When Everything Falls Apart, Your Imagination Doesn't Have To (Holy Stupidity 3.3)

Speaking My Dreams Outloud

Dear Human Is A Verb Community-

This wraps up my three-part series on tending imagination based on what I learned about Saint Brigid on my journey to Ireland. If you missed the earlier pieces Part 1: The Fire That Refused To Die and Part 2: Rust Is Actually a Slow Burning Fire, they're worth reading, but you can absolutely start here. Especially if you're in the thick of your own disruption right now.

Peace,

Julene

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For over a thousand years, the sisters of Kildare did something that would make most of us nervous. They kept a fire burning. Not just any fire - Saint Brigid's flame, tended day and night, passed from one set of hands to another like a sacred relay race that lasted centuries.

Then the Reformation came, and with it, the kind of institutional efficiency that has little patience for mystery. The fire was extinguished. The practice dismissed as "pagan superstition" where there had been a living practice of imagination endurance.

But here's what gives me hope: in 1993, someone lit Brigid's flame again in Kildare.

Here’s a snapshot of the Brigid Room at Solas Bhríde, taken from their website: https://solasbhride.ie/meeting-rooms/

With the Nazarene Theological Seminary class I facilitated in Ireland, we visited the Solas Bhríde Centre, a center that keeps the memory of Saint Brigid alive. Since 1993, they have kept a fire going - well, a candle burning.

One of my colleagues half-jokingly mentioned he fears a student will accidentally knock over the candle. The flame was right in the room, and we could see how easy it would be to break the chain.

The thousand-year-old or even the 23-year-old fire tells me that imagination can't be permanently destroyed. Only temporarily silenced.

Even when institutions shut it down, or systems refuse to support it, something remains - even if just small embers. Waiting for someone with enough holy stupidity to send it back to life. And sometimes, terrifyingly vulnerable to one clumsy moment.

When Your Inner Fire Goes Dark

As I've been "sabbatical-ing" since January, when my job officially ended with the college I had worked at for 8 years, I kept saying, "I have no imagination for what is next." I was so full of grief and the trauma of the way things closed that there was little capacity to tend the imagination embers, let alone recognize them.

It has taken months to reach a place where I'm beginning to dream and imagine again.

For all of us who have been through significant life transitions, we know grief takes time. IT SURE DOES! And I know I can grieve and imagine at the same time. This is why the disciplines for moral imagination can be so helpful.

Now comes the crucial question I'm wrestling with in my own life: How do we sustain this kind of moral imagination over time? How do we keep these embers alive when everything around us is changing, closing, or dying?

The Art of Imagination Endurance

I've begun thinking of this practice "imagination endurance."

Imagination endurance means persistently holding space in our lives for dreams, creativity, and possibility, even when everything around us feels uncertain, disrupted, or impossible.

It means gently tending those fragile embers, trusting they'll eventually catch flame again, even if, right now, all we feel is exhaustion and grief.

Why I Feel Foolish (And Why You Might Too)

Some days, I feel absolutely foolish and scared, for walking this path of tending imagination. There are no guarentees. Did Brigid’s sisters feel like this too? This is the Holy Stupid part, all I can do is follow a deeper knowing in me and a knowing I’ve been taught by the best of my Christian faith. But at the end of the day, it was much eaier to have a ‘set path’ where I didn’t have to allow my imagination to come alive. Or to live with the allusion that my path is ‘set’.

Like Brigid giving away her father's prized sword to help a leper, there are moments when following what feels sacred looks completely impractical from the outside. And yet, here I am, speaking out loud, (actually I’m writing) the dreams I carry.

I dream of creating courageous spaces where people can finally hear themselves think, feel, and be. Where the noise and pressure let up just enough for someone to say, "Oh. That's who I am."

I dream of helping people uncover a deep sense of clarity and confidence about who they are and what they truly value. Not in theory, but in the everyday choices of their lives. And I don’t think we get there without the spiritual life.

Call it faith, prayer, quiet, God. It's that part of us that listens beneath the noise. The part that keeps showing up when we ask big questions. I believe it's in that space, the honest, open, sacred space, that we start to remember who we are and what really matters.

I dream of communities where people know how to stay connected through tension. Where conflict isn't feared or avoided but transformed into something more honest and more human. I want to walk with people who are tired of false peace and hungry for relationships that are both truthful and kind.

I imagine guiding people who are burned out on busyness into sacred rhythms. Through intentional pauses, through reimagined pilgrimage, through the kinds of questions that don't have easy answers but invite deeper living.

More than anything, I dream of being part of a community where people are becoming. Not performing, not pretending, but practicing the sacred art of being human in a world that is forgetting what that means.

These are the dreams I'm speaking into the world. Sacred. Impractical. And, on my best days, I believe, entirely possible.

What Tending the Embers Actually Looks Like

Here's what imagination endurance looks like for me right now:

Stay Connected, Not Isolated

It's the courage to reach out and speak honestly with friends who reflect back possibilities I'm too tired to see. It means staying connected, not isolated, and inviting those who love me to help me dream again.

Give Yourself Permission to Grieve AND Notice Sparks

It's giving myself full permission to grieve what I've lost while deliberately noticing the sparks of possibility in small things - a new idea captured as an audio memo, conversations that ignite hope, an unexpected conversation that can help my dream, or the stories of others who've turned disruption into new beginnings.

Make Small Creative Choices Daily

It's making small creative choices every day, however modest: cooking something new, exploring my community by foot and bike instead of driving, writing simply because it helps me feel alive, learning new platforms like SUBSTACK! and stopping to play with our cats! Each small creative act strengthens my imagination muscles.

Lean Into Uncertainty with Curiosity

It's leaning into uncertainty with patience and curiosity rather than what is my go-to - anxiety and control. Eventually, clarity will come. It has before, and it will again. This is, BY FAR, the hardest one for me. Ask my husband!

The Mystery You Can't Manufacture

When imagination is tended, life flows from me in ways I can't manufacture or control.

What I know to be true from my own experience is that when imagination is tended, life flows from me in ways I can't manufacture or control. The fire in my belly meets the moment, and something mysterious happens in that mingling. God's Spirit moves in ways I can't predict but somehow recognize as holy. I long for this! And I can't make it happen.

This is the paradox of imagination endurance: we must tend the flame without grasping for the fire. We must stay awake through the dark hours, trusting that dawn will come, even when we can't see the first hint of light on the horizon.

Building Fire Pits Together

The sisters in Kildare understood something our culture has forgotten: the sacred work of tending imagination isn't meant to be done alone. For a thousand years, they passed the flame from one set of hands to another, night after night. They knew that some fires were too important to trust to a single keeper.

This is my invitation to you and myself: let's build fire pits with each other. Find people who will ask, “How's your inner fire these days?" and want to know the answer.

Together, we can practice the holy stupidity of believing that imagination endures.

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What's one small way you could tend your imagination today? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

References

Lederach, J. P. (2005). The moral imagination: The art and soul of building peace. Oxford University Press.