In the summer letter from St. Gregory’s Abbey, Abbot Andrew writes on the important stuff of fantasy and imagination. He says:

These and many other stories that follow the outline of the Paschal Mystery baptize the imagination by imagining the world as ultimately redemptive through self-sacrifice in love. However, it is the Gospel which has baptized the human imagination so as to make these stories conceivable. Lewis said his imagination was baptized by MacDonald’s novel, but MacDonald’s imagination was baptized by the Gospel. It is the imagination baptized by the Gospel that opens our eyes to the shape of the Paschal Mystery in the last Harry Potter book and even in the graceless world of His Dark Materials . . . the Gospel claims to be what Lewis called many times: Myth become fact.

In St. Gregory’s comfortable library you can also find William Cavanaugh’s Theopolitical Imagination, in which he writes that “politics is a practice of imagination.” He asks:

How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world and kill people he knows nothing about? He must be convinced of the reality of borders and imagine himself deeply, mystically, united to a wider national community that stops abruptly at those borders.

We are often fooled by the seeming solidity of the materials of politics, its armies and offices, into forgetting that these materials are marshaled by acts of imagination.

So what could be more urgent than imagination’s baptism: the work of mystery and faith, the leap of imagining the impossible, possible, the intractable solvable, the unjust, just and the oppressed, free?

Every political act starts with a leap of imagination.