Rarely do our actions reflect thoughtful, calculated choice. They are typically the product of how we imagine the world and our place in it. For good or for ill, the imagination and the story it weaves are so deeply entrenched in us that we are often simply not self-aware enough to accurately identify the story by which we live. We have difficulty stepping outside of ourselves to observe how the imagination impacts what we do. We know that the will, as distinct from the intellect, is the decision making faculty of the mind, but do not realize that it is handmaid to the imagination. The choices we make are the result of imaginative work that is precognitive. These choices resulting from subconscious imagining, if given time, soon become habits. The habits formed in our lives are birthed in the imagination. They are the fruit of the imagination, expressions of our desires and the story we perceive. Not only that, but the story we perceive is a matter of habitual imagining and, like any other habit, it will only change if replaced by a new habit; in this case, an alternate way of perceiving. We become what we imagine.
James K.A. Smith suggests that life habits are the fulcrum of our desire. They are “the hinge that turns our heart, our love, such that it is predisposed to be aimed in certain directions.” Moreover, he says that we are propelled to action by an engine “that purrs along under the hood with little attention from us (Desiring the Kingdom). Many of our life choices are the product of habit, not just habits of action but habits of thought, and these habits are formed, not hardwired, in us by means of the imagination.
The imagination is father to action. All ethical and unethical actions—both spoken and unspoken—have their roots, their genesis, their inception, in the imagination. For this reason, Scripture could not be more condemning than by saying “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).
The imagination is fed by pictures and drives actions based on those pictures. Those actions, given time and tide, will become habits. The imagination is not so much a debating chamber as a picture gallery (Macneile Dixon, The Human Situation). Since habits “constitute the fulcrum of our desire” and since they are the fruit of the imagination, any activity that feeds visual stimulus to the imagination is essentially habit and life forming. Christ, in fact, said that repentance for sinful actions was good, but not simply effective enough. If one imagined murdering his brother or having sex with his neighbor’s wife, then those actions were as good as done. Damage to the soul has already been done.
What we imagine shapes us.
For this reason, it takes very little for television and movies to form not only our desires, but also our common frame of reference. Both are easily dismissed as merely entertainment, but it is precisely these pictured stories that nourish the fruit of our lives. Consider, for a moment, the power of pornography. Pornography is not only immoral but spiritually deadly. It skews the imagination and, therefore, the whole person. An imagination so distorted can only bear distorted fruit, fruit that gradually ruins all relationships. It stands to reason that any examination of conscience must include an examination of the imagination because the health of one’s conscience is directly connected to the vitality of the soul. Many people, unfortunately, simply do not want to work that hard to unearth the contagion. Others are simply too focused on chasing their imaginative story of self-fulfillment.
We become what we imagine. Therefore, “what discernment we should exercise about the things that feed our mind and are to be the seed of our thoughts! For what we read unconcernedly today will recur to our minds when occasion arises and will rouse in us, even without our notice, thoughts that will be a source of salvation or ruin” (Pierre Nicole, Essais de morale contenus en divers traits, V.II, Paris 1733).
Assessing the imagination might prove the most essential move toward spiritual health, but such assessment is difficult because it is so habitually undermined. We would be wise, therefore, to cultivate healthy imaginations as intentionally as we do healthy bodies. We are creatures with the gift of an imagination whose power is beyond our understanding and whose quality must be guarded as the gateway to our hearts.
The healthy imagination, therefore, is measured by its sanctification—by the degree to which it is washed by Christ and seeks Christ in everything: the degree to which it pursues God. Our actions, or what the Scriptures call our “fruit,” betray the state of our imagination and provide the world an embodied expression of our view of God. Assuredly, “nothing reveals more forcefully one’s true view of God than the quality of one’s imaginings” (Janine Langan).
When Scripture says that the mouth speaks out of the overflow of the heart, it reinforces this very principle: what a person says or does is the cultivated product of the heart. The imagination is the soil of the heart’s loves and hates and desires. A friend of mine had a vision of the good life. He hoped for freedom and personal pleasure. He had faith in himself to achieve both and, with a little bit of luck, he found a girl who wanted something similar. Pregnancy was not part of the dream, but she gave birth while they were both in high school.
Some people might dismiss the poor chump and advise him to use protection next time, but the truth is that he is not very different from the rest of us. The difference is that his choices caught up with him and chained him down. What I don’t often realize is how chained I am by the stories my imagination perpetually spins.
Because the imagination purrs beneath our hoods with little attention from us, our loves and hates are especially conditioned by the story we perceive. A well-renowned writer and student of people once wrote that “hate is just a failure of imagination.” I disagree. Perhaps our disagreement reflects differing uses of the word imagination, but I think it is worth noting here that every form of hate, good and bad, is the realization of the imagination, not a failure of imagination. Actions of love or hate are the full-fledged product of the imagination.
Take, as another example, the parable of the prodigal son found in Luke 15. Christ used a story to reach through all the intellectual barriers and access the drive shaft of actions, the imagination. At his most basic, the prodigal son is not so much a reasoning being as a desiring being and so his imagination has tremendous power in how he lives life. His passions have veto power over reason and so his will, like ours, answers to his desires. What he does is not so much a matter of conscious, calculated choice, but the natural product of a certain way of imagining life and his place in it. The prodigal son’s desires, as pictured in the imagination, manifested themselves in the choices he made. His decision making faculty, the will, was and will be handmaid to the imagination.
When he took the cash, took to the city, and blew it on his own pleasure, he was only expressing what was in his imagination all along. Some of us are surprised when the pastor has a fling with his secretary or when the good daughter gets pregnant, but the idea that such events just suddenly happened is an illusion. These collapses in character are the product of the story these people perceive. Unfortunately, many of us don’t take the time to assess the story we are perceiving and blindly live out our arrogance in a lifetime of self-gratification. Many of us have forgotten that we are people set apart by God, a holy priesthood with a high calling to be more self-aware. M was right when she told James Bond, “This may be too much for a blunt instrument to understand, but arrogance and self-awareness seldom go hand in hand (Casino Royale).”
On the other hand, the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39, provides a fitting example of a man who was self-aware regarding his imaginings. Joseph was strong, fluid in mind and body, and well-proportioned, and he climbed the corporate ladder even as a slave. He was a hard worker and a man of prayer. This rare combination was one reason why God blessed him. None of these blessings blinded him imaginatively to the the dangers that lurked around the corner or to his own capacity for sin. He ran from Potiphar’s wife, naked as the day he was born, not because he was afraid of sex, but because the scenario was not new to his imagination. He had rehearsed, on principle, what he would do if tempted to be unfaithful to his wife—present or future. There was will—volition—involved, but it answered to his desire for purity and marital happiness untainted by covert trysts. That happiness and purity were central to Joseph’s vision of the good life.
Let me confess here that to a large degree I am more like the prodigal son than I am like Joseph. My vision of the good life often involves doing what I want when I want, and getting what I want when I want it. This vision of the good life, however, coincides more with our western clamor for self-fulfillment than it does with God’s vision of the good life.
Thankfully, God is rather clear about the good life and Scripture is full of glimpses. One of those important glimpses is a beautifully simple prayer found in Proverbs 30. “Two things I ask of you; deny them not to me before I die: Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’ or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.” Another glimpse is in I Thessalonians 4:11. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business, learning to work with your hands as we commended you.” Both passages paint a picture of a very different kind of good life than we are accustomed to pursuing. They offer us a new kind of ambition and the greatest of all risks: the risk of oblivion.
The word oblivion means the state of being forgotten, indicating that something or someone can still be very alive and well and still being forgotten. The word denotes a continuum along which the forgetfulness moves from more awareness to no awareness. I Thessalonians 4:11 is a blueprint for a life of oblivion and this is another place where God’s upside down economy is evident. The world and the people in love with her are hell bent on outrunning oblivion, but the memory of their lives is smudged by the hand of time. The Christian tradition on the other hand is full of people who ran toward oblivion with open arms and whose memory still blazes before us as proof that God uses the foolish things to confound worldly wisdom.
