Imagine this:
A river in the sky.
I have five children, four girls and one boy.
Guy time is a rare and valued treat. When my son was about three, we bought him two foam airplanes with which to play with dad. What made these airplanes rather exciting was their potential for air time. Attached to each eight-inch plane was a very large and strong rubber-band. We could pull that rubber-band back about four feet and let the plane fly. Sending that airplane over the back fence became a cinch and we both delighted in watching a perfect long distance flight. That’s what boys do.
We were sitting on the back deck when, being Dad and having a lust for the spectacular that has nearly no bounds, I began to wonder whether we could turn the airplane into a kind of rocket and launch it vertically into the atmosphere. So I took my airplane, pointed it vertically, pulled as far back as I possible could and was about to let it fly when my son frantically stopped me. He had a wild look in his eye, an alarm verging on terror, and the intensity of his face and gestures stopped me.
“You can’t do that, Dad! If you shoot it up there, we’ll lose it in the river,” he said.
Now, you need to know that we have no river near us. I have a small stream and pond I created, but they’re both small enough for a child to step over, so I was a bit baffled as to this sudden alarm.
“What river?” I asked him.
“The river in the sky!” he said with frustration in his tone of voice, as though he was stating the obvious to a man who should already have the intelligence to know it. Unfortunately, I am a child of the Enlightenment with one overdeveloped way of looking at the world and so I asked again, “What river? There is no river in the sky.”
He looked at me with shocked three-year-old eyes and a dropped jaw. “Was Dad serious?” they seemed to ask. “Was Dad really that dense in the head?” they pleaded.
“Look, Dad.” He had suddenly grown into a patient and kind teacher, willing to work around my imaginative barriers. “Look at all that blue water in the sky. Do you see how the clouds move along the water in the same direction? Do you see how quickly they’re moving along the river? That means the river is pretty strong today, so we definitely don’t want to shoot the airplane up there. If we do, then we’ll lose it in the river and we’ll never get it back!”
What does any Dad worth his salt do with that moment? “The kid is messed up,” I thought. “He’s got only some of the facts straight. There is water in the sky, but it’s no river.” I was about to correct him in good scientific fashion, but my tongue stumbled on the words. I was unwilling to place upon my son the burden of my enlightened rationalism which takes our knowledge too seriously.
I laughed. He looked at me, puzzled. Then we were laughing together, father and son, two boys giggling at the river in the sky and wishing we could raft together on one of those clouds. Maybe, just maybe, my son has everything correct. Maybe, just maybe, my son is seeing the sky as God sees it. My narrow rationalist friends will purse their lips and shake their heads to hear the young so lead astray. My more fastidious pietistic friends may well click their tongues and call it all a vile pack of lies. But I often wonder if God is not more playful than we are and that our goal in life is not so much to get all the facts straight as to get the perspective correct. Maybe when we see the sky as a river, we’re actually getting it all more poetically correct and, therefore, more correct in an ultimate sense. Maybe it’s closer to the way God sees the world. Maybe we’ve finally landed right side up.
Along with G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Howard, Robert Farrar Capon is helping me reclaim the imagination. His perspective on things is obtuse enough to startle me into the enchantment of the world, people and things alike. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “all the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up” (Orthodoxy). Capon is upside down in just the right way. And that’s the point of reclaiming the imagination: to become right way up. Because the imagination is at the core of who we are as people, reclaiming our imagination is reclaiming our humanity—what and who we were meant to be—recapturing and nurturing the divine image. What a playful anthropology!
Capon suggests that we reclaim our humanity, as God intended, by looking poetically at the world: “In our fear of picking up an incorrect causal connection we deprive ourselves of the freedom of rummaging playfully through all the connections we could think of. And that’s a shame because it’s precisely connectedness, interrelatedness, that’s the most engaging thing about the world. We should be far more afraid than we are of the habit of assuming there’s only one correct way of talking about it. To get a connection backwards or wrong or to pick it up fabulously or poetically—to say the sun rises or the moon wanes, to think boats grow from seed or plankton have plans—is all small compared to missing the wonder of it altogether. Or as happens more usually, to turning the world into an alien, tiresome place where only the least fabulous, least poetic—least human—reading of causality can be the right one”
The imaginative faculty sees connection and difference, types and shadows, symmetry and singularity; in a word, correspondences. The healthy imagination sees the fingerprint of God everywhere, it sees the face of God pressing through the fabric of this world. In this way, the healthy, or sanctified imagination is attentive because as Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son, “a man without attention is not fit to live in the world.” And Tennyson echoed the same when he wrote, “for what are men better than sheep or goats that nourish a blind life within the brain?” (The Passing of Arthur).
