The Crane’s Claw

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The imagination, overloaded as it is with sensual pleasure and distraction, needs a touchstone, a frame of reference by which to be anchored. Remember the cranes? The legends suggest that during the journey they will land for short respites. Huddled together, they will select one of their members to keep watch. That crane lifts a stone in one claw while standing on the other. The stone provides that crane with a focus point for his sleepy mind and if he falls asleep, he will drop the stone and wake not only himself, but those whom he was to protect.

            The medieval bestiaries were a wonderful example of imaginative vision: they saw symbols everywhere. To those medieval Christians, the cranes represented us on our pilgrimage and the stone represented Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life. Our safety on this pilgrimage depends upon our holding Christ and focusing all our attention upon him lest we drop the Touchstone. Not only must we fly as high as the crane, we must also be alert like the crane.

            The healthy imagination so necessary for our pilgrimage depends not only upon a right trajectory toward Beauty, but a knowledge of the Truth. This knowledge is what keeps the imagination from feeding on every sense experience and all the particulars of our lives as though every single one were a source of nourishment. By analogy, we can put nearly anything in our mouths, but not everything we put in our mouths will be nourishment to our bodies. Because the imagination has an appetite, we would do well to feed it properly for the sake of the soul. There is plenty of spiritually poisonous gas in this life of ours, but God has given us the tools by which to find the Truth and to expose false imposters.

Truth certainly speaks into our reason and the propositional training of the mind is an important equipping process for discerning Truth. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of reason in the life of a Christian disciple and there are many valuable books on the topic. But there are more ways to apprehend Truth than reason. As Thomas Howard shows so eloquently, we find the Truth in propositions like the book of Proverbs, the Gospel sermons, the apostolic writings, and the law of God. We also find the truth in history, where it takes not the form of proposition, but narrative. We find it in the Psalms where it comes in the form of poetry and dance. In the prophets we find the truth in startling images like a woman clothed in the sun and in the parables we find the truth couched in anecdotes. Finally, we find the Truth best expressed in the incarnation where it is embodied by Christ for all men to see.

Scientific experiment and verification is not the arbiter of facts. Though very few will admit it, even scientists work from certain assumptions about the natural world just like a logician works from certain premises. These assumptions, these life premises, are based in stories. No matter how they are told, whether in textbooks or in song, these stories are creation stories, stories that tell us where we came from, where we are going, and what we are doing along the way (Dickerson and O’Hara). This fact does not remove my ability to know something truly, but it does verify that there are many ways to know: I know facts about my wife. Yes, but I also know my wife poetically, as a best friend only can. Even more so, I go into the bedroom and close the door, and we know each other intimately.

God has also given me the imagination as an instrument of seeing, and therefore of knowing. The imagination helps me to know poetically, three-dimensionally. By the imagination, I take all three ways of knowing just listed—factually, poetically, and intimately—and create a whole picture or story that provides meaning in life.

What instrument of the mind synthesizes our experiences, facts, assumptions together in search of correspondences that tell a meaningful story? The imagination. What serves as a directional basis for the journey of the imagination toward God? Beauty. What keeps us upon the correct road as we move toward God by means of the imagination? Truth.

Once again, I’ve planted tomatoes in my garden. I like tomatoes, unless they’re canned or boiled. The plants looked fine when I first put them in the ground, of course, but now it’s August and they’ve sprawled spinelessly all over the garden. I like tomatoes. I don’t like tomato plants. They are ungainly, unbridled droopers and stinkers.

I am at a friend’s house. It is still August. He has a small back yard with a garden tucked into the corner by the garage. I like gardens and so I snoop while he’s up at the house. He has a thick and happy crop of blueberries. He has pumpkins and cucumbers and herbs. He has tomatoes, too. His tomato plants rise like a vine along a 2×2 post and his tomatoes hang like pearls along fruit bearing branches—a lot of tomatoes. They look like they’re from an advertisement and I begin to think there’s a catch. My friend joins me in the garden just in time to catch my blossoming suspicion.

“Where did you get your vine tomatoes,” I ask. I’m waiting for him to shuffle his feet and confess that they’re plastic.

“O, those aren’t vine tomato plants. These are just regular ‘ole tomato plants. What lots of people don’t realize is that tomato plants produce better with a couple of minutes of attention each day. You know how on a tomato plant you’ll have the main stalk and the main branches growing and then you have these little nutrient suckers that will pop out from the inside elbow where the stalk and branch meet?”

He shows me the “sucker branches” and I recognize them as the driving characteristic of my plants at home. I nod and smile.

“Well, those are the ones that will outgrow all the fruit bearing branches and use up all the nutrients. If they’re allowed to grow, then they’ll restrict the output of actual tomatoes and sometimes choke out the plant.”

 

The imagination, while essential for accurately perceiving the world and ourselves in the world, is like that tomato plant. It will bear fruit in action. What we are concerned with here is how to train the imagination so that it does not become unwieldy and undisciplined as a result of negligence. Like our emotions and like our reason, the imagination will feed on whatever it is given, and if it is not pruned periodically by the Truth, then it will synthesize our life experiences into a story that is self-contradictory and possibly self-destructive. A destructive story leads the soul away from God. Since the imagination is the tap root of the soul, it is the imagination in line with the Truth that will lead the soul back to God.

Here is where we run into some trouble again. Since you and I have grown up in a world that believes Truth is relative, our imaginations and, therefore, our souls, have nothing to guide them. We choke ourselves at the deepest point with our own metaphysical freedom and autonomy. I’d like to suggest that if we are the epiphany of God, the offspring of His imagination, and the expression of His love, then He would not send us whirling into a cosmos void of absolute meaning and objective Truth. He would not leave us stranded in this world without a map to guide us toward home. He is calling us back to himself by speaking into our imaginations and he has given us not only a map, but the pruning shears of the imagination that we so desperately need. They are called, in my tradition, the Old and New Testament Scriptures.

I say “my tradition” because it is the one in which I was raised. Indeed, it is not mine—I did not find it. It found me. It is the one I have come to love and embrace as my own though I was baptized with hardly a clue as to the nuances and profound claims of the Christian faith. I say “my tradition” because there are many religious traditions clamoring for an audience and, thankfully, Christianity is not one of them. As C.S. Lewis put it, not all roads radiate from a circle and we will not gradually draw nearer to the center if we follow them long enough. We live, “rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision…It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection…I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road” (from the preface to The Great Divorce).

The road that leads to God is found exclusively in Christianity. In its most faithful expressions through history, Christianity has always been the most unassuming of religions. Ironically, it is also the one that begets conviction, nobility, and a love for martyrdom by preaching a life of servanthood.

Christianity is a religion of irony.

Irony can only be understood by imagination.