their way of life has been completely overturned. Their sense of security has been violated. They have no idea if they will ever live to see their home again. And this leads to deep theological – faith questions: where is God amid this? Why did such devastation happen? Will it ever be possible to return home?

This Advent, I am finding it so very difficult to look beyond the limits of the devastating, all too real images, of the ‘spoils of war’ embodied in the lives of children in Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, Sudan, and more, in their overwhelming places and experiences of exile. This Advent, like none other, I have little stomach for the crass commercialisation of Christmas in the ever-frantic shopping malls, and the overflowing abundance of noise and jollity. If I am to be strenuously disciplined in my active imagining and give credence to God’s call for this season, what will be the waiting work required of me to be about the bringing of this promised future. To be as incarnation for this very time.

Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent: one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other – things that are really of no consequence – the door is shut and can only be opened from the outside.

- Letter from Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Tegel prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge, November 21, 1943. (Letters and Papers from Prison)