We spent this past weekend in the big city and stayed near downtown and the university district. Our breakfast at a trendy café in an old factory building was one of the best breakfasts ever. I had a pork sausage, goat cheese, caramelized onions, and herbs omelet. The coffee was self-service, rich and good. Right above the various creamers, dairy and otherwise, was a plain framed sign. “Imagine Peace,” it read.
The cynic in me took the sign to be a form of virtue signaling, a way to assuage the consciences of those of us spending way too much money on a very good weekend breakfast. The patrons who drove in their non-Tesla EVs from the leafy suburbs with their “love spoken here” lawn signs or others who biked over from the nearby loft apartments (or tourists in the big city) would have felt a bit less guilty imagining peace as they ate their California Dreamer omelet or avocado toast and carried on knowing conversations over good coffee.
Yes, I had placed the politics and the vibe of our breakfast café. “Imagine all you want,” I thought, “What good will it do in a world like ours?”
I’ve been thinking about the sign in the café and imagining peace all week long, and not always cynically. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think I am right about the politics and vibe of the breakfast place and its patrons. Surely, too, there are virtues I wish to signal, many of those shared by those who live in leafy suburbs or loft apartments. And maybe, just maybe, what we imagine does matter, but maybe, just maybe, we need to do more than imagine.
The verb imagine and the noun imagination are not really biblical words, though the King James version translates various forms of “thoughts of the heart” as “imagination.” When Mary magnifies the Lord after she enters the house of Zechariah and Elizabeth and the baby leaps in her womb, she says of the Lord, “he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.” (Luke 1:51). The prophet Jeremiah is particularly concerned about the imaginations of the evil human heart. “They obeyed not, nor inclined their ear, but walked every one in the imagination of their evil heart,” Jeremiah writes (11:8) of his own people in his own time. Here the new versions correctly translate the phrase as the “stubbornness of their evil hearts.”
Left to our own devices our imaginations tend to be proud and stubborn, tending towards evil. Like the sailors on Narnia’s Dawn Treader, who realize almost too late that it is not a good thing for dreams to come true (all dreams, including those that make you afraid to go to sleep again), so we must beware of our imaginations.
In the Bible peace is not so much something for the virtuous to imagine as it is the presence of the God of peace. Peace is not a matter of claiming to “speak love” or of driving a non-Tesla EV. It is God’s presence found in Christ and in thinking about and doing the things he calls us to do.
The Apostle Paul encourages his friends in Philippi: Finally, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. Philippians 4:8–9
I will never find peace through my proud and stubborn imagination, but as I think about and practice the things of Christ – honor, justice, purity, loveliness, commendability, excellence, and praiseworthiness – the God of peace will be with me. As C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with him everything else thrown in.” Even peace.