{"id":1891,"date":"2009-04-01T07:30:32","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T11:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=1891"},"modified":"2018-08-21T03:57:43","modified_gmt":"2018-08-21T07:57:43","slug":"imagining-antarctica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2009\/04\/01\/imagining-antarctica\/","title":{"rendered":"Imagining Antarctica"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A ten-day expedition to Antarctica provides the context for exploring imagination as a creative and iterative process that transforms our percep\u00adtions of things seen and unseen. Supplemented by photographs, the essay describes how encounters with sacred story and liturgy over the course of the journey spark and capture the imagination.<\/em><\/p>\n When I told friends that I was going to Antarctica, I got one of two responses: either “Wow!” or “Why?” At first I thought that the bearers of those two sentiments differed in their sense of adventure, or maybe over the simple matter of not liking the cold. But it was more than that. Conversation after the initial gut reaction revealed that the basic difference between the “wow’s” and the “why’s” was that the first group desired to live into possibility, while the second group preferred the stable comfort of certainty.<\/p>\n As a process theologian, I am drawn to “possibility” as the way in which God works in the world. God sparks our imagination by placing before us possibilities for beauty, wholeness, and love, and inspires us to co-create a world in which those possibilities come into being. This vision informs my ministry as a community-based chaplain and seminary instructor, and it leads me to approach life with a sense of adventure. My colleague and friend, Lisa, had longed to go to Antarctica and was in search of a companion for the trip. When she asked me in October 2005 if I would go, I was impulsive enough to say “yes,” after sleeping on it for only one night. The possibility of going to Antarctica was something I just couldn’t pass up. It seemed that God was luring me to explore this wild and mysterious continent. The next spring, we booked our passage on a Lindblad-National Geographic expedition that would leave just after Christmas.<\/p>\n Imagination is a creative and iterative process that transforms our perception of things seen and unseen by placing before us possibilities that spark our creativity. This transformation can occur by constructing\u2014and over time, reconstructing\u2014images of that which is invisible, and yet perceived, or by transforming visible images by imbuing them with new meaning. God is at work in the imaginative process, moving us to seek deeper levels of meaning that reframe existing images, and inspiring us to create new images of beauty and wholeness. As I prepared for my trip to Antarctica, my imagination of what I would encounter there was aided by images in photographs, websites, and books. In my imagination, I began to construct my own images of standing on the deck of the ship admiring the scenery or walking among the penguins on the shore. An evening spent with friends who had previously taken this trip added adjectives and anecdotes, though I could see that they struggled to find words to capture their experience. “It’s a very spiritual place,” they said, “you’ll see.”<\/p>\n Friday, December 29, 2006 found Lisa and I boarding the National Geographic Endeavour<\/em> in the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia, a coastal city surrounded by treeless snow-capped mountains, an area so barren and remote that Argentina established a penal colony there in the late 19th century. Standing on the deck as we pulled away from the dock into the Beagle Channel, we found ourselves trying to place this strange land in the realm of the familiar by connecting its landscape to something we had seen before. Lisa and I decided that it reminded us of the Highlands of Scotland, whose wild beauty and ever-changing weather makes one sense both the power and the intimacy of nature. Ushuaia had that same character of windswept mountains, tinged with the purple and green of heather and lichen, of mist mingling with clouds punctured with beams of sunlight.<\/p>\n The sudden familiarity of this strange place triggered a memory of what the Celtic tradition calls a “thin place,” where the boundary between this world and the eternal is lifted in order to bring one into the near presence of God. Farther from home than we had ever been, we felt at home in this thin place amidst the mountains of Patagonia. When we shared that impression with a British couple who, like us, were marveling at the scenery, the woman looked startled and said, “I was just saying the same thing.” Naming that shared experience of the holy\u2014I had observed that “it is a spiritual place where the veil is very thin”\u2014brought us into greater awareness of God’s presence, awakening us to the possibilities before us. As we began the voyage to Antarctica, our surroundings alerted us to God’s creative process at work in the paradox of novelty and familiarity, as the tension between those realities revealed the invisible within the visible. We knew now what our friends back in Ohio meant by describing this as a spiritual place. In sensing the familiar in the strange on the deck of the Endeavour<\/em>, the imaginative process, in which images are transformed by perceived patterns of meaning, arose in the creative tension of that paradox, where spiritual journeys often find their roots.<\/p>\n Early on the morning of December 30, we passed Cape Horn and entered the Drake Passage, named for the Englishman who sailed around the world in 1577-1580. This passage of water, where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans come together, is notorious for its wild turbulence and severe storms. What must Drake have thought when, the day after clearing the Strait of Magellan to enter the Southern Ocean, he encountered severe storms that drove him far south toward lands unknown?<\/p>\n
\nSparking the Imagination<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
Capturing the Imagination<\/em><\/h3>\n
Crossing Over<\/h4>\n