Follow me and we’ll take a peak behind that veil to better understand why God gave us, his characters, an imagination. Let’s take our memories—each one of them—each sense perception, each fact our teachers diligently injected into us, each emotion, each reason, and all the other parts of who we are and label an imaginary puzzle piece with each one. The puzzle would be gigantic, far bigger than those intimidating 10,000-piece puzzles. Then, just imagine, we gather those pieces together and promptly hurl them onto the living room floor. Let’s amplify the pressure by removing the puzzle box with the picture on top so that all cheating aids are removed. What we have is a metaphysical mess and a metaphor of our daily lives.
The imagination has the herculean task of gathering those pieces together and assembling a coherent picture of the whole thing. We deduce meaning based on how well we feel those pieces are slipping together and what kind of picture it is. Between sin and the resulting fractures of our lives, however, the chances of matching the puzzle pieces to the master copy found in God are slim indeed. Most of us have spent decades building a picture that is botched, jammed, cut and torn, just so we can conjure an image that makes some sense to us. But the image leaves us with only glimpses of meaning, fragments, unless we align our vision with God’s vision. A vision rightly aligned knows that “to tell the story of anything is to tell the story finally of everything” (Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home). Every memory is tied to every other moment in our lives and bound inextricably each to each. And when we extend out for the moments of our lives to the convergence of our lives with other life stories, we find the connection still in tact. Our lives have touched, for good or for ill, ten thousand others. To every brother whom I harm, I harm not only those who are touched by him in this lifetime, but his children and grandchildren. To every sister whom I bless, I bless also her children and grandchildren.
Reclaiming the imagination will undoubtedly refocus our efforts away from blindly doing more and help us to see differently instead. We want the vibrant life, but vibrant, transformed, purposeful significance is elusive because we can’t quite see the whole story. Sometimes we taste the vibrant life and then it is gone. Life feels awfully regular and mundane most of the time. Seeing our pilgrimage and the pilgrimages of others as God sees them—as divinely imagined stories—might just open the floodgates. A reclaimed imagination helps us not only embrace suffering as part of the divine story, it helps us refresh some of the habitual thinking that mires us in the drollery of our day-to-day. No longer are we the cogs of an economic wheel, but the bright stars on the canvas of God’s imagination. No longer are we chained to relationships that have all the spark and wit of pumpkins. The world is the theater of God’s imagination and we are the players acting upon his stage. There is no two-bit, pedestrian part. There is no such thing as a small, insignificant event. He knows even the falling of a sparrow and its fall is significant in the larger story’s unfolding.
Narnia will one day give way to Aslan’s country, but the journey toward the door is clogged with trouble and meandering. There is a destination but that destination is not the now of this moment. We live in the now a bit like blind fish in a stream, bumping into every rock and pebble, rushed along in a flurry of momentum leading to who knows where. But God has given us the imagination to circumvent the blindness of soul and mind that we inherit. With the imagination we glimpse a larger purpose, a far more complex plot, behind our stories.
But a plot, regardless of quality or complexity, has a setting. The really rich stories have a rich setting because the setting intimately impacts both the events and the character. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example, it matters very much that Lucy should find Tumnus in a snowy wood—a rainy, dreary wood or a even a city neighborhood would change everything. The cold, the quiet, and the thick whiteness adds a great deal of tension in the story and impacts not only what the characters do, but how they interact as well.
Our stories have a setting. On a macro level, our setting is the universe. My mind wants to break the unfathomable universe into little manageable pieces. God gives it to me whole. The milky-way dances and I can’t keep up. I want to think theology. He says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). We prefer vivisection to poetry, microscopes to the ocean. My mind stutters under the weight of all this light and color. It is more than I can handle: light and color that slips through a pin hole in the curtain that veils God’s absolute glory. Tear down the curtain and I die, ripped up, bowled over, and tumbled like a weed on the prairie.
On a micro level, our setting is this city, this street, and these walls. The entire stage, all the curtains and furniture, is our setting. Where we are physically significantly impacts not only what we do, but how we interact with others and how we interpret our life parable. A boy who spends his entire life on a farm may not understand why a city boy acts or responds to certain situations in a certain way, but the setting has played a significant role in shaping those responses. But this discussion goes much deeper than whether a boy grows up on a farm or in the city or whether Tumnus was in a snowy wood or not.
The most influential setting in our lives is what we call “home.” At any given moment, we have somewhere that we call “home.” Where is that place? What is the tone of that place? Who lives there? What kind of sounds and smells are found there? The quality of one’s “home” will largely be responsible for the quality of our responses to the events in life. If you come over to my house tomorrow, you’ll be greeted by an eager dog and five very different children. There will likely be music playing somewhere in the house and, Lord willing, the welcome smell of something cooking. Shortly after your arrival, my son will invite you to play hoops in the backyard: bump, 21, one on one, or whatever you like.
This is my home. Its textures have shaped me. I cannot imagine that I would respond to life or make the same choices were I single and living in an apartment; neither can I imagine things being the same if I lived with all my children in New York City. We are spiritual and physical beings who not only pilgrimage through a physical world, but whose spirits, intellects, and imaginations are all molded by that physical world. The setting of a parable is as important as the character himself. The house he lives in is as important as the house inside him.
Wisdom suggests that we pay closer attention to the textures of our stories. The health of the soul depends heavily on the health of the imagination. Since the imagination is so heavily influenced by its surroundings, its setting, choosing the location and quality of the roof over our heads is more than a pragmatic decision.
