Part of this Christmas story involves something else. I wanted to buy a Christmas present for my niece, Heather. As I was driving down a street on the south side of Chicago, I saw a pet store. I went in and bought Heather, who has all these wind-up, battery-powered toys, something that was a bit more real, a little Yorkshire Terrier. The only problem was I didn't ask my brother first whether he would accept a dog in his home. He said, "No." So, I had to return the dog to the pet store.

On Christmas night some friends of mine showed up with a basket. In the basket was the very dog I had bought for my niece, Heather. This created some problems. What was I going to do with a Yorkshire Terrier? My mother already has a German Schnauzer. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I didn't want to reject the gift. So, I took the gift. The week after Christmas, I developed the flu. I was stuck in my mother's condo with blinking Christmas lights, a German Schnauzer and a Yorkshire Terrier.

One night as I was resting on the couch because I wasn't feeling well, I looked out into the sky and saw a full moon. My heart jumped. My imagination jumped from the banality of all those Christmas lights to the purity of the light of that moon. I looked down at the dog and I saw how dependent this little Yorkshire Terrier was on me and again, my heart jumped. My imagination jumped. I realized what a renewed dependency I need on God in my life. The lights and all that other stuff were there for a point.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving my most beloved relative, my Aunt Kate, passed away. I didn't realize it until I got sick after Christmas, but I was in the darkness of grief, the darkness of grieving. The lights and all the running around at Christmas time were an attempt to bury that grief. What that little dog did -- God even works through dogs -- what that full moon did, was remind me that I am in need of healing. So, my heart and imagination jumped from the darkness of grief and depression to the light and consolation that only God can provide.

I want to tell you a story about Easter. I was supposed to be involved in all the liturgical services this past Easter and I missed them. I missed them because the Wednesday before Holy Thursday, my mother fell and broke four ribs and two vertebrae, and went on to develop other illnesses over the next three or four months. I had to back out of a lot of commitments including liturgical ones.

During her long illness, she went from 113 pounds to 90 pounds. As I paced through the hospital waiting for some of her test results, I was praying and telling God what He should do if He knew what He was all about and what was right. I picked up a book someone had given me some time ago, The Language of Letting Go, by Melody Beattie and opened it to a passage entitled, "Let Go of the People That You Love."

The passage read something like this, "Let go of the people that you love. Let go of the people that you like and let go of the people toward whom you bear resentments. Stop holding on so tightly. Stop controlling and realize this, everything today is unfolding as it should and there is good and benefit in today for everyone involved. There is a power involved in today that is good, that is love, that is God. Let go. Surrender."

Again, my heart jumped. My imagination jumped from that need to control, to surrender and release and trust in a God who loves me.

I would like to tell you a story about the summertime. One of my best friends, Mary Ellen, had a recurrence of cancer. As they told her that she was not going to recover, she asked me if I would conduct a prayer service because she said that she was in the void. About three hundred people came and laid hands on Mary Ellen and prayed over her.

She stood up at the end of the prayer service and said, "You know, I was in the darkness of the void when they told me that I was not going to recover from my cancer, but because of you people and because of God, my heart has jumped from the void to feeling that the Holy One is with me however this turns out."

I visited Mary Ellen in the hospital as she was dying. She said, "Would you tell me a story?"

I said, "What kind of story?"

She said, "Tell me the story you used to tell about "The Wonder Years," when Winnie Cooper was in a play. She lost her lines and Kevin Arnold, who was desperately in love with her, was the light man.

Kevin Arnold said, "I loved her so much I felt like I was holding her up with the light trying to get her to remember her lines." When she finally remembered her lines, a solitary tear rolled down Kevin's cheek.

Mary Ellen said, "That's it. Would you go home and tell my family and friends to hold me up in the light. Through their prayer, light my way home."

My heart jumped as I walked out of that hospital. I had associated her death with darkness. All of a sudden I walked out of the hospital room with a sense that her death was a transformation into the light. As we prayed over her as she was dying, we said, "Mary Ellen, go to the light."

After she died, I went through some grief again and some anger. This woman had earned a degree in pastoral ministry and she had not even been allowed to use it. She died at age 45, before she got a job in pastoral ministry. But then my heart jumped, my imagination jumped. What is ministry? Credentialed people doing busy things or people of faith demonstrating by personal witness how to live and how to die with faith and conviction.

I would like to tell you another summer story. I finally got my brother to take care of Casey, that little dog. I got custodial rights once a week. I would take days off with her and relax on the couch and watch Phil and Oprah and stuff like.

I returned from a trip to Washington in June and I asked my brother if I could come and pick up Casey. He said, "No, it's a bad day, the plumber is here."

I said, "Please, I don't get a chance to see the dog a lot."

He said, "No, it's a bad day."

Finally, he said, "Casey is dead. She died right after you left for Washington. We had x-rays and everything taken of her heart. She had a bad heart."

After this I had a Job experience. I said to God, "Can't I have anyone? Can't I have anything?"

I went to a counselor friend of mine. I said, "Why is the death of this dog bothering me so much?"

He said, "The dog drew out of you something that you have been repressing as a cleric and as a male, unconditional love."

My heart jumped, my imagination jumped, folks. My heart and imagination jumped. This little dog was a gift from God and now, I praise God that I had a little Casey in my life for six or seven months, to teach this aging celibate something about unconditional love.

Why am I stressing this imagination stuff so much? Why am I stressing this jumping of the heart so much? I really believe it is what conversion, evangelization and personal transformation are all about.

Your imagination is not the imaginary. Your imagination is the deposit of the dominant images, the directive images, of your life. What I am suggesting is there are some dominant images in my life -- like worry, control, sometimes seeing the negative part of things rather than the positive, the need to achieve. There are some dominant images of my life that are pretty far from the imagery, the dominant-directive images, of Jesus which we call the Kingdom of God.

When we have a personal conversion experience or transformation experience, what changes or what jumps is our imagination, from our own perhaps dysfunctional directive images to the directive images and dominant images of Jesus.

I think it is not just people, though, that need change and imagination. I think sometimes our churches are operating dominant images that are not of the gospel. So many churches, sometimes I think my own included, operate out of power imagery. There are certain folks in charge that minister to the people of God. I think the churches are in need of some corporate conversion where our dominant images shift from power to the imagery of Pentecost in Acts 2. Our church has to move back to the imagery where the dominant image in our churches, the power of the Holy Spirit, calls us to evangelize, calls us not to jargon community, but to real community in big churches, in small communities and the restoration of the domestic church, the home.

Finally, I think there is another area of change that is needed on the level of imagination. I think most of us are terribly subsumed by the dominant images of society and the culture around us. George Gallup says that 90% of Americans claim that they believe in God, but their dominant directive images certainly don't have an awful lot to do with God or Christianity.

In his book Following Christ in a Consumer Society, John Cavanaugh sums up some of the dominant directive images of the world today that we breathe in like air pollution, with these words, "Sex is mechanics. Your body is a machine. Live with fear. Don't be committed. Retain yourself. It is all about technique. Stay on the external of things. Be cool. Be hard. Accumulate things. Scratch every itch. Have. Be skeptical. Be doubtful. Be independent and strong and isolated. Addiction. It is all going to end in death anyway, isn't it."

The dominant images of the consumer culture around us. If the church is really going to do its job in evangelization, we need to evangelize the consumer culture, to lift up these directive dominant images, to critique them and to point out the directive dominant images of Jesus Christ which we are being called to live as self, as church and in society.

When I was a kid, we used to close every mass with prayers for the conversion of Russia. I guess what I am suggesting today is maybe Russia is doing okay and moving along pretty well. We ought to pray more and more for the conversion of us, for the transformation of the directive dominant images, inter-psychically, in our churches and the society in which we live.

Orley Herron: I appreciated what you said, Father Brennan.

Patrick Brennan: Thank you.

Herron: How can we help people to allow the Lord to control their lives, rather than the church to control their lives?

Brennan: It is a paradoxical sort of situation. When the imagination jumps from the need to control to surrender, that is a genuine conversion experience, at least it always has been in my life. The paradox that I am alluding to, though, is I really think you need a church, or at least a community of faith, to help you make that jump.

When I have been in grief, when I have been in mourning, when I have bouts of a depression or fear, usually it has been the influence of other people around me who perhaps at that moment have a deeper prayer life than I, that help my imagination soar to the directive images of Jesus. But I think we are then into another problem.

Herron: What is that?

Brennan: Churches that, rather than serving, than mentoring, companioning, enabling ministry, really do try to control people's lives. I fear that some churches are in an addictive pattern or a paradigm paralysis. They are stuck in that control, authoritarian model.

George Gallup's research tells us that people are not looking for that any more. The days of guilt, obligation, those motivations for church attendance and church membership, are over. People are going where they are spiritually fed and where they feel that there is community, where they can belong.

Herron: Father Brennan, do you think the church is changing today to accommodate those needs?

Brennan: I do. I think the Holy Spirit is moving us back to a truly Pentecostal Acts II church, but I think there is massive resistance, massive resistance at the top for some people who want to maintain control and massive resistance on the bottom where people like to be an audience but don't really want to be responsible for their faith.