成人快手

It was on 4th July 鈥� this day - in 1862 that the Reverend Robinson Duckworth took a rowing trip on the river Isis in Oxford. During the 5 mile journey, his friend Lewis Carroll started to formulate a story he called Alice鈥檚 Adventures Under Ground. The plot was simple: a girl tumbles down a rabbit hole into another world, with a different time, different societal assumptions, strange characters 鈥� a Wonderland.

In this other world, Alice meets the same cruelty and kindness as is found in real life, but disguised in such a way as to invite critiques on the ways that adults behave, and the way society is ordered. Her journey down the rabbit hole, following the hurrying rabbit, who is worried that he is always late, speaks to a curiosity inherent in the human condition. Perhaps also revealing a yearning for reassurance that there could be other ways to live, that there may even be another world so close but so different that holds up a mirror to the assumptions we live by now.

The power of the human imagination to build whole new worlds is not just confined to writers. The announcement yesterday that scientists in China have succeeded in growing moss that they think can survive on Mars has prompted a flurry of statements, by turns excited and trepidatious, wondering if another planet really can sustain human life and society alongside the earth. If this prospect comes to pass, imagination will be needed every bit as much as scientific expertise.

The power of imaginative stories is that they can help us tell ourselves the truth about who we are, what we want, where we want to go. At the same time as containing profound reflections on the human condition and the deepest themes of life itself.

Religious practice harnesses the power of imaginative stories to reveal a deeper purpose, with vivid characters: in the Christian gospels characters such as the widow who persistently and bravely wakes up the judge in the middle of the night to get justice. Or the king who takes time to sit down with his advisers before committing troops to a war鈥� or the foolish house builder who builds a house on sand not rock.

I am thankful that such a story was imagined on that boat 162 years ago today. Because the spiritual life is irrigated by the power of human imagination. Which is a way of life that commits to remaining alert, awake to possibility, alive to the absurd. A life that as it goes on, is less about finding answers and more about learning to live with the questions. A life that is 鈥渃urioser and curioser鈥�.

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