“O me! For why is all around us here…as if the world were wholly fair, but that these eyes of men are dense and dim, and have not power to see it as it is: perchance, because we see not to the close.”
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur
A Quote from G.K. Chesterton
As the reader’s eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something he has never seen: that is, never realized…None of us think enough of these things, on which the eye rests. But don’t let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see the startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes.
G.K. Chesterton, from the Preface to Tremendous Trifles
The Pinocchio Syndrome
Pinocchio, the witless.
Pinocchio, the mischievous.
Pinocchio, the sometimes brave.
No sooner had Geppetto finished carving Pinocchio’s legs and taught him to walk than the marionette bounced off the table and scampered out the door. With spindle legs and great flopping arms, Pinocchio gamboled off in search of adventure and fresh air. Accused of hating children because little Pinocchio ran off, Geppetto was imprisoned. When poor Pinocchio wandered back home, he found himself poorer than he thought: no Geppetto. He scavenged for food and found, instead, a talking cricket. The candid cricket said that a disobedient boy will become nothing more than an ass.
The wisdom of Solomon.
Petulant Pinocchio wanted nothing to do with such a kill-joy. He promptly hurled a hammer at the cricket and mashed it into a discolored pile of juice.
“What?!” you cry.
I know, Disney forgot that part.
So Pinocchio wandered into the street, begging for food. Poor Pinocchio. The neighbor, still reeling from a bad day, was cranky and dumped a bucket of water on Pinocchio. Welcome to the world, pal.
Pinocchio tried to warm himself on the stove, but fell asleep. When he awoke, his feet were burnt off: a symbol in more ways than one and a warning for the lad who would disobey his father. Geppetto was finally freed after clearing up the confusion. He built new feet for Pinocchio who promised to be good. In a thrall of good intention, Pinocchio promised to attend school and Geppetto sold his only coat to provide school books for Pinocchio.
How easily resolutions disintegrate.
Pinocchio, the simple.
Pinocchio, the distracted.
Pinocchio fell into bad company…over and over…and over again. Manipulated, coerced, beguiled, bamboozled, he followed the strained music of pleasure and entertainment only to end up hungry, lost, and bewildered. Sure enough, he woke up one morning as an ass, comical ears, snout, and all. What is worse, someone wanted to skin him and turn his skin into a drum! What a shame! What can an ass do, but bray and whine and bray some more?
Pinocchio’s pilgrimage was a meandering exercise in catastrophe, but for every bad companion, there was better companion to guide him. Unfortunately for Pinocchio, these wise companions took the form of little more than crickets and squirrels and so he paid little heed to their advice. So his early years are characterized by a simple-mindedness, a tendency toward distraction, and the ultimate transformation into an ass. We will call it The Pinocchio Syndrome.
Many of us suffer from The Pinocchio Syndrome. Like Pinocchio, we have leaned the ear toward catchy tunes, falling for self-pleasure and the flattery of Cat, or Fox, or Candlewick. Like Pinocchio, we have woken from a spiritual stupor and been entirely startled by the asinine face staring back in the mirror.
God has set us on pilgrimage and our pilgrimage need not end with such tragic transformation as Pinocchio. God has given us fellow pilgrims along this journey. Some companions are better than others and we cannot afford to dismiss those whom God has given to us as good guides. The difference between good companions and bad companions is that the former inspire Joy and the latter draw us down toward pleasure. The healthy imagination, the sanctified imagination, pursues companions who point it upward and inspire it toward Joy.
We were made to gravitate toward companionship of some kind, whether good or bad companions. We simply can’t help ourselves. In a world characterized by fracture and isolation, where neighbors hardly see each other and family members spend more and more time in their own rooms, we still gravitate toward community. Our community, our companionship has taken a virtual form these days, but it still has the skeleton of community. We exchange real people in real time for virtual people in virtual time, but the desire for company is wired into our nature by a God who likewise loves company. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity defended so faithfully by Athanasius, remains the only convincing reason why we gravitate toward others and why community is worth protecting. If we are the epiphany of a Trinitarian God, sprung forth from his imagination, then we should fully expect a communal aspect to our nature and a primordial need for that community.
Indeed, God has not only wired us for relationship, but he has made us in such a way that relationships have a formative affect upon our lives. I have had friends who were on both sides of the moral fence and several who straddled it. But like Pinocchio, when I was with the debauched, I became debauched by proximity. Like Pinocchio, when I was with the upright, I became upright by proximity proving that “he who walks with the wise becomes wise, but he who walks with the foolish shall be destroyed” (Proverbs 13:20). Like Pinocchio, we are shaped by the desires of those around us and by the appeal of their conceived stories in one of three ways: their conceived story generally resonates with our own, it is more beautiful than ours, or we are compelled to their story by fear of rejection.
When my family visited distant relatives in France, I was only a kid. We were invited one evening to a home, people we did not know but who knew our relatives, and ate a lavish dinner. When we finished the adults encouraged the children to go play while they had their grownup conversation. The children in that home knew no English, but language barriers are most easily surmounted by children. While the younger children found something to keep their attention, the older boy furtively suggested I follow him. He scampered up to his room and grabbed a stack of comic books, magazines, and a flashlight. I should have suspected something even though he was whispering in French because his body language was that of a moral sneak: recognizable universally to those with eyes in their head.
We stumbled out into the darkness of night and kicked out through the tall grasses of their property. I remember very little besides nestling down into the tall grass and waiting while he fidgeted with the flashlight. When it finally turned on, he pulled from his pile a French comic book and several other lewd French magazines. He rifled through those comics in search of every suggestive picture possible and though we could not understand a single word the other spoke, we understood each other perfectly when it came to the attraction of images.
I still remember the simultaneous revulsion and attraction of those pictures. My imagination snatched each one from the page to fix them on the wall of my mind. Their seductive power was augmented because of the circumstances in which they were encountered: night time in a foreign land, hidden amongst the tall grass with only a flashlight, and a companion whose bravado was far greater than my own. I was cowed by his calloused swagger, afraid of rejection, and attracted by the forbidden fruit. Such is the power of converging stories. His story was so different from my own and though I knew wrong from right, I did nothing to change the trajectory of our conjoined stories. I joined him in his wallowing and happily smeared myself with moral guano.
How do we overcome the Pinocchio syndrome? We find people who seek the characteristics of Christ: people who press us toward transcendent Joy, people who love the Beautiful and the True in order to be Good. We find people who help sanctify our imagination and expand our constrictions, then we call them our friends and find a way to be around them as much as possible.
The Purpose Driven Story
Since we are the epiphany of God’s imagination, walking and talking parables, how can we learn to better interpret our parables and the parables of those we encounter? One important way is by growing more familiar with the basics of a good story: plot, setting, and character. One need not be a literature teacher to recognize the basic elements of every story. These Aristotelian categories are so fundamental to narrative that even a four year old includes them when telling a story—fib or no fib. Just this evening I heard through the bedroom window my galloping four year old daughter vehemently cry, “For Aslan and for Narnia…No, no…I mean, for Narnia and for Aslan!” I’ve heard this cry before and she usually has a brandished stick in one hand and a stick pony between her legs when she shouts that battle cry. So when she came into the house screaming, twenty seconds later, one of two things must have happened: either she fell and hurt herself or her older brother, in an attempt at self-protection I’m sure, had unhorsed her.
“I need an ice pack! My favorite one, not that one (sob)…Mommy, I was just minding my own business outside (sob), when…”
“…Then he (sob)…”
“(dramatic sigh) That’s why…”
Voila, a narrative complete with plot, setting, and characters! Simple, perhaps, but Samantha will hone her skills with more practice over the years. Perhaps someday she will understand that this single moment in time is one snapshot within a much larger and more complex series of events. She will learn this lesson best by reading the great stories of the world, interpreting their lessons, and navigating their complexities.
Regardless of how rich the fabric of a story, it can always be reduced to its most elemental: the plot. The first lesson to learn about a good story is that no event in the plot sequence is random. Every side comment, every seemingly irrelevant detail plays a role in the narrative’s overall purpose. God is no inferior storyteller. If we know what constitutes a good story, then certainly God knows how to speak a good story. From a character’s perspective, stuck in the moment on one single page at a time, life events may very well have the look and feel of chaos. Our burden is remembering to see all this apparent chaos in our lives as important parts of the overall plot.
Let me invite you into one of those apparently purposeless moments in my life: I am sixteen or so. I have a sheet of questions placed before me: a chemistry test. I write my name at the top. That might be the only thing I get right on the test. I have studied many hours for this. I have prayed throughout. I am still praying. “Dear God, help.” I look at the letters and numbers and they swirl before me. I cannot set them in a comprehensible order in my mind. I close my eyes.
I want to be a doctor.
“Doctors do chemistry,” a voice in my head nags.
I open my eyes. It’s still just a jumble of letters and numbers and large empty spaces anticipating my pencil lead. My chemistry teacher thinks I’m mentally disabled (no joke). He’s never said it in so many words, but he wrote a note to my dad as one scientist to another and explained what he thought might be my mental problem. I am not mentally disabled, only something more frustrating: stupid, at least when it comes to these strange animals called equations. Equations are creatures that go “bump” in the night. They gurgle and giggle and make tiny scratching noises behind my closet door about an hour after the lights go out.
I want to be a doctor.
Time is up. I put my pencil down. So many spaces filled with scribbles. Doctors sometimes scribble. Others pretend to understand the scribbles. Maybe my chemistry teacher will glide over the scribbles and see something essentially, primordially true in the tilt of my penmanship and the test will secretly whisper to him, “The boy doesn’t need this test.”
And he will say, “The boy doesn’t need this test.”
“You should give him an A.”
“I should give the boy an A,” he will say. My chemistry teacher is a well intentioned man, though large and intimidating in a way that makes me think of old Ben Kenobi playing with little minds in Star Wars. I turn in my test. He looks briefly at the page and looks up at me. Clearly, no subliminal whispers.
I wanted to be a doctor. The author had other plans. I wanted patients, but he gave me students. I wanted to combat cancer of the cells, but now I combat other kinds of cancer. What seemed at the time to be a miscarriage of authorial skill, turned out to be an essential plot twist.
The first step to aligning our imagination with God’s, then, is to see our lives as more than the meaningless and chaotic events we see with our eyes. The very fact that we cannot practically live with the idea of mere randomness as the defining aspect of our lives suggests that we come from a good story maker. Only bad stories have no point and no order. The ones worth reading are moving somewhere; the Christian story is headed toward final and eternal closeness with God, but for now we live behind a veil. For now we see in part, but someday we will see face to face (I Corinthians 13:12). And that’s the way it has to be…for now.
The Epiphany of God’s Imagination
C.S. Lewis was asked at one point where the idea of Narnia came from. He admitted to having an image, back when he was a teenager, of a faun standing in the snow. Talk about an unbridled imagination. He could have been doing something profitable like his character Eustace Scrub who liked pinning beetles on cards or reading books of information about grain elevators or the gross national product of Zimbabwe. Fauns are a notorious waste of one’s time.
Imagine this:
Young Clive Lewis, gangly and awkward like most teens, with a picture of a faun in his imagination. The faun had a setting: crisp snow, trees, and a lamp post. Was the faun real? That depends on what is meant by real, I suppose. Was the faun three-dimensional? Was he two-dimensional? Did he have personality? Did he have a name? Did he do anything? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. In Lewis’ imagination the faun had all these things in his favor. Even that early in the imagining, the faun was doing something: he was standing. So was the faun real? Yes, Tumnus the faun was real, he was real in the mind of his maker. All the faun lacked was the proper time and place to be materialized, which came forty years later in a land called Narnia.
I first met Tumnus like many of you, with Lucy, tumbling out of the wardrobe and out into the brisk air. There stood Tumnus, skittish and alone, with a satchel of books slung over his shoulder. Tumnus was real long before my daughter tugged on her mom’s shirt sleeve while watching the movie and said, “Oh, look, Mommy, there’s Tumnus! I love Tumnus.” Whether he could be touched by a finger, rather than only seen or heard, is irrelevant. He existed without ever being touched because he existed in the mind of his maker. All that was needed was for the maker to speak or write Tumnus onto the page. Tumnus lacked, of course, all the trappings of a life—a fireplace, bookshelves, Lucy, snow, and an evil queen. He even lacked a sensible witness to his person (outside of the author), a reader or a little girl sitting in a theater. But Tumnus existed. His entire life, all the beauty and all the pain, was in the imagination of his maker long before it ever happened to Tumnus.
You are Lucy. I am Eustace. We are Tumnus, written in God’s book and spoken into this whirling galaxy of stories. Knit together in the womb by the spoken, and still speaking, word of God, we are fearfully and wonderfully made and the days of our pilgrimage are already written in God’s book (Psalm 139:11-16).
The writer of Hebrews reinforces the psalmist when he writes, “by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which were visible” (Hebrews 11:3). God speaks the world into being and the visible is born of the invisible. He speaks you and me and all our individuality and uniqueness into being. All the words that form you and me and all creation came tumbling out of the creative mind of God. Those words are the formulations of what is already real in God’s imagination. You and me, with curling toe nails and nose hair and nasally voices, were first formed in God’s imagination.
We’ve been imagined.
That fact alone makes us very unique and precious to the Master Storyteller. Every difficulty, every memory, every happy moment of our lives is a single point in the plot which God is weaving. If a healthy imagination is had only by aligning our imagination with God’s imagination, then we need to see things as God sees them. Every story maker spins his or her story from the active workings of the imagination. We are the offspring, the children, the whirling galaxies, of God’s imagination. The business of life, then, is to see our lives as narrative and to see that narrative as the Master Storyteller does.
Life takes on a different hue, a nuanced perspective, when we perceive our lives as stories, but they take on another level of dimension entirely when we perceive our stories as God imagines them: our life stories are parables. All these cherry blossoms? All these figs and gravel and granola? These are the setting. This whirling globe is the setting for over six billion converging parables. Like molecules, we spin and collide without stopping to interpret those parables. How unfortunate. God gave us the imagination as a tool to not only perceive those parables, but to read them, interpret them, learn from them, and enjoy them. It is the only faculty we have that is capable of looking at the parables and seeing the parables simultaneously. The imagination is our only resource when it comes to both observing life as a parable and fluidly learning its lessons. If only we could observe the parable correctly and learn the lessons that God intends for us to learn. So often, however, we focus on the wrong parts of the parable or take away the wrong lesson. How very much like Christ’s disciples. Perhaps Christ would speak similar words to his people today: “How is it that you fail to understand?” (Matt. 16:11).
A Quote from Thomas Howard
Images created through some visible or audible medium give shape to the human experience of the world. The word “dry”, for example, can refer to many things. By itself it is not much of an image. But “dry as a bone” is. “Exhausted” is not itself an image, but “I felt like a wrung-out dishcloth” is. In both cases, the speaker has reached for some concrete thing in order to vivify abstract language. Dryness or exhaustion are states of affairs, and something in us mortals forever urges us to give shape–concrete shape–to these and other realities we experience.
We are coming up here to the word imagination, which is the image-making faculty with which we mortals are crowned. We have reason and will and affection and appetite–and imagination. We can scarcely open our mouths without reaching for some image. “Reaching” I just said. BUt I didn’t stretch out my arm here to grasp anything. It was “just” an image that presented itself naturally to my imagination int eh course of typing out that sentence. A few lines ago I said that the word “dry” is not, by itself, an image. But if I were to say, “Professor So-and so’s lectures are almost insupportably dry”, the adjective would conjure an image. An interesting question that comes trotting along (“trotting along”, he says) at this point is the question of the literal versus the fanciful. There is nothing literally “dry” about the good professor’s lectures, in the sense that the Sahara is dry. On the other hand, however, the image somehow not only does not attenuate the literal statement: rather it clarified it, or fortifies it, or vivifies it. The statement becomes tru-er when it is assisted by an image. I myself have always distrusted the –to me– cavalier remark, “Oh, that just an image. It’s not literally the case.”
No. Perhaps not. But the word “just” is a perilous one there. It implies that an image is “merely” this or that, and that it draws us away from the literal, which is the locale of the real, we would say. But does it? My own guess is that on the contrary, a well-chosen image draws us further into truth than, say, the syllogism, or the equation.
And suddenly we are head over heels in the mystery of the Incarnation. The Word of God, the truest thing there is tended toward concretion. “In the beginning was the Word…That event was very far from being a detour, or a mere charade, on the part of God. Nor was it a pis aller, as though God said to himself, “Hum. What strategy will answer to the collapse of things in that universe that I made? We’ve almost run out of ideas.” No…It is of the very nature of the Word that it tends toward Incarnation.” Or put it this way: we, who find ourselves in this species called man, seem to have an incorrigible wish to approach reality via the concrete.
(from The Night is Far Spent, p. 27)
Charcoal and Other Stupid Ways to Improve My Life
Scripture makes it clear that our life fractures can only be healed by way of forgiveness. Divine forgiveness is our means to abundant life. We’ve also realized that lasting transformation comes only by way of fixing our imaginative vision on God. Finally, God can only be seen with the Holy Spirit in the eyes and through the imaginative virtues: faith, hope, and love.
Meaningful transformation is a matter of aligning our imagination with God’s imagination, by aligning our desires with God’s desires. An aligned, well-directed love forms us while a misdirected love deforms us. Any life transformation we desire will come only by way of Christ’s forgiveness, and forgiveness inspires the pursuit of imaginative virtues.
The unfortunate fact is that we want change the easy way. We toss effort after foolishness when we think that transformation will come cheaply in the form of an attitude adjustment, plastic surgery, a new lover, or a different cell phone. How easily we choose bizarre and futile means to change.
Imagine this:
I was eight years old or so. Kenya was home by now. I swung and swooped in the tropical air with the ease of a swallow. Barefooted, I wandered footpaths for miles. Already, I spoke Swahili fluidly and bantered with my friends like it was my mother tongue. They stopped running their hands through my mzungu hair, but I could see that I was a white blotch on a sea of beautiful black.
My parents attended a conference in a far off city and so they shuffled me off to stay with my best friend. Philip’s family was larger than my own and stuffed into a small concrete house. On the first evening, I approached the dreaded time when I would have to strip down and change into my pajamas. I didn’t mind that the children shared a couple of old mattresses on the floor in a back room. Exposing my naked white butt, however, that I did mind. I minded very much, but privacy was a rich man’s privilege. Aunty Christine, Philip’s mother, told me that we were all made by God and that I needed to get over myself. I dawdled for awhile until the other children finished changing. Some remained in the room, but they seemed distracted so I cautiously took my shirt off and pulled off my pants. I was totally in the buck when my friend turned around and choked on his own laughter. The stifled giggles burst into outright guffaws.
I can’t blame him. Standing there exposed, I felt the weight of strangeness press down on my heart. My nakedness, I felt, was a double nakedness: first, because I had no clothes and second, because I was bleached white like a sheet. My pajamas quickly hid me, of course.
I noodled on a question all that night: “Why would God make me so strange, so doubly naked?” I could imagine no reason why God would do such a thing. Perhaps I was a cosmic mistake; at least I was sure that the pigment of my skin was a cosmic mistake. Perhaps I was a glitch in creation, neglected and planted in a world more beautiful than myself. Surely God would not do such a thing on purpose!
The next day I wandered outside and stared at a large pile of cooking charcoal. An idea struck my young brain and I imagined an alternative to the current state of things. Change was possible! Transformation was within reach! So I reached out my hand and took some charcoal. I rubbed it angrily on my arm. The charcoal was abrasive and severe to my child’s skin, but it made my skin darker. The rewards were worth the cost of pain, so I kept rubbing the charcoal. I was giddy with the excitement of self-transformation. Possibility rose up before my eyes and I furtively glanced about. No one was around, so I stripped down again—all the way down.
By the time Moses arrived, I was well on my way to full transformation. Moses was Philip’s father, a generous and gregarious man, but he might as well have been the first Moses come down from Mt. Sinai to me in that moment. I was Israel cavorting before the golden calf and I froze mid-caper. Thankfully, he didn’t have any stone tablets. He only smirked and called me to himself. I dropped the charcoal, pulled on my clothes in disappointment and shuffled over.
“What are you doing?” asked Moses quietly.
“Making changes,” I muttered.
“Who do you belong to?” he asked.
I groused and folded my arms.
“Who do you belong to?” he asked again.
“God?” I theorized.
“That’s right. Does God know what he is doing?”
I felt cornered. Moses was black and wonderful. How did he know?! I knew the right answer to his question, but I still wrestled with some apparent inconsistencies. If God knew what he was doing, then why was I Caucasian? I groused again and unfolded my arms. They fell limply to my sides.
“Yes, Ben. God knows what he is doing. Your skin is exactly what God intended from the beginning. It is not a mistake and you make a very big mistake trying to change God’s plans.”
I vaguely remember Moses helping me clean off, saving me the indignity of the neighbor kids seeing me half-transformed, half way through metamorphosis. I remain thankful for that encounter to this day, though I did not willingly accept his theological case until I was much older. I certainly look back on this anecdote in my life with all the advantages of age and perspective, but it still serves as a fitting illustration of how and what we try to change. Sometimes we recognize what really needs to change, but choose all the wrong ways to change it. On the other hand, sometimes we try to change the very things that God has given to us as gifts.
I was teaching my students about Lord Byron once. They were impressed by the apparent contradiction between his beautiful poetry and his broken life. His ambition and idolization of the Don Juan lifestyle ran so contrary to his more cogent poems. One student who had recently passed through some serious health issues spoke up and said, “How unfortunate that Byron would miss the very means God provided for divine communion.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked another student.
“Well, it just seems that Byron did everything in his power to overcome the clubbed foot he had since birth.”
“Who wouldn’t?” responded another student.
“It seems logical enough,” responded this young man, “but what if the clubbed foot was the gateway to dependence upon and communion with God?”
“Then he’s trying to change all the wrong things,” said the other students.
If we align our imagination, our spiritual vision, with God’s vision, then we will more likely see the right things to change and the right means to change them. We will also see that all effort toward transformation by way of behavioral changes or environmental changes or attitude changes is wasted. We may temporarily change our actions, but change is a matter of will in that case. The will does not have the strength to hold unless it responds to a better picture or a better story. A change in thinking is no better. A change in information is often helpful and required. It often inspires change, but will not serve the larger purpose unless the data provides my imagination with an alternative picture or story that compels deeper change.
Proverbs provides ample examples of this means toward change. The father educates his son about the dangers of sex outside the marriage covenant by providing word pictures. “Let me show you a picture of what will happen if you follow the immoral woman, son,” says the father. “On the other hand, let me give you a picture of what will happen if you choose the safe path.” The father spends most of the book talking in word pictures so that he can captivate the son’s imagination and provoke moral change or better secure virtue. He says to his son, “my son, pay attention to my wisdom; lend your ear to my understanding, that you may preserve discretion and your lips may keep knowledge. For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell. Lest you ponder her path of life—her ways are unstable; you do not know them” (Proverbs 5:1-6).
Here’s another example: many of us say that we love Christ and his Church, but all our actions point to a different picture of the good life. We may echo the psalmist’s longing that “better is a day in God’s courts than a thousand elsewhere,” but we spend all our days and energies at the stadium and the mall and wandering the virtual hallways of social networking. Like the son in the book of Proverbs, we are motivated to avoid one image in favor of another image and this is the principle of imaginative change. What I most deeply consider the picture of the good life is what drives my actions. We will only find lasting transformation when our vision aligns with God’s vision of the good life: a vision rooted in faith, hope, and love.
Real transformation will happen when we see faith, hope, and love as part of a larger narrative and when we pursue faith, hope, and love with all the attentiveness of a boy in front of his presents on Christmas morning. Faith is a gift. Hope is a gift. Love is a gift. Transformation comes by way of gifts and desiring not only the gift, but the gift Giver.
The Three Imaginative Virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love
The clearer the imaginative vision, the more light enters the soul. The imaginative lens stays clearer when we live virtuously. Every virtue has its roots in one of three essential virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love. Faith, Hope, and Love are essential to the good life because they are essentially imaginative. Doug Jones (fellow of philosophy at New St. Andrews College) first introduced me to the idea that the three superior sisters of virtue were imaginative at their core. Indeed, Faith is belief in what we cannot see; Hope is longing for what we cannot see; and Love is desiring what we cannot see. They are also impossible to separate. We cannot believe one whom we do not love or long to see. Neither can we love one in whom we do not believe.
Faith, Hope, and Love are also dynamic and effectively shape the stories we conceive “because the role of these three [faith, hope, love] is to withdraw the soul from all that is less than God, consequently they unite her with God” (John of the Cross). Our conceived stories will be better aligned with the divine author’s version when we pursue these three virtues. So let us explore them.
Faith is not simply belief, but where, “the looking and believing are the same thing” (A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God). Faith is the same as looking and looking is the same as belief. We see this exhibited in the book of Numbers when God’s people were swarmed by vipers and God told Moses to build a serpent so that people might look up and be saved from the vipers at their feet. We, too, have vipers. They are the sins and distractions that keep entangling our feet, slithering between our toes, and tripping us. Only an imagination focused on Christ will save us from those vipers.
A.W. Tozer once described the relationship between faith and sight this way: “Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God we do not see ourselves—blessed riddance…Faith looks out instead of in.” Since faith is a matter of looking, and of looking away, it can be done anywhere at any time. The imagination is not bound by location or by season. Neither is faith. Faith is not dependent on weather, mood, or time of day. It is to be had whether in church or in the garden, the alley or the highway, because our spiritual vision is wherever we are. Some places and some seasons better nourish our spiritual vision than others, but the vision is a gift. The health of that spiritual vision is directly connected to the health of the imagination. By looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2), the biting distractions of this wasteland lose their power. The more a basin is filled with one thing, the less room there is for anything else; thus, the more our imagination is filled with the beauty of the Lord, less room remains for petty imitations. The more we gaze at God, the more distractions lose their charm.
While faith is a cognitive belief in what one cannot see, hope is the memory longing for what cannot be seen. We often think that memory works in only one direction: backward. It certainly has that important job. Indeed, God has woven remembering into the very fabric of manhood. The Hebrew word for male, zakar, means “remembering one” or “to remember.” It is as though the Hebrew people knew that if a man failed to remember, then he failed in his very core being. To be a man is to remember the past, for it is a large part of our narrative identity and the identity of a people.
Much of our memory is taken up in remembering the past, but we are also able to anticipate in our minds some aspects of the future. I may anticipate a good day tomorrow and I may hope for a good day tomorrow, but that hope is based on the memory that tomorrow is my birthday. So “memory gives me my place vis-a-vis the past, but also with a view to the present or to the future. It is what lets me be myself in time” (Iain Matthew, The Impact of God).
Unfortunately, most of us know only one kind of hope: a vague wish for happiness on the morrow. This hope certainly holds great power in our lives as expressed by Victor Frankl. Like Corrie Ten Boom, he was a victim of Nazi cruelty and his life was subsumed by fear. One day he decided he was tired of the wearying whirl of fearful thoughts and so he imagined himself speaking publicly at a podium and this hope gave him courage to live through trial.
Victor Frankl recounts: “I felt that I needed some kind of mental lifeboat, to help me cross the great ocean of time that lay before me, aiming for that almost unimaginable moment far beyond my horizon when I might somehow go free. And so I took all the positive thoughts I could muster and lashed them together in my mind, like planks in a psychological raft that I hoped would buoy me up. And so in some ways it did. It was one of several mental devices, or tricks, or props, that helped me get through. In this way, I fought what was the psychological battle of my life.”
Even the body’s immune system recognized the power of this hope. Between Christmas of 1944 and New Year’s Day, 1945, there was an unexpected number of deaths in the prison camps. Though the prison camp conditions were no different, prisoners who had hoped on being delivered by the Allies and home for the holidays found that living with dashed hopes was literally unbearable.
There is no denying the human power to hope in this way, but the Scriptures speak of another and more lasting hope, a more potent hope; not a hope in tomorrow or a hope in the past, but a hope in God who was, and is, and is to come. The psalmist says, “Mark my teaching O my people, listen to the words I am to speak. I will tell you a story with meaning, I will expound the riddle of things past, things that we have heard and know, and our fathers have repeated to us…He charged them to put their hope in God, to remember his great acts and to obey his commands” (Psalm 78). In this psalm are conjoined not only story (nourishment for the imagination) and remembering the past, but also hope and obedience. We have hope in God because we recall his faithfulness in the past. People who do not remember God’s faithfulness in the past are unable to hope in God for the future. An individual’s inability to remember God’s faithfulness in the past is a poor guarantee for his hope in God tomorrow.
Without the virtue of hope, many of us dedicate our imaginative memory of the past in such a way that God is marginalized altogether from those memories. We remember the pain, the shame, the scars, but we remember them disconnected from the authorial hand of God. Those memories, then, are warped and no longer have the accuracy of a memory bathed in the faithfulness of God. A hope based on memories void of God is a malnourished hope infected by diseased pictures of the past. Such is the hope of those stranded in the wasteland. Their hope is of the meager, half starved variety: a conceptual hope only, that will soon dissipate in a storm of distraction or pain. True hope, however, “pulls memory off the suction pads of yesterday and tomorrow and cups it upwards [toward God] in the present” (Iain Matthew).
Love, like faith and hope, is also an imaginative virtue. When we love someone else, we love not simply what is before our eyes, but the hidden, mysterious, and beautiful soul inside. In many cases, we love even the potential, the maybe, the what if. Love is desiring that which is not seen, but is also that which most essentially forms us as human beings. Marilynne Robinson is right to suggest that “there is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal.”
For this reason, it has become a commonplace to say that you are what you love and, likewise, “where your treasure is, there is your heart also” (Matthew 6:21). What we love forms us because what we love drives what we do. There is no doubt that those desires drive our habits and we are largely defined by those habits. While faith is a cognitive faculty and hope is a faculty of the memory, love is a faculty of the will: love is seen in what we do. As Simone Weil has suggested, love is not so much a state of the soul as desire directed toward an object. While sin is desire pointed away from God, love proper is desire directed toward God. When we love God, we love him whom we cannot see before our eyes and are thereby raised to life. Weil wrote that “Love is a direction” and “desire directed toward God is the only power capable of raising the soul.” For this reason, love is the great imaginative virtue: the greatest virtue of them all.
We find our lives expanding, like balloons, when we zealously pursue faith, hope, and love. Give me more faith, more hope, and more love and I will know more abundant life. Christ did not say that he came to give a limited new life. He did not tell the woman at the well that she could only have a taste of the eternal water. The word eternal does not understand the word some. The words limited and abundant belong in different sentences. We cannot reach the end of God’s love, and we cannot have too much abundant life. At no point does God turn off the electricity or shut off the water supply. God does not seem to understand the word balance and thank God for that!