Imagine

It has been a while, but I wrote this today as an example for my students. Thought it was worth posting.

I don't remember the first time I heard John Lennon's ImagingI , but I know that when I did hear it it gave me chills. I was too young then to fully understand the depth of what Lennon was saying, but I have become much more in tune to the words of this song with the wisdom of age. When I first heard the song, I connected with the line "you may say I am a dreamer." I have always been a dreamer and hopeless romantic. Over the years I have learned a some about the Buddhist philosophy and I can connect to Lennon on a much deeper scale.

As a young girl growing up in the backwoods of East Texas, the ideas of puritanical Christianity were indoctrinated into every fiber of my spirit. I fully believed in Heaven and Hell. I feared the Devil and loved Jesus with all of my soul. Interestingly enough, when I was presented with the idea of imagining there is no Heaven, I didn't freak out. I simply thought - well, John Lennon is wrong, there is a Heaven, but he is right about the war thing. We could certainly do without that.

Some years later as a young women focused on education and immersed in philosophy and literature classes, I began to entertain the idea that Heaven and Hell might be different than the portrait that had been painted for me in my youth. I still believed absolutely that Heaven and Hell existed, but I was more open to Lennon's proposition that "there is no heaven." And I was still unconditionally drawn to the conception of "nothing to kill or die for" was worth imagining.

Around the age of 40, I bottomed out. I became an orphan, divorcee, single mother and unemployed in the span of about six months. If not for the simple yet profound wisdom of one Dinty Moore in his book The Accidental Buddhist I am not sure I would have even begun to rebound from the deep depression into which these events spiraled me. I learned a new way to think about religion, a new way to imagine being. I had to because my soul had been irreversibly altered. I begin truly to imagine that there was no Hell, that living on this earth is hell. Even though I cannot give up on the notion of Heaven, I do believe that I have a deeper understanding of what John Lennon was talking about.

At this point in my life I am still a dreamer, just like John Lennon. Reflection over the years has lead me to the idea that Heaven and Hell are complex ideologies and that no two people will understand them in the same way. Still I wish for the world that my children and grandchildren to be one in which there is nothing to kill or die for. I don't think they will be bored because they will have plenty to hope for and a lot to love.