For those of you wondering how long this will be, the title of my speech is, “14,000 Embarrassing Things Levi Could Have Said, But Didn’t”….and it will still be shorter than Mr. Reidt’s farewell speech this morning.
Thank you, Levi.
Would you pray with me?
O, sweet Jesus. You hold all things together. We live and move and have our being because of you. We give this evening, our words, our laughter, and especially these our sons and daughters…these loaves and fishes…to you. Multiply our offerings so they might serve your kingdom mightily. Intercede on their behalf before the Father, the author of each story seated up here on this stage. And send your Spirit to walk with them, comfort them, guide them, invigorate them, and sing over them. And we pray these things in your name, Jesus the Christ, Amen.
As Tevye and Golde sang so beautifully, “I don’t remember growing older, when did they? When did she get to be a beauty. When did he get to be so tall?”
Welcome, family and friends, to a celebration of the swiftly flying years, one season following another, laden with happiness and tears. Welcome to that moment between chapters when we turn the page, remembering the last good chapter and anticipating the next. Welcome, graduates to “The Last Time”: this is the last time you will EVER have to sit under the teaching of an Oaks teacher. So let’s cut to the chase.
We all know what you want. We wanted it too. You want freedom:
Freedom to build a new reputation, meet new people, or explore the buffet line at the food court at all hours of the night. Freedom to do any noble or wonky thing you want. Today, you must tuck in your shirt and wear socks. Tomorrow, who knows? Tomorrow, you can play ping-pong all night with some guy who traced his lineage back to the Brandybucks and who showers, on principle, once a year according to the Shire Calendar. You can change the face of Western Civilization by collecting Mountain Dew cans and stacking them into the largest pyramid on Baylor’s campus. Or you can fulfill your life long dream of resuscitating words long dead like “gnarly” and “bodacious”. You could even hold burping contests without getting cuffed over the back of the head or ride a unicycle to class with your clothes inside out. Yes, it’s true Brian, your secret plans are not so secret any more!
One thing is certain: you will have the freedom to choose. That freedom is a weighty thing, indeed, it comes with responsibilities, but your choices are actually quite simple. Like the man in Frank Stockton’s short story The Lady , or The Tiger? you, too, are entering an arena and must choose between only two doors: a lady behind one and half-starved tiger behind the other.
There’s a whole lot resting on your choice. Door #1 or door #2.
Door number 1 is, statistically speaking, the most commonly chosen door by college freshman. Its brass door knob and bright decorations lure even the cautious. They choose it because it looks, to some of them, like a door to love, or a meaningful life, to power, or to a name, even to happiness. Painted over the door frame in gold lettering is this quote from Nietzsche: “For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself.”
It is a bright and beautiful door with a wide, paved path lined with hand-painted aluminum flowers that whisper in unison the gospel according to Katy Perry (feel free to embarrass yourselves by singing with me): “There’s a spark in you? You just gotta ignite the light and let it shine ’cause baby, you’re a firework. Come on, show ’em what you’re worth. Make ’em go, oh, oh, oh as you shoot across the sky…y…y.”
And if you lean your ear against that polished door, you’ll hear the pulsing intoxications of blind youth, a party on the other side, straight from Pitbull: “Ask for money, and get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice. Ya’ll call it a moment, I call it life. One day when the light is glowing, I’ll be in my castle golden. But until the gates are open, I just wanna…feel this moment.”
Or you’ll hear something “fun” like this: “Lay your clothes down on the floor, close the door, hold the phone, show me how. No one’s ever gonna stop us now cause we are, we are… shining stars. We are invincible.”
I think the proper Latin response is Phonus Balonus.
And for those of you who didn’t recognize a single one of those song lyrics: God bless you, everyone. May that be the first and last time Katy Perry, Pitbull, and FUN are given airtime at an Oaks graduation. Can I get an “Amen”?
Their tunes may be new, my friends, but the lyrics are old and worn out. Every house of cards since Babel has been built to the rhythm of the same bad poetry, proving that age old maxim: “all that glitters is not gold.”
If you choose door number 1, you will trade eternal gladness for temporary pleasure, divine wisdom for human precept. Although it all sounds like good times, spring songs and free love and hope; and although the tiger you glimpse through the key hole paces with regal power and eye-popping beauty, promising you the same; though he’s smooth, baby, so smooth! I promise you that behind door number 1 is a slow death by strangulation. That’s how tigers kill their prey, they clamp down on the victim’s throat until it suffocates to death. And although tigers commonly kill small game like wild pigs and deer, they have been known to kill pythons, crocodiles, water buffaloes, and even rhinos so I don’t care who you think you are, if you open door number 1, then you’re a dead man. And you’ll probably look your enemy in the eye as he strangles you.
But enough with door number 1. None of you is stupid enough to squander your inheritance and your life story on mere show and empty promises. As Augustine said, “For they that have their joys from without sink easily into emptiness and are spilled out…and in their starving thoughts they lick their very shadows” (Confessions, book 9).
Door number 2, on the other hand, is rather an embarrassment. Unpainted with rusty hinges, it has scratched into its frame by a dull knife the following verse from Psalm 40: “I am poor and needy, yet The Lord thinks on me.” And if you lean your ear against it, you might get a splinter and nothing else. No cheap tricks here. No aluminum flowers. No cranked base. You can take her or leave her, but the woman on the other side of this door will not sell herself and she will not lure you with expensive perfumes. She wears the garb of the poor and sits quietly waiting so even with your ear to the key hole you will hear only silence, but those who choose door number 2 always seem to be singing. Strange folks choose door number 2. Many of them lack the refinement and prestige so paraded by those who chose door number 1. Like Tolkien, they know “all that is gold does not glitter.” They are a ragamuffin bunch, bent backed pilgrims who prompt unbridled hilarity from the world just as little Dagonet did.
Ah, Dagonet: one of my favorite forgotten characters in all of literature. You will find him tucked in the back pages of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Dagonet arrived at The Round Table late, long after the knights had debauched that symbol of nobility, virtue, and justice by living fast and loose. Tristram, that rival to Lancelot in every way including good looks and the girls, found Dagonet dancing in the hall and reminded poor Dagonet that only fools dance when there is no actual music. And Tristram took down his guitar and strummed some angst filled love songs he’d learned from John Mayer…but Dagonet stood stock still with one foot in his hand.
Tristram was indignant: “Why don’t you dance, fool?”
Dagonet looked him right in the eye and said, “I would more willingly dance to the broken music of my brains than any broken music you can make.”
“What music have I broken, fool?” asked Tristram while all his buddies winked and nodded.
But Dagonet did not shy away. “Because you chase the passions and pet your personal pleasure, you are now more beast than man. And all you can play, all you can sing, is a broken song.”
Come,” cried Tristram, “you are crabbed and sour. Yet I call you swine, for I have flung you pearls and find you swine.”
And little Dagonet mincing with his feet said, “Yes, I WAS a swine. I have wallowed, but I have washed and thank The Lord I am now the king’s brother. The king who loves the unlovely and transforms swine into men and strangers into brothers.”
“And down the city laughing Dagonet danced away; but through the slowly-mellowing avenues and solitary passes of the wood rode Tristram toward his mistress.”
You see, Dagonet knew what Tristram did not; namely, that Jonah 2:8 is and forever will be true: “Those who follow worthless idols forsake their own mercy.” He recognized in Tristram a hungry man dreaming of food who would awake still hungry. Or a thirsty man who dreams of drinking, but awakens faint and thirsty still just as Isaiah foretold (Isaiah 29:8). And so Dagonet chose door number 2, knowing that behind that door was the most beautiful of all women: Wisdom herself. And he was willing to be counted a fool by the world’s chuckleheads, so that he could claim a reward that would never perish.
Many are the Tristrams, my friends, but who can find a Dagonet?
As the good book says, “Narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matt. 7:14). Who will show me a man or a woman who loves the King of all kings more than life itself. More than a good name or a good time or good car or a good college or sweet abs or two thousand Facebook friends? Show me the one who counts all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of christ Jesus our Lord and I will show you a rare and happy man: a man after God’s own heart. Are you willing to be so in love with Christ that others will say of you, “There goes a God-intoxicated person!” If so, then you have already chosen door number 2, you have wisdom, and your heart is filled to bursting with a love for God’s wisdom which is foolishness to man.
Where you go, we cannot follow, but we know that you will find many who are like Ephraim in Hosea, chapter 5, “oppressed and broken in judgment, because he willingly walked by HUMAN precept.” Human precept has a short reach. Divine wisdom? Well, what can compare? In the long run, human wisdom is a short-sheeted bed. Those who share that bed with Ephraim will toss and turn, cramped, all night. Ephraim will choose door number 1, but if you look closely, there are some still willing to choose door number 2. Follow them. Ephraim will choose to do common things, but Dagonet will do that which is uncommon.
The Dagonets amongst you will choose the humble and, therefore, hard road. The Dagonets amongst you will find an old person as a mentor as soon as possible (and 25 years old doesn’t count). The Dagonets amongst you will invite yourselves over to families in the church and cook a meal for them and share life together. The Dagonets amongst you will go to bed so that you are refreshed, ready to claim the day God has given you in more than just your mental pajamas. The Dagonets amongst you will read old books while others fizzle out watching Pretty Little Liars in the next room. The Dagonets amongst you know that a happy life is characterized by far more than simply how fun it was. A happy life is characterized by gratitude.
Look, I know what I’m asking. I know that it would be no small miracle to have 100% of you choose purposefully to live as Dagonets. So I dare you. I call you out and dare you to live uncommonly, to live like Dagonet and choose the door of the humble and the needy.
Door number 1 or door number 2: There’s a whole lot resting on your choice.
Door number 1 will deliver you a yacht full of momentary pleasure, but a small country’s worth of regret. Door number 1 will provide you a limo full of human precepts, and though you’ll be riding in luxury, you’ll be riding down a blind alley. Even if all your frat bros are at the same door, remember this: they are not your people. Your people are God’s people. God’s people are different. They choose different doors.
They do not dance to the world’s broken music and neither will you. They do not promise peace when there is no peace and neither will you. But you will be a Joseph to the world: a foreigner in a foreign land filled with men and women tormented by bad dreams. By God’s grace, you will be their interpreters, speaking into their nightmares a new and living way (Hebrews 10). And you will be like Esther, born for such a time as this. And you will be like Nehemiah, who built a city with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other. And you will be like Anna, declaring to the world the arrival of their only sure hope, the Christ. And you will be like Noah who built a boat to save the world, though all the world giggled glibly. And you will be like Hannah, pleading with God on behalf of a barren world. And you will be like Boaz, sowing fields of grain to feed the refugees who flee a life of sin.
Today is tomorrow’s yesterday. What you sow today, you will reap tomorrow. The present is the future’s past and the past, my friends, CANNOT be erased. What you do now, even now in these moments between chapters, will likely dictate the outcome of your story. Your decisions can NEVER be undone, not even by the blood of Jesus. They can be covered by the blood. Thank God they can be covered, but they can never be erased from your story. “So choose this day whom you will serve for God has set before you this day life and good, and death and evil, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30:15 and 19).
Some say that college constitutes the best years of your life. I hope not. There is SO much life to live AFTER college. Live with THOSE years in mind. Remember your children and your grandchildren. And when you are old and grey and some idealistic freshman asks you what were the best years of your life, you won’t say, “college!” You’ll say, “ALL of them!” For you lived your days out in the light of God’s only Son and you opened door number 2, above which is carved, “I am poor and needy, yet The Lord thinks on me.”
If this hard-fought education has taught you anything, it better be this: “The works of the Lord are great, studied by all who have pleasure in them” (Psalm 111:2).
We have taught you, from the cradle until this very hour, to join Job, saying “As for me, I would seek God, and to God would I commit my cause, who does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number” (Job 5:8-9).
Go, my Dagonets. Freedom beckons. Go with our blessing and our love, but come back as often as you can. You are family and we love you as family; in fact, we’ve bought a lot of stock in you as family. May that stock only rise. And may the world know, with no uncertainty, that your lives serve as a fork in the road declaring to each person you encounter this truth: “choose you this day whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
May you forever seek God who has lifted you from out of the pit, out of mud and mire, and who has set your feet on a rock and given you a firm place to stand (Psalm 40:2).
“May you seek God and rejoice, being glad in Him; may those who love His salvation say continually, “Great is the Lord!” (Psalm 40:16).
You have a tremendous task, an absolutely monumental task with generational impact ahead of you: it’s called “Life”. This life is sweet all the way through eternity if you choose door number 2. But life cannot be done with one eye on each door.
Make a decision: The lady or the tiger.
Life and Culture
A Watch Out Of Tune
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.
Unbind the Feet
Winter is best for breaking bones.
Cold weather numbed the senses and so they waited. When winter arrived, the mother took her four-year-old daughter into the back bedroom where a basin of herbs was mixed with animal blood. Although a child’s bones are less brittle than an adult’s and less painfully broken, the mother understood the need for preparation. She set her daughter on a small chair and soaked each of the girl’s feet in the basin of animal blood. The cotton bandages were also soaked in the blood mixture while the mother massaged each foot until it was limber and warm. Each toenail was clipped back as far as possible. With the preparation complete, the mother took each toe and pressed it down into the heal of the foot until the bone of the toe broke. Each toe on each foot must be broken to allow for greater flexibility.
I do not know if the girl screamed. I do not know if the mother wept. I was not there, but I know that with the toes pressed down into the sole of the foot, the arch of the foot was then forcibly broken. Each arch on each foot was snapped so that the foot could bend in half with ease. With the toes folded over and the ball of the foot pressed toward the heel, the bandages were wrapped in a figure-eight. With each pass, the binding was tightened, the pain intensified, until the five meters of cloth was completely wrapped around the foot. The mother knew the temptation her little girl would have to undo the wrap, so she sewed the binding to prevent any meddling.
When all was finished, the mother stood and took her daughter’s hand in her own. “Come,” she told her daughter. “Come and walk with me. I will walk with you, but you must put all your weight upon your feet.”
With tears standing in her eyes, the girl whispered, “Why?”
“Because your weight will press the feet into something even smaller and more beautiful than they are right now. The bandages will grow more tight as they dry and you will surely be beautiful someday. Your feet will be beautiful like the Lotus, my daughter.”
The girl’s feet were unbound at least three time a week, the feet soaked and massaged and broken again to ensure the foot’s flexibility, and then wrapped more tightly. This ritual lasted for several years. The pain was intolerable, of course, but had to be endured if she was to attain the desired three inch foot.
So it was, in 19th century China.
Infection was the worst part of the ordeal. The toes would grow into the soft flesh of the foot, causing further injury and infection. If the infection sank deep enough into the bones of the toes, entire toes might fall off. No matter: with the toes gone, the foot could be wrapped even tighter and a smaller foot was the result. If a girl had rather large toes for her age, a shard of tile or glass was inserted beneath her toes and wrapped tightly as before. The shard would inevitably cause the desired injury and infection so that the toes fell off.
Seriously.
Foot binding was all the rage. There is some question as to motive for this practice. Some say it was the product of envy. Perhaps a favored concubine had small feet. Perhaps the dancing girls of the palace had delicate feet. Whatever the motivation, the practice began with the elite of society. Small feet were the sign of wealth, of economic independence, and of prestige. A woman with such small feet was known to be free of manual labor and married to an independently wealthy man. It became a national symbol of both power and eroticism. Beauty and sex were attached to those who hobbled and swayed in their Lotus shoes. Nearly all the wealthy women of China had bound feet at one time and in this way the practice spread from the wealthy to the poor. The lower classes admired and imitated the celebrity as they are wont to do and they desired nothing more than for their children to get a head start on the prestige.
When Christian missionary Gladys Aylward arrived in 1930, the practice was still in effect. Part of her missionary duty, perhaps at the behest of the Chinese government, was to encourage the unbinding of broken feet. She would travel from home to home and teach both hygiene and the gospel, encouraging women to see the loveliness of natural feet. She introduced them to both physical and spiritual freedom. Gladys knew that there are few more powerful metaphors for the Gospel of Jesus Christ, than the unbinding of feet.
Unbind the feet.
Unbind the soul.
My feet are not bound. My soul, however, is very bound indeed. I have intentionally and repeatedly broken my spiritual bones, wrapping them under and binding them until they are warped. Why? To please others, perhaps. Maybe I have bound my soul out of self-pity or for the sake of self-gratification. Sometimes I did it because I was afraid of rejection. Perhaps I have bound my own soul because I saw no alternative. The reasons are rather endless, but I know that I have bound my own soul by placing the wrong pictures in my imagination. Since the soul and the imagination are intimately connected, how I frame the world, what I picture, the story that I conceive defines me. Each of those activities is soul-shaping.
My imagination is crabbed, crooked, broken and, therefore, so is my soul. I alone have done this thing. Lo, I am the man. How easily I shrug off my spiritual deformation by blaming sin. The Scriptures do teach us that sin is to blame for our current state, but at its core, sin is simply choosing different pictures for the gallery of the imagination than the pictures that God wants. Sin is simply choosing the wrong pictures of happiness and pursuing them. The story we conceive that opposes the one that God is actually telling is the sum total of those ill-chosen pictures. When we conceive the wrong story, when we chase the wrong pictures, we not only head the wrong direction on our pilgrimage, we also bind our spiritual feet. We bind our own feet which leaves us ill equipped for the long journey home to God. What a painful thing is a pilgrimage to those whose feet are bound.
How can we unbind the feet? How can we loose the chains that have bound us for so very long? What an endless tangle of sins ensnare us! What hope for nimbleness do clubbed and broken feet enjoy? We cannot sidestep or hurdle such entrapment. No amount of back-slapping jocularity, perseverance, positive thinking, or accountability can save us from the habits that our imaginations have formed for us. Only a transformed imagination can transform habits and, therefore, transform a life from slavery to freedom. And this is what we not only long to have, but the very thing for which we were saved: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).
Gleaning the Savior
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.
An Easter Poem
Yesterday was bleak,
even bleaker than the day before
precisely because it was the day after.
And dreary days of loneliness loomed ahead of us.
Yesterday was bloated with grief,
An abscess in the soul
distended by the swelling pus of guilt.
And we wept for fear
and burrowed into our loneliness
and binged on a bottle of bitter.
But today,
today,
today is different.
Gone is the grief.
Gone, the guilt!
Very gone of very gone.
Today is a day to gather gladness from the sky,
To suck the sunlight like an iris,
And blush boldly with the tulips.
Today is a day to stretch after a long dark winter,
like the dogwood and the shy chinaberry.
Today is a day to take our shoes off
and lie down in the grass
or stroll barefoot amongst the apple blossoms
hatching all along the branches.
Or rub the length of our backs like a bear
On the bark of a towering Tamarack.
Today is a day to say thanks
for wren, and thrush, and bold sir robin,
the duke of dirt,
who struts across the lawn
and thrusts out his chest.
Today is a day to say thanks
and feel the smallness of that word
under the bigness of the broadening sky.
Today is a day to stuff our mouths with bread
and follow it with wine
because today,
today,
today is the beginning of all our tomorrows.
Gone, the guilt.
Dear God, the guilt is gone!
And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
open before us like the petals of a flower
that brightens every hour
beneath the Son’s broad, bright, beams.
Today the Son is up and doing with unshod feet
and soil in his fingernails,
and I promise
because he promised
that Golgotha will be a garden,
because today,
today,
today is Easter morn!
The Captivated Life
The abundant life is the captivated life, the full life, the good life. The captivated life is the Godward life where God is the fixed point of the healthy imaginative vision. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328) made this claim quite clear when he wrote, “What one grows to know and come to love and remember, his soul follows after…If the soul were to know the goodness of God, as it is and without interruption, it would never turn away…” (Sermon on the Eternal Birth). When we fix our spiritual vision, our imagination, on God then we see everything around us with new eyes. Everything is subsequently colored by the radiance of God. Meister Eckhart wrote, when you have your focus on the true abundant life, “everything stands for God and you see only God in all the world. It is just as when one looks straight at the sun for awhile: afterward, everything he looks at has the image of the sun in it. If this is lacking, if you are not looking for God and expecting him everywhere, and in everything, you lack the birth” (Sermon on the Eternal Birth).
The birth of which Eckhart speaks is the spiritual rebirth found by reclaiming the imagination: the ability to see what is not literally before the eyes. When we have new birth and new eyes, then our energies are spent pursuing more of that light found only in God. Shall we slip the bonds of selfish preoccupation? Can we actually jettison our self-induced life-ruptures and look for the light with new eyes? The answer is yes. How is it possible for us to leave the old ruptures and press toward the new birth since we are estranged from God? Christ’s parable of the prodigal son reflects not only the fracture and estrangement that characterize our lives, but also the fact that God has bridged the divide between our mortality and His divinity. He is our Life and he calls to us with the vigor of both a father and a hunter. He desires imaginations captivated by him and so he entered his creation to ensure that captivation.
Augustine says it well: “But our very life came down to earth and bore our death, and slew it with the very abundance of his own life. And, thundering, he called us to return to him into that secret place from which he came for us…For he did not delay, but ran through the world, crying out by word, deeds, death, life, descent, ascension—crying aloud to us to return to him. And he departed from our sight that we might return to our hearts and find him there. For he left us, and behold, he is here” (Confessions, Book Four, chapter 13).
Because he bridged the divide first, we are able to cross it. Although all the faculties of the mind aid us in this crossing, the imagination is the means by which we finally come face to face and see eye to eye with our maker. We are not home yet, but our pilgrim journey leads us toward that destination. Healthy imaginative eyes give us the ability to see the entire world, in all its complexity and pain and joy, as it really is: charged with the fingerprint of God.
If we see ourselves with imaginative eyes, then we see purpose-ridden characters in a master story. If we see others with imaginative eyes, then we see bright eternal souls bursting with the image of God. If we see creation with imaginative eyes, then we see as the poets have seen: a world charged with the grandeur of God. His face presses in upon his creation and we need the imagination to see the indentation. Let’s use the imagination to trace his shape and to journey toward him.
Sacramental Attunement
Life is about taking risks. By risks I do not mean jumping out of airplanes, playing chicken with a train, biking across America, or even chasing elephants. The risk I suggest is far greater and more difficult to sustain, particularly while living in the sweeping current of modern technophilia. The greatest risk we can take in life is one that suppresses our eager self-aggrandizement in favor of what Christ called meekness (Matthew 5).
Meekness is an inward disposition that bears concrete fruit in the choices we make and things that we do, but that disposition has roots in the imagination. The meek imagination is simple, uncomplicated, and fixed. It is harmonized with the sacred holiness of God as that holiness is found in the ordinary of our day to day lives. This imaginative harmony is a “sacramental attunement.”
An important distinction must be made between the Sacraments and sacramental attunement. The Sacraments were divinely instituted not only as a means of grace, but as physical pointers back to God. Christians learn from an early age to see through the sacraments to the reality they represent. A sacramental attunement, however, is a spiritual attentiveness to the way all bread, all wine, all water now points us back toward the divine. One of the most beautiful and meaningful things that Christ did was to take bread between his hands and tear it, offering it to his disciples as a memorial of his finished sacrifice on the cross. He took the ordinary and made it extraordinary, as God intended at creation, reshaping in our imaginations all such simple acts like eating, drinking, and bathing. These activities are not the Sacraments themselves, but they remind us of great spiritual things and invest life with a million markers of the divine. The meek imagination is sacramentally attuned to those markers and in this way it inherits all the earth (Matthew 5:5).
How then can we foster a sacramental attunement in our harried lives? This task, just like reclaiming the imagination in general, is particularly difficult in our modern world. I’m all for technology and all for the conveniences of modern living, but the fact remains that our lifestyle presses us away from sacramental attunement simply by the speed, multi-tasking, and brief attention span required to succeed. Chaos, like the ocean’s surf cascading endlessly along the shore, fills our ears and makes it difficult to hear the red-winged blackbirds singing in the reeds.
There is one activity, however, that inevitably nurtures a sacramental attunement and that activity is prayer. A strong prayer life is the warm center of the soul that lights the spiritual eyes and awakens the chilled limbs to action. It is the heated core from which all warmth emanates.
My father spent the summers of my teen years teaching me to guard the warm center. Whenever we went camping, he would allow my brother and I to build the campfire while he unloaded the gear. In our rush to build a bonfire, we lit a few sparse twigs and promptly snuffed them out with a pile of logs. After several attempts and following the same technique failed, we wished for a bottle of lighter fluid and shambled over to dad who was choking in the drifting smoke. He would stop what he was doing and, once again, show us how to meticulously build a fire.
“Look boys, you can’t rush a good fire,” he would say. Then squatting and thrusting aside our hasty smoke signal, he told us to gather some more twigs and dry grass. When we returned, he took them in his hands and built a small lean-to inside a small protected cove he had built with the larger wood. “Okay, see how I’ve used the larger pieces to build a wall against the breeze and then covered it against the rain?”
We nodded, remembering the previous summer’s lesson but forgetting it all over again in our desire to have the fire warming our fingers.
“Now we lean the little kindling upwards so that it can catch the flame and let it rise like it wants to. Then we put some larger kindling next to it, but not too much in case it won’t light.” This he did, and then he took the match, struck it, and set it in amongst the small kindling. Without fail, a small whisper of smoke slipped out from amongst the grass and twigs, then there was a quiet pop as the flame jumped to life. The process of building a fire was always a gradual and careful one, with well-timed blows from my father and a few adjustments of the kindling. Dad knew how to build a warm center and how to guard it. He knew how to maximize the space to accelerate the growing heat at just the right pace. In the end, the task we rushed to perform always became my father’s duty and his patience proved effective in getting us our campfire…even without using lighter fluid.
Prayer, likewise, is the warm center from which all spiritual attentiveness emanates. All the sacramental attunement that comprises a good life in the eyes of God has at its center prayer and all the activities summed up by I Thess. 4:11 begin with prayer. Those whom I admire for their quiet and deliberate work ethic are often prayer warriors in their own right, even though few of them would claim the title. Those who serve others with incredible sacrifice and sincerity are often prayer warriors who, like so many others, would not claim the title. Indeed, life in the ordinary takes on extraordinary character when seen with imaginative eyes. All the little things that pass for the mundane are actually holy activities, like the breaking of bread, but we easily brush them aside because our attunement is poor.
This sacramental attunement has been and will remain a rather gradual process for me. I have found, however, that my greatest growth comes not from my individual efforts toward this attentiveness, but from living in community. This realization should not surprise me since God is three persons in one, a community. I was made in his image and designed to function best when living within a community. But a sacramental attunement, in particular, becomes more attuned by being around others who are so attuned. It also learns to practice that learned attunement on others. So family life is the loam, the rich soil, where sacramental attunement takes root, grows, and bears fruit.The kind of attentiveness required for sacramental attunement is difficult to both attain and sustain, but it needs brothers and sisters who eat together, play together, clean together, read together, and sing together. In these environs the sacramental attunement is both more effective because it forces a proximity with the divine stamp in others and it forces a self-forgetfulness necessary for attunement. Social networking, while convenient, is a virtual community in which sacramental attunement is nearly impossible because it intentionally limits the physical, concrete, opportunities for self-forgetfulness.
Eating dinner as a family, real people crowded together in real time, has become a precious commodity in our home and one that I hope my children fully take for granted. I want them to be surprised at the possibility that some families don’t eat together. There are many reasons for my desire, but one of them is because the dinner table forces a geographical proximity, a closeness difficult to replicate during the hustle and bustle of the day. Sure, the conversation is not always sparkling and we never try hard enough to follow the etiquette rule book, but the meal provides plenty of opportunities to practice self-forgetfulness. When my children, for example, say, “After you,” they are learning not only to defer their own gratification, but also learning to be more attuned to that other person as a human being made in the image of God. The simple act of putting others first is an important habit to form and this habit will be the natural byproduct of sacramental attunement as we play, eat, sing, and labor in community.
That is exactly why personal transformation is not a personal matter. It is not simply a matter of making better choices for myself based on sound reason and judgment. Nor is it a matter of choosing what works or what will serve my interests. The kind of transcendent transformation many of us are looking for is a matter of redirecting the imagination toward a vision of the good life that is rooted in community and has at its center, God.
God has given us the entire world chock full of communities, and there are many forms, to become more self-aware. He uses these folks in their own way to lift us above our petty pleasures and so we might follow alternative visions of the good life. Our lives are extended parables and communities are nothing less than the convergence of many parables. We would do well to live this parable more intentionally, remembering that future generations will hear our story and learn how to live well or how to live poorly.
Our pilgrimage comes equipped with a map given to us by which to navigate the difficult terrain. What we do, however, along the way and how we go about traveling, reflects the story our imagination tells us. That story feeds our desires and loops back to feed those same desires toward either a spiritually healthy or destructive end. There is good reason for why people perpetuate destructive cycles in their lives: the story in their head has no alternatives, no exits, no loopholes.
Christ came to provide not only spiritual salvation, but an alternative way to live. The primary way he expressed that alternative was through parables. His teaching method was story-shaped. When Christ spoke in parables, he was not only teaching the truth about God and our relationship to Him and to others, he was providing alternate imaginative pictures. He knew that our understanding, our thought life, has a narrative shape. We see things not only as they exist in space (trees, people, rain), but primarily as they exist in time. Stories are a function of time, we are a function of time, and our thoughts run in narrative grooves.
Those grooves often define how we live, what we do. Our hands will do something. What they do, what we do, is birthed in the imagination. Lasting transformation—the kind of transformation that keeps us actively pursuing the straight and narrow pilgrim path—is a matter of being captivated in the center of our being—our imagination—by God.
Risking Oblivion
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.