A distinguishing mark of great stories is the human tension, the conflict, that shapes the characters. Longings, failures, ambitions, sins, and desires all play significant parts in who the characters are and who they become. The recognition that we are characters in a larger story helps inform how we live that story. We are rich, round characters, because God made us in his image. When we read our lives in this manner, then we look at our failures, our desires, and our various tensions differently, realizing that they all have a purpose. Each of them points toward the author’s shaping of the character and the resolution of the story. When we see our lives in narrative terms, then we better understand how transformation takes place. Our tensions, feelings, and aims, like the setting, play a significant part in transforming us.
The imagination is the tool God has given us by which we not only perceive the sequence of events, the setting, and our various character qualities, but we also conceive or weave a story from those parts. We certainly feel inadequate, sheepish, maladjusted, and bewildered more often than we’ll admit, but that doesn’t prevent our imaginations from creating a story in which we play a particular role. The quality of that conceived story, the richness and degree of complexity, is the source of meaning we find in life. If our story is busy, our desires are shallow, and our spiritual ambitions are low, then the meaning we find in life will likewise by shallow.
I worked at a small lumber store as one of my college summer jobs. One old curmudgeon muttered through the week and lashed at anything that wasn’t a costumer. We tiptoed around him for fear of catching his attention and even the inanimate wood appeared to shy away when he approached. Friday evening was his only bright point of the week and all his shallow desires centered around it. He saved every penny during the week so he could binge with the best steak and the best beer; everything else was an agonizing wait for the next Friday night.
Though he had low ambitions, I’m convinced that he was not always that way. We all seek meaning and I think his inability to find it chafed his soul. At the deepest level of our person, we all seek a meaningful story. The quality of our conceived story plays an enormous role in whether we find that meaning in life. No wonder we lack meaning in life: like Macbeth’s, our stories feel like sound and fury signifying nothing. We feel like we’re walking through our parable on broken feet and we want to be better than broken. We want to change our parable, but God is telling the parable. How does the lead character climb out of the plot, tap on the window of God’s study, and suggest some adjustments? We try, but our attempts haven’t worked so far. What can we do, then, when the story we perceive and conceive feels like the unwanted child of failure and exhaustion?
I think there is one important imaginative activity that effectively propels us along our pilgrim way: we can remember the author’s promises. Every single promise that God made to his people was a call to the imagination: a call to get up and follow him. The old hymn calls us to stand upon the promises of Christ the King, but to stand on a promise requires the ability to envision something which has yet to be. It requires imagination. Abraham lies on his back and stares at the starry canvas. He remembers God’s promise to make him a nation. God had pointed to the stars and said, “So shall your seed be.” But Abraham’s arthritic knees flare up as he tries to get up off the ground and the damp ground chills him faster than it did twenty years ago. Stand on the promises. So many promises like great boulders across a wide river: we hop from one to the next until we reach the other side.
Here’s a statement of fact: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness” (Jeremiah 31:3). The promise? I have loved you and I will always love you. We are the epiphany of God, as Alexander Shmemann said, and therefore the offspring of his love. God’s love for his creation finds expression first in his imagination and then in what he does with that creation.
He imagines you.
He speaks you.
He leans in and claps over your parable.
He is love pressing in to meet you and to fill you. Imagine that!
“All this is from God who has reconciled us to himself through Christ” (I Corinthians 5:18). The Christian tradition teaches a beautiful doctrine of salvation, that only the blood of Christ saves us from sin. We could never overstate that fact, but it is worth remembering that our imaginations are at work even in comprehending that fundamental fact of our redemption. Imagine this: we are robed in the righteousness of Christ! There is no other meaningful way of understanding redemption than by way of the imagination and there is no other way for my life to have meaning until I see it as a redemptive story. In an elegant dovetail, God utilizes our imagination to know him more fully and to desire him more completely.
Like Abraham, we bump into imaginative barriers, spiritual rocks, and groan in our confusion. We search God’s shadow for dimension, for an explanation to the difficult, seemingly unassailable events of our existence, but we cannot fully grasp their purpose until the day when we see God himself. So God gives us his promises to foreshadow that moment. His promises build a bridge of images by which the imagination can travel toward God. The separation we feel between this finite life and the infinite God is a ravine of our own making, but we spend life attempting to bridge that gap with poor material: emotional euphoria, positive mental thoughts, philosophy, “ten steps to a better you.” Unfortunately, our bridges do not span the distance required and we find ourselves falling short of lasting happiness, or joy, or satisfaction.
The vibrant life, the abundant life, is assured to those whose spiritual ballast consists of God’s promises. The storms will not disappear. The waves and wind will play havoc. We will face deep trouble and heart-breaking sorrow. We might even taste depression, but our ballast keeps us from keeling over and a healthy imagination will point the ship in the right direction.
But behold, I have taken my hands off the authorial rudder and we are lost in an ocean of mixed metaphors: parables, boulders, bridges, and ships. Perhaps it’s time we returned to life as a narrative. Augustine’s famous claim mentioned in chapter 1 is a narrative claim: “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God” (Confessions). It implies a beginning and points toward an end. It is a word picture: an image that acts on the imagination and informs our journey. If Augustine is correct, then our only tangible hope is to feed the imagination with God’s promises until they bring us, through faith alone, to our final rest in God.
Reclaiming the primacy of the imagination will give us a needed fresh perspective on everything that constitutes our parable: what we do, what we think, how we feel, and everything that has or will ever happen to us. The healthy imagination is narratively aware, constantly reading its own parable and the parables it encounters. Understanding the fundamentals of a good story and looking for those aspects every day will change how we view this life’s journey, how we view suffering, how we view knowledge, affection, ethics, the daily urban grind, and other people.
The imagination will not save humanity from eternal separation from God. Only the blood of Christ can do that. But the imagination is the vehicle of faith that follows the promises of God and crosses the bridge between God and us, created by the blood of Christ. The imagination will also save us from our own distraction and self-preoccupation. God has given us an imagination as the primary instrument through which we can see things as God sees them, as narrative, and thereby find meaning in a cosmos that is pregnant with it. Lasting happiness will elude us until we align our vision, our imagination, with God’s narrative vision.
