The more healthy the imagination, the more it sees the world as it really is: enchanted with the divine presence. Like harvesters, we walk the fields of this world and look for the marks of Jesus Christ, gleaning the savior[1] wherever he may be found. When our imaginative vision is consumed with God, captivated by Jesus Christ, and nourished by the Holy Spirit, then we are most fulfilled. That fulfillment can only start at the source or well-spring of our desires, thoughts, will, actions, and habits: the imagination.
Thomas Howard reinforces this importance of the imagination for gleaning the savior. The imagination is much more than simple fancy. It is “the mode of perception that may lie closest to the truth of our humanness. Angels and seraphim do not need imagination presumably, since it is said that they behold reality directly, and animals do not have imagination as far as we can tell; but we men perceive reality, unlike angels, mediated through a thousand oblique angles and colors in the prism of creation, and we forever try, unlike animals, to decry a pattern by relating all the angles and colors to each other.”
This eternal effort to trace the heavens signifies our human dignity as made in the image of God, patterned after him, and magnetically drawn back to the divine. We want “the birth.” A birth that begins by looking into The Sun: God. That kind of vision inspires awe and delight. Unfortunately, we’re lured into a simplistic, vivifying approach to people, nature, and ourselves: a dissecting attempt to control what we cannot control, a smallification of the grand and glorious. The healthy imagination begins with curiosity which then leads to awe and this awe, dear friends, is wired into us by God as a means of drawing us back imaginatively to Himself. Most of us, however, spend our lifetimes shouting that awe down until it is so small that we are reduced to calling a milkshake “awesome.” But real awe, childlike awe, is a hallmark of a healthy imagination.
Children have natural inborn vitality and so they want things repeated. My daughter has The Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear memorized. So do I. I read it to her or recite it with my eyes half closed. She turns the pages without me, so I rest my eyes even more. I finish.
“Read it again,” she says.
I read it again, but I am not strong enough to exult in monotony because I am an adult (so says Chesterton and I reluctantly admit the accusation). A man, for example, performs a magic trick for kids. They have seen it fifteen times before. When he is finished, the youngest cry, “Do it again!” while the teenagers shuffle away, feeling the heavy burden of self-seriousness and enlightened rationalism. “Do it again,” say the children and we remember the words of our Lord: “Lest you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
The unhealthy imagination sees only one flat, faceless, reductionist view of everything that God has made glorious. Nearly everything around us—noise and bustle—conspire against the childlike imagination in this regard. The awe is bludgeoned into silence. The adventurous spirit grows callused. While the created world shines over us with majesty, we peck for scattered seeds along the ground like narrow minded hens. Hens are not known for their broad perspective, for their vision, but we ought to be so known.
This shift away from ourselves and toward God depends heavily upon reclaiming the awe-filled imagination as we view nature and people and the significance of life events, thereby bringing our vision into alignment with God’s vision. If his creation is awesome to him, then we imitate him by maintaining that awe. In order to reclaim the imagination, we must repossess a childlike awe even, or especially, of the mundane.
If we start looking for enchantment in the details, like the May-mess of cherry blossoms or ant colonies in a geo-political race to build their own Tower of Babel in the sidewalk, then we will wake up one day to find that we are filled with awe. When we look around us and see The Sun, God, wherever we look then we’ll know that we are right side up. We will know that we have a healthy imagination. We require new eyes so that we can see God’s fingerprint everywhere, for “Christ plays in ten thousand places” and “the world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Grandeur of God”). But if we stop and simply stare, ox-like, at creation, then we will stall our pilgrim steps and home will remain far off. Creation, as an expression of God’s beauty, is a means by which God calls us out of ourselves and on toward Him. Every swallow, every sun-tipped wave, every towering tamarack tree points back toward its Creator as a road sign for us. Thomas Howard reminds us that “all creation whispers, ‘Not yet. Not here. Keep going’” (Thomas Howard).
[1] Anthony Esolen, in his book Ironies of Faith, used this term to describe the poetic work of Gerard Manley Hopkins who is, in my opinion, a blueprint for us to follow as disciples of Jesus Christ. Although few of us are professional poets, we might be well served to develop a poet’s eye.
