The Godward Life

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 19^th  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).

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The imagination, overloaded as it is with sensual pleasure and distraction, needs a touchstone, a frame of reference by which to be anchored. Remember the cranes? The legends suggest that during the journey they will land for short respites. Huddled together, they will select one of their members to keep watch. That crane lifts a stone in one claw while standing on the other. The stone provides that crane with a focus point for his sleepy mind and if he falls asleep, he will drop the stone and wake not only himself, but those whom he was to protect.

            The medieval bestiaries were a wonderful example of imaginative vision: they saw symbols everywhere. To those medieval Christians, the cranes represented us on our pilgrimage and the stone represented Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life. Our safety on this pilgrimage depends upon our holding Christ and focusing all our attention upon him lest we drop the Touchstone. Not only must we fly as high as the crane, we must also be alert like the crane.

            The healthy imagination so necessary for our pilgrimage depends not only upon a right trajectory toward Beauty, but a knowledge of the Truth. This knowledge is what keeps the imagination from feeding on every sense experience and all the particulars of our lives as though every single one were a source of nourishment. By analogy, we can put nearly anything in our mouths, but not everything we put in our mouths will be nourishment to our bodies. Because the imagination has an appetite, we would do well to feed it properly for the sake of the soul. There is plenty of spiritually poisonous gas in this life of ours, but God has given us the tools by which to find the Truth and to expose false imposters.

Truth certainly speaks into our reason and the propositional training of the mind is an important equipping process for discerning Truth. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of reason in the life of a Christian disciple and there are many valuable books on the topic. But there are more ways to apprehend Truth than reason. As Thomas Howard shows so eloquently, we find the Truth in propositions like the book of Proverbs, the Gospel sermons, the apostolic writings, and the law of God. We also find the truth in history, where it takes not the form of proposition, but narrative. We find it in the Psalms where it comes in the form of poetry and dance. In the prophets we find the truth in startling images like a woman clothed in the sun and in the parables we find the truth couched in anecdotes. Finally, we find the Truth best expressed in the incarnation where it is embodied by Christ for all men to see.

Scientific experiment and verification is not the arbiter of facts. Though very few will admit it, even scientists work from certain assumptions about the natural world just like a logician works from certain premises. These assumptions, these life premises, are based in stories. No matter how they are told, whether in textbooks or in song, these stories are creation stories, stories that tell us where we came from, where we are going, and what we are doing along the way (Dickerson and O’Hara). This fact does not remove my ability to know something truly, but it does verify that there are many ways to know: I know facts about my wife. Yes, but I also know my wife poetically, as a best friend only can. Even more so, I go into the bedroom and close the door, and we know each other intimately.

God has also given me the imagination as an instrument of seeing, and therefore of knowing. The imagination helps me to know poetically, three-dimensionally. By the imagination, I take all three ways of knowing just listed—factually, poetically, and intimately—and create a whole picture or story that provides meaning in life.

What instrument of the mind synthesizes our experiences, facts, assumptions together in search of correspondences that tell a meaningful story? The imagination. What serves as a directional basis for the journey of the imagination toward God? Beauty. What keeps us upon the correct road as we move toward God by means of the imagination? Truth.

Once again, I’ve planted tomatoes in my garden. I like tomatoes, unless they’re canned or boiled. The plants looked fine when I first put them in the ground, of course, but now it’s August and they’ve sprawled spinelessly all over the garden. I like tomatoes. I don’t like tomato plants. They are ungainly, unbridled droopers and stinkers.

I am at a friend’s house. It is still August. He has a small back yard with a garden tucked into the corner by the garage. I like gardens and so I snoop while he’s up at the house. He has a thick and happy crop of blueberries. He has pumpkins and cucumbers and herbs. He has tomatoes, too. His tomato plants rise like a vine along a 2×2 post and his tomatoes hang like pearls along fruit bearing branches—a lot of tomatoes. They look like they’re from an advertisement and I begin to think there’s a catch. My friend joins me in the garden just in time to catch my blossoming suspicion.

“Where did you get your vine tomatoes,” I ask. I’m waiting for him to shuffle his feet and confess that they’re plastic.

“O, those aren’t vine tomato plants. These are just regular ‘ole tomato plants. What lots of people don’t realize is that tomato plants produce better with a couple of minutes of attention each day. You know how on a tomato plant you’ll have the main stalk and the main branches growing and then you have these little nutrient suckers that will pop out from the inside elbow where the stalk and branch meet?”

He shows me the “sucker branches” and I recognize them as the driving characteristic of my plants at home. I nod and smile.

“Well, those are the ones that will outgrow all the fruit bearing branches and use up all the nutrients. If they’re allowed to grow, then they’ll restrict the output of actual tomatoes and sometimes choke out the plant.”

 

The imagination, while essential for accurately perceiving the world and ourselves in the world, is like that tomato plant. It will bear fruit in action. What we are concerned with here is how to train the imagination so that it does not become unwieldy and undisciplined as a result of negligence. Like our emotions and like our reason, the imagination will feed on whatever it is given, and if it is not pruned periodically by the Truth, then it will synthesize our life experiences into a story that is self-contradictory and possibly self-destructive. A destructive story leads the soul away from God. Since the imagination is the tap root of the soul, it is the imagination in line with the Truth that will lead the soul back to God.

Here is where we run into some trouble again. Since you and I have grown up in a world that believes Truth is relative, our imaginations and, therefore, our souls, have nothing to guide them. We choke ourselves at the deepest point with our own metaphysical freedom and autonomy. I’d like to suggest that if we are the epiphany of God, the offspring of His imagination, and the expression of His love, then He would not send us whirling into a cosmos void of absolute meaning and objective Truth. He would not leave us stranded in this world without a map to guide us toward home. He is calling us back to himself by speaking into our imaginations and he has given us not only a map, but the pruning shears of the imagination that we so desperately need. They are called, in my tradition, the Old and New Testament Scriptures.

I say “my tradition” because it is the one in which I was raised. Indeed, it is not mine—I did not find it. It found me. It is the one I have come to love and embrace as my own though I was baptized with hardly a clue as to the nuances and profound claims of the Christian faith. I say “my tradition” because there are many religious traditions clamoring for an audience and, thankfully, Christianity is not one of them. As C.S. Lewis put it, not all roads radiate from a circle and we will not gradually draw nearer to the center if we follow them long enough. We live, “rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision…It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection…I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road” (from the preface to The Great Divorce).

The road that leads to God is found exclusively in Christianity. In its most faithful expressions through history, Christianity has always been the most unassuming of religions. Ironically, it is also the one that begets conviction, nobility, and a love for martyrdom by preaching a life of servanthood.

Christianity is a religion of irony.

Irony can only be understood by imagination.