Just back from vacation… I (Talitha) spent a week with great people on a lake in Massachusetts. There I learned a fantastic new game. The youngest of our company, not yet two years old, went around asking people: “Do you wanna be a pirate?” To this query you would either answer “no” or “Arrrr, matey!” with a pirate hook finger – causing her to giggle with glee. 
That was it. That’s the whole game. And it was complicated enough for her, serving to transform an otherwise boring day at the lake into an exciting search for fellow pirates.
This little girl, with her game, was in the business of invitation. You thought you were sitting in an inner tube? No, she brought you to the land of pirate ships. You thought you were cleaning up after dinner? No, you’re swabbing the decks (or something). All this change effected merely by extra R’s and a crooked finger.
In order to interact with her, you had to enter her world. In this case it was rather easy to do… but how often do we trip up over invitations to join one another’s worlds? We are usually asking children to leave behind their silly childish worlds and enter the adult world, one of reading, listening, and talking in turn… How often do we lay aside our reality and consent to enter another’s? Not just the world of imagination, but different ways people experience the world. For some, life is thoroughly painful – can you enter, even for a little while, their world of pain? For some, life is set at “bliss” for the foreseeable future – can you (from your world of pain) enter their world long enough to rejoice with them?
Karen Armstrong says the core of every religion is the practice of compassion. And compassion is an act of the imagination – can you put yourself in someone else’s world long enough to imagine how they would feel? To mourn with them, to celebrate with them?
Well, I’ll leave you to ponder those things. But as for me – I’ll be a pirate.