Allow me to return to a different metaphor for the imagination. Remember the tomato plants? Let’s imagine that we are plants. Let’s imagine that what we do and feel every day, all day, is the result of the nutrients fed through the tap root. The tap root of our very essential being is the imagination. So what happens when the tap root is sucking up foulness? What happens when we are living destructive cycles because the tap root has no alternative from which to drink? Obviously, the plant must be uprooted and replanted in fertile soil, but the plant cannot uproot itself. We need community, we need others to uproot us and replant us in better soil.
The problems we face are very concrete, very real, and persistently pressing: Children who kick the hornet’s nest, corporate scissors that cut us loose, infections that set up camp and put up the Home Sweet Home over the door of our body are not theoretical problems. How does the imagination see through these kinds of circumstances? Finding a solution is more than a schoolboy’s exercise and the sum to these problem will not be had by copying the teacher’s notes. What makes it worse is that we see, when we do, only in part. We do not know ourselves well enough to fix the problem. Only God knows us that well. Jeremiah Burroughs, in his classic, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment provides an analogy for this poor self-understanding. “When a man has a watch and understands the use of every wheel and pin, if it goes amiss he will soon find out the cause of it; but when someone has no skill in a watch, if it goes amiss he does not know what is the matter, and therefore cannot mend it. So indeed our hearts are as a watch, and there are many wheels and winding and turnings there. And we should labor to know our hearts well, that when they are out of tune, we may know what is the matter.”
That is why this discussion about the imagination and its import in our lives is not simply an exercise in theoretical piddling. We have thrown the wheels and windings of our hearts out of gear and there is much grinding as result. If most of us have spent a lifetime perceiving poorly and living a story not worth the peanuts we pay for it, how then do we break the cycle and start living better, more meaningful, stories? How do we align our vision with God’s imagination?
For starters, we desperately need other people to help us live more meaningful stories. God uses other people to align our vision with God’s imagination. Throughout this book, I’ve suggested that we need not something to do, but new eyes by which to see. That’s not completely true. There are some things we can do to get those new eyes. There are things we can do to help sanctify the imagination. We’ve spent the time requisite to explore the sanctified imagination. Perhaps it’s time we discovered some means by which we can claim it for ourselves.
Let’s remember that the imagination has two key qualities: first, it is the storying faculty of the mind; second, it is the seeing faculty of the mind. As a storying faculty, the imagination perceives the various parts of our lives and works night and day to synthesize those parts into a coherent whole. Whether or not that coherent whole story matches the actual story God is weaving is besides the point for now. What matters is that we understand the imagination’s restless activity.
As the restlessly seeing faculty of the mind, the imagination is able to see what is not presently before the eyes. I can remember the time I ate fried ants as a kid even though those fried ants aren’t presently before my eyes. I can also anticipate, or imagine, a future that includes ocean side property and endless hours to write. That future, obviously, is not presently before my eyes but that fact is no barrier to my imagining it. This activity of the imagination is almost always on hyper drive. I have no stats to support my instinct, but I’m sure we spend the majority of each day imagining either the past or the future. We might be tempted to suppress this particular activity of the imagination because it smacks of nostalgia or fantasy, but that is besides the point for now. What matters is that we realize this second restless activity of the imagination.
The question posed a short time ago was, “How can we align our vision with God’s vision?” Which is to say, “How is the imagination sanctified?” Those questions assume that we can align our vision with God’s: an assumption we just spent time to undermine. We have already addressed the very real matter of our incapacity to deliver ourselves into the new birth and we have come to understand that God uses other people to do so. How then can we turn around and suggest that we have any active role in the process of aligning our vision with God’s? If our actions depend so much upon the author of our life story for change, then how much of our activity is our own? John Piper answers this dilemma well because he does so briefly: just because we know that every breath comes from God, does not mean that we have no obligation to breath (When I Don’t Desire God). So it is concluded that only God can shift our spiritual vision, and yet you and I are responsible to make those shifts ourselves. How to make those shifts remains the question: a question can only be answered by dealing with the activities of the imagination—storying and seeing—separately, so let’s do that.
First, the imagination restlessly conceives a story of the parts of our lives. The goal of our lives is to conceive a story that matches well the story that God is actually weaving. Only God, through the Holy Spirit, is capable of revealing to us a glimpse of his larger story. When he does, we usually know it. The convergence of a thousand threads of possibility on a single point of actuality leaves us gasping for air. In that profound revelatory moment, we suddenly know in fact what we only theorized; namely, that we are part of a much larger and more complex story.
God has given us his Scripture for that very purpose. The Scriptures give us a glimpse of the larger story of which we, believer and unbeliever alike, are a part. The Bible gives us God’s promises, people, and principles that all act upon our imagination. The promises of God, as already stated, inform our faith and help us to see what is not presently before our eyes. The various characters of the Bible are living mirrors by which we see ourselves: I am like Peter today and like Gideon tomorrow. The principles provided in the Bible are the directions for keeping our stories free of moral complications. So, when it comes to the storying, synthesizing faculty of the mind, the imagination has the Bible as a guide for storying well, but it needs the Holy Spirit to reveal God’s larger purpose in our particular life stories. These revelations come in God’s timing and all we can do is pray for more of these insights and remain attentive for the moment when God passes them before our imaginative vision.