A Christmas Carol of Imagination and Chaos, as seen by a feminist Muslim panentheist

Thou hast thy mighty wings outspread

And brooding o'er the chaos shed

Thy life into the impregn'd abyss

The vital principle infused

And out of nothing's womb produced

The heav'n and earth and all that is

                                                  (hymn by Charles Wesley)

Wesley also wrote "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," but I prefer this one as my Christmas Carol, the universe being born when pregnant potential, infused by the creative life force, gave birth to quarks and leptons.

And are not you and I part of the original potential of the big bang? Are we not a dream, a promise that it held to unfold its possibilities? We've got promise, just like her, we've got potential.

We are the promise of our Mother Chaos ancestor and her dreams to unfold herself, to create on higher levels. We are born limited as a collapsing of her random possibilities, born in the midst of a different kind of chaos - humanmade, societal injustice. We are born embodying the principle that evil is a failure of the imagination, that zero-sum games are discreation, that many binaries and definitions we assume get us unnecessarily into a mess and cause massive, collective denial, and that such denial itself constitutes a crime.

But as co-creators with God, we can unlimit our imagination, and in doing so unleash the potential of our ancestors, through a daily recovery program: and I say "daily" and "recovery" to bring attention to the fact that we are addicted to our limited ways of thinking. Optimism is a crime: there is no cure here, no one-off born-again enlightenment that allows us to transcend old scripts.
Nevertheless we can learn to question ourselves, to be more receptive to challenges to our deeply held and cherished attachments, investments, assumptions, loyalties. We can learn to say "not either/or but both/and" a bit more.
We can validate things we disagree with on some level, however limited.

I open myself up to thee, Allah. In my manger of making the same mistakes over and over again, I ask that you impregnate my soul with your rūḥinā / rūaḥ. By being open to your creative coping, to your healing life force, new paths appear, where there once stood only limitations. To prepare myself, I seek to balance my moments of drive, seeking, calculating, consuming, task-orientedness with awe, slowness, not doing anything, chanting, playing (doing something not as a means to an end, not having an end-point in mind before beginning), improvising, so that I can be *listening* to what is inside of me,

I lift my open hands or put my antennas out, just to receive a message from the moment, to create a space, to see what it tells me. I certainly don't do this enough, I often run away from empty spaces. I'm afraid that they are a waste of time and I have a million things I should be doing, could be doing. I think that these spaces are nothing.

But nothing is pregnant. And that is something to sing about.


(*now PLEASE go back and click those links, to Torah-influenced process theologian Catherine Keller, and what the Torah and the Qur'an /and, separately, / James Baldwin and Catholic theologian Thomas Merton in conversation have to say, as well as various links which you can concretely apply to your racist cousins)