C.S. Lewis was asked at one point where the idea of Narnia came from. He admitted to having an image, back when he was a teenager, of a faun standing in the snow. Talk about an unbridled imagination. He could have been doing something profitable like his character Eustace Scrub who liked pinning beetles on cards or reading books of information about grain elevators or the gross national product of Zimbabwe. Fauns are a notorious waste of one’s time.
Imagine this:
Young Clive Lewis, gangly and awkward like most teens, with a picture of a faun in his imagination. The faun had a setting: crisp snow, trees, and a lamp post. Was the faun real? That depends on what is meant by real, I suppose. Was the faun three-dimensional? Was he two-dimensional? Did he have personality? Did he have a name? Did he do anything? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. In Lewis’ imagination the faun had all these things in his favor. Even that early in the imagining, the faun was doing something: he was standing. So was the faun real? Yes, Tumnus the faun was real, he was real in the mind of his maker. All the faun lacked was the proper time and place to be materialized, which came forty years later in a land called Narnia.
I first met Tumnus like many of you, with Lucy, tumbling out of the wardrobe and out into the brisk air. There stood Tumnus, skittish and alone, with a satchel of books slung over his shoulder. Tumnus was real long before my daughter tugged on her mom’s shirt sleeve while watching the movie and said, “Oh, look, Mommy, there’s Tumnus! I love Tumnus.” Whether he could be touched by a finger, rather than only seen or heard, is irrelevant. He existed without ever being touched because he existed in the mind of his maker. All that was needed was for the maker to speak or write Tumnus onto the page. Tumnus lacked, of course, all the trappings of a life—a fireplace, bookshelves, Lucy, snow, and an evil queen. He even lacked a sensible witness to his person (outside of the author), a reader or a little girl sitting in a theater. But Tumnus existed. His entire life, all the beauty and all the pain, was in the imagination of his maker long before it ever happened to Tumnus.
You are Lucy. I am Eustace. We are Tumnus, written in God’s book and spoken into this whirling galaxy of stories. Knit together in the womb by the spoken, and still speaking, word of God, we are fearfully and wonderfully made and the days of our pilgrimage are already written in God’s book (Psalm 139:11-16).
The writer of Hebrews reinforces the psalmist when he writes, “by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which were visible” (Hebrews 11:3). God speaks the world into being and the visible is born of the invisible. He speaks you and me and all our individuality and uniqueness into being. All the words that form you and me and all creation came tumbling out of the creative mind of God. Those words are the formulations of what is already real in God’s imagination. You and me, with curling toe nails and nose hair and nasally voices, were first formed in God’s imagination.
We’ve been imagined.
That fact alone makes us very unique and precious to the Master Storyteller. Every difficulty, every memory, every happy moment of our lives is a single point in the plot which God is weaving. If a healthy imagination is had only by aligning our imagination with God’s imagination, then we need to see things as God sees them. Every story maker spins his or her story from the active workings of the imagination. We are the offspring, the children, the whirling galaxies, of God’s imagination. The business of life, then, is to see our lives as narrative and to see that narrative as the Master Storyteller does.
Life takes on a different hue, a nuanced perspective, when we perceive our lives as stories, but they take on another level of dimension entirely when we perceive our stories as God imagines them: our life stories are parables. All these cherry blossoms? All these figs and gravel and granola? These are the setting. This whirling globe is the setting for over six billion converging parables. Like molecules, we spin and collide without stopping to interpret those parables. How unfortunate. God gave us the imagination as a tool to not only perceive those parables, but to read them, interpret them, learn from them, and enjoy them. It is the only faculty we have that is capable of looking at the parables and seeing the parables simultaneously. The imagination is our only resource when it comes to both observing life as a parable and fluidly learning its lessons. If only we could observe the parable correctly and learn the lessons that God intends for us to learn. So often, however, we focus on the wrong parts of the parable or take away the wrong lesson. How very much like Christ’s disciples. Perhaps Christ would speak similar words to his people today: “How is it that you fail to understand?” (Matt. 16:11).
