Romantic Imagination with Religion

ROMANTIC IMAGINATION WITH RELIGION

We need to re- romanticize faith, religion, and church and give people something beautiful with which to fall in love.  To do this, we need more than good theology and good pastoral programs.

What needs to be inflamed today inside religion is its romantic imagination and this is not so much the job of the theologian as it is the job of the saint and the artist.

We see this, for instance, in Francis of Assisi. Francis was not a great theologian by the standards of the academy of theology and it was not his insights as a theologian that so moved history and transformed Christianity. He does not have major cities named after him and more than 300 congregations of men and women trying to live out his charism because of the books he wrote.

Francis' greatness lay in his sanctity and in his art and in the particular way he brought those together. It was as a saint and artist that he was able to inflame the romantic imagination of the church and the world. When he took off his clothes and walked naked out of Assisi, he wasn’t preaching from a pulpit, lecturing from a university podium, or writing a book. He was making an aesthetic, saintly gesture, and that gesture, complete with the commitment he made afterwards to back it up, helped restructure the romantic imagination of Christianity and the world in general. Seven hundred years later, his gesture and his life still speak. Such is the power of great saints and great artists.

Without vision the heart doesn’t know where to go; but, without romantic fire it doesn’t want to go anywhere, least of all to church.

(Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI)