Following September 11, 2001, Congress and President Bush formed the independent, bipartisan group that became known as the 9-11 Commission. The men and women on the Commission were charged with preparing a report regarding the circumstances surrounding the attacks, with specific recommendations designed to prevent any such future attacks.
On July 22, 2004 the Commission released its report to the public, finding systematic failures throughout our nation’s government. The mistakes spanned many years and several administrations, all of which failed, the Commission held, to understand the “gravity of the threat.” Given all the investigation and testimony taken, the report provided a great deal of detail about what had occurred, yet in the end the Commission chose a somewhat surprising way to describe the overall nature of the profound failure. “The most important failure,” the report found, “was one of imagination.” Simply put, nobody imagined that a group of hijackers might use commercial aircraft as weapons. We couldn’t conceive of such a thing.
This language—a failure of imagination—seems most often to arise in this sort of context—when a catastrophe occurs. You might expect to hear the term when experts discuss the design flaws of the Titanic. Or when military historians analyze Pearl Harbor. The term might be invoked when engineers speak of the 1967 Apollo 1 fire or the space shuttle disasters. The term has been used most recently in connection with Israel’s lack of preparedness for the Hamas attack and the massacres that occurred in Israel on October 7.
But our imaginations fail in other contexts, as well. In terms of technological and commercial innovations, once something is brought to market, we often ask ourselves, “Why did that take so long?” The upside-down ketchup bottle comes to mind. Why didn’t someone suggest that earlier? A failure of imagination. Sometimes our imaginative failures even occur with regard to our faith. Let’s consider this possibility in connection with how we think of God.
In J.B. Phillips little gem of a book called Your God is Too Small, he argues that our devotion to God suffers when our imaginations fail to fully conceive of what God must be like. “There is a conception of God,” Phillips writes, “which seems at first sight to be very lofty and splendid,” but really it isn’t. Our imaginations are coming up short if we “think that the God who is responsible for the vastness of the Universe cannot possibly be interested in us—the specks of consciousness which exist on this insignificant planet.” He goes on:
Now then, we may say that we cannot imagine God taking the detailed interest in a single human life...But the words “I cannot imagine” mean simply that our minds are incapable of retaining the ideas of terrifying vastness and of minute attention to detail at the same time. But this in no way disproves that God is incapable of fulfilling both ideas and a great many more.
As Phillips lays out, there’s a quite common image of God in the popular culture of a distant deity who may have, in fact, created the universe but afterwards was compelled to step back, uninterested or incapable of closely attending all that was created. At first blush, this may seem to be a very reasonable view. A sophisticated, even a humble notion. Though it might not quite be put this way, a proponent of this view might say, “In the scheme of things, I know I am of little consequence, God surely has better things to do. After all, there are billions of people in the world. And I am just one person in one brief moment in time. Such a grand God is surely too busy to attend to me.”
But to hold to the position that the God who created the universe is too busy, too grand, too uninterested, or simply incapable of keeping up with or intimately knowing all of us really doesn’t give the notion of omnipotence its full meaning. Put another way, a Creator who is innately powerful enough to create an entire universe and perhaps much more but then not powerful enough to closely attend to everything that was made is an odd place to draw the line on such power and capability. This, Phillips is saying, is a failure of imagination. A God, as he puts it, that is too small.
Our capacity to imagine is one of the most glorious parts of our humanity. May we never fail to employ it but instead expand it, especially when it comes to matters of the spirit.
God—Help me to put my imagination to good use. Amen.
