pat loughery

Funny how sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, and those who are forerunners, at the edge, pushing the envelope – sometimes it’s hard to know what their contribution really is (besides pissing people off and raising a ruckus, which is only sometimes as fun as it looks :-)).

From “The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time” (Tom Sine) , here’s encouragement to many of you:

To counter the imperial colonization of our imaginations, we need poets, prophet(esses, Pat adds) and artists to help us create subversive imagery that challenges the reigning reality. Walter Bruggeman reminds us (in “Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile” (Walter Brueggemann), Pat footnotes) that the people of Israel challenged the powerful myths of the Babylonian Empire by the subversive power of poetic imagination and began to conjecture a very different vision of the future. (Bruggemann writes) “The outcome of such poetry is hope. It is hope that makes community possible on the way out of the empire.” (196-97)

So, those of you prophetesses and prophets on the edge of the empire, continue to create subversive imagery that creates hope – hope that community is possible on the way out of the empire.