The walled gardens at Drum Castle are a favourite place for a reverie. It's hard to have a reverie these days. Our minds aren't accustomed to the mental spaciousness and lapse of productiveness and reorientation of focus necessary for those episodes of creative restfulness and restful creativity.
Walking on paths laid centuries ago, in a garden with historic borders and beds of old scent laden roses, and provided with a number of features intended to rest the mind and slow the body, like this old water feature not unlike a baptismal font, I reach for that word rendered obsolete by frantic lifestyles fuelled by acquistive habits, driven by dissipated attention, sustained by conveyor belts of desire-induced credit, and hostile to any use of time that is not work, entertainment, or retail activity. Reverie.
Reverie is to allow ourselves the freedom to notice; to be patient with and to feel this body that walks, talks and works; to remember rhythms of thought and movement that are respectful of place and time. Reverie isn't so much a time of thinking as a time of openness to thinking about the present as a requirement of being open to the future, and of not foreclosing on our past.
Reverie is an imagination friendly environment, a space hospitable to thoughts however weird, wonderful or wide of the marks of the norm. Reverie is when we are not limited by here and not constrained by now, but when we are presented with the gift of wondering what it is like to be who we are, and to accept who we are without judgement, expectation, or disappointment.
Reverie is prayer if it is some or most of these things, because we are made in the image of a God who created for six days, and at the end of each day looked with critical appreciation and saw that it was good. We are made in the image of a God who at the end of the six days looked with critical appreciation and saw that it was very good, and then rested. The sabbath of God was a time of creative reverie, God rested, wondered, waited, allowed to be.
I wonder how much more effective Christian mission and activity would be if we rehabilitated the practice of inner sabbath, reverie. What would it do to our church programmes of discipleship, worship, mission and service if they arose out of a community comfortable with periods of critical appreciation, creative reverie, a wondering and waiting that was open to the present and therefore open to a different future?
One of the characteristics of the first Christians was their joy. Luke describes those days after the resurrection as times when the disciples disbelieved for joy. Paul lists joy immediately after love and before peace as fruits of the Holy Spirit. My point? The word reverie comes from obsolete French meaning rejoicing, revelry and is from rever meaning delirious! Now whatever else Christians have been accused of by the society they categorise as secular, we haven't been overburdened with charges of excess joy. Maybe that's because there is insufficient value placed on Christians modelling a way of living in which reverie, creative wondering and imaginative care for the world, is the disposition out of which comes those redemptive gestures, out of which grows a spirit of reconciliation, and within which grows a community in love with the world God made, in which God became incarnate in Christ, which God loves into new life and new creation, and into which we are sent as revellers of the Kingdom.
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