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The Imaginative Life

Growing Down: Reclaiming a Childlike Imagination

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Brian Aldiss suggests that children remind us of our decay. There was once a time when we dreamed long dreams and hoped large hopes, imagining remarkable possibilities for our life stories. We used to dream of walking with kings until our sin, failure, and cowardice pressed us down into the cellar of our own hopelessness.

Sometimes, sometimes we dream those dreams again. Sometimes we hope those hopes. It is in this way, that the imagination tries to break out of that cellar before the realist inside beats those dreams down, reminding us why we are in that cellar in the first place. It recalls to us the myriad dangers lurking in those open spaces. Why? Because the power of sin, failure, and cowardice does more than alienate us from God, it erodes our dreams and decays our joy.

What’s the solution?

Ephesians 3:20 is a much needed jetpack:

“Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or imagine, according to the power that worketh in us.”

If we wake up every morning with this verse strapped to our backs, then we can power out of the cellar and live the day more hopeful, more optimistic, and pursue bigger, more generous dreams. We could never out-dream God and that’s a child-like vision for life.

Christ’s death restored that child-like thinking to us.

Heraclitus once said, “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”

We’ve assumed that a child’s imagination is limited to childhood, but that assumption is unbiblical and sad. A “realistic” adult is one who has consigned his vision to the narrow confines of a cellar. His hopes, if he has any, are small and they stink like sniveling wishes. He demands we forget that Christ is loose and at large. He sneers at miracles or explains them away. And I don’t mean that he sneers only at miracles in Scripture, he does so even with the small and large miracles of our day to day.

How many of us have become this man? How many of us avoid eye-contact with failure or refuse to confront our cowardice. How many of us give our sin to Christ with one hand while snatching it back with the other?

We smell the cellar and feel its cold pressure. We want out, but we’re too afraid of the possibilities of living under an open sky. We’ve grown comfortable with our familiar confines. Maybe it’s time we nurtured a childlike imagination.

As the man once said, “You will find more happiness growing down than up.”
Amen to that.

A Quote from Winston Churchill

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“You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination.”

Gleaning the Savior

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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.

A River In The Sky

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Imagine this:

A river in the sky.

I have five children, four girls and one boy.

Guy time is a rare and valued treat. When my son was about three, we bought him two foam airplanes with which to play with dad. What made these airplanes rather exciting was their potential for air time. Attached to each eight-inch plane was a very large and strong rubber-band. We could pull that rubber-band back about four feet and  let the plane fly. Sending that airplane over the back fence became a cinch and we both delighted in watching a perfect long distance flight. That’s what boys do.

We were sitting on the back deck when, being Dad and having a lust for the spectacular that has nearly no bounds, I began to wonder whether we could turn the airplane into a kind of rocket and launch it vertically into the atmosphere. So I took my airplane, pointed it vertically, pulled as far back as I possible could and was about to let it fly when my son frantically stopped me. He had a wild look in his eye, an alarm verging on terror, and the intensity of his face and gestures stopped me.

“You can’t do that, Dad! If you shoot it up there, we’ll lose it in the river,” he said.

Now, you need to know that we have no river near us. I have a small stream and pond I created, but they’re both small enough for a child to step over, so I was a bit baffled as to this sudden alarm.

“What river?” I asked him.

“The river in the sky!” he said with frustration in his tone of voice, as though he was stating the obvious to a man who should already have the intelligence to know it. Unfortunately, I am a child of the Enlightenment with one overdeveloped way of looking at the world and so I asked again, “What river? There is no river in the sky.”

He looked at me with shocked three-year-old eyes and a dropped jaw. “Was Dad serious?” they seemed to ask. “Was Dad really that dense in the head?” they pleaded.

“Look, Dad.” He had suddenly grown into a patient and kind teacher, willing to work around my imaginative barriers. “Look at all that blue water in the sky. Do you see how the clouds move along the water in the same direction? Do you see how quickly they’re moving along the river? That means the river is pretty strong today, so we definitely don’t want to shoot the airplane up there. If we do, then we’ll lose it in the river and we’ll never get it back!”

What does any Dad worth his salt do with that moment? “The kid is messed up,” I thought. “He’s got only some of the facts straight. There is water in the sky, but it’s no river.” I was about to correct him in good scientific fashion, but my tongue stumbled on the words. I was unwilling to place upon my son the burden of my enlightened rationalism which takes our knowledge too seriously.

I laughed. He looked at me, puzzled. Then we were laughing together, father and son, two boys giggling at the river in the sky and wishing we could raft together on one of those clouds. Maybe, just maybe, my son has everything correct. Maybe, just maybe, my son is seeing the sky as God sees it. My narrow rationalist friends will purse their lips and shake their heads to hear the young so lead astray. My more fastidious pietistic friends may well click their tongues and call it all a vile pack of lies. But I often wonder if God is not more playful than we are and that our goal in life is not so much to get all the facts straight as to get the perspective correct. Maybe when we see the sky as a river, we’re actually getting it all more poetically correct and, therefore, more correct in an ultimate sense. Maybe it’s closer to the way God sees the world. Maybe we’ve finally landed right side up.

Along with G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Howard, Robert Farrar Capon is helping me reclaim the imagination. His perspective on things is obtuse enough to startle me into the enchantment of the world, people and things alike. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “all the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up” (Orthodoxy). Capon is upside down in just the right way. And that’s the point of reclaiming the imagination: to become right way up. Because the imagination is at the core of who we are as people, reclaiming our imagination is reclaiming our humanity—what and who we were meant to be—recapturing and nurturing the divine image. What a playful anthropology!

Capon suggests that we reclaim our humanity, as God intended, by looking poetically at the world: “In our fear of picking up an incorrect causal connection we deprive ourselves of the freedom of rummaging playfully through all the connections we could think of. And that’s a shame because it’s precisely connectedness, interrelatedness, that’s the most engaging thing about the world. We should be far more afraid than we are of the habit of assuming there’s only one correct way of talking about it. To get a connection backwards or wrong or to pick it up fabulously or poetically—to say the sun rises or the moon wanes, to think boats grow from seed or plankton have plans—is all small compared to missing the wonder of it altogether. Or as happens more usually, to turning the world into an alien, tiresome place where only the least fabulous, least poetic—least human—reading of causality can be the right one”

The imaginative faculty sees connection and difference, types and shadows, symmetry and singularity; in a word, correspondences. The healthy imagination sees the fingerprint of God everywhere, it sees the face of God pressing through the fabric of this world. In this way, the healthy, or sanctified imagination is attentive because as Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son, “a man without attention is not fit to live in the world.” And Tennyson echoed the same when he wrote, “for what are men better than sheep or goats that nourish a blind life within the brain?” (The Passing of Arthur).

Sacramental Attunement

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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.

 

Life As A Night Terror

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Imagine this: Night Terrors.

I was eleven. I dreaded the night time and so a visceral and physical something thickened in my belly and chest as evening approached. I was sent to bed, and even before I crawled into bed, I knew whether it would come tonight or not. Sometimes the feeling was not there, but when it came, I knew with certainty that sleep would bring to my dream world things not easily spoken of: night terrors.

I was having them with greater frequency, and this terror had become a rather constant drum beat of my young prayer life. God save me. I tried to explain the terrors to my parents, but it all came out rather jumbled, and the visions didn’t sound as terrifying to my parents, or to me, for that matter. I knew that my descriptions had not done them justice.

And then that thick feeling of doom descended on me at dinner, and I knew that tonight I would dream again. This was my dream: I am at the edge of a twenty story high rise. I fall over the edge and plummet to the ground. I feel the wind and the rise of my stomach into my throat and, finally, I feel my skin and then my bones and bodily organs hit the immovable pavement…but I do not die. I only agonize in pain, unable to even writhe or check my kidneys because I am broken and mashed all over.

The fall has not awakened me. I am still in the terror and I can feel the earth tremble as though an enormous beast gallops my direction. I open my eyes and see a machine with a rolling pin on its front— like the machines used to crush and level asphalt roads—and it is rolling in my direction. It moves with inevitability and the earth rattles my crushed form. I try to scream, but my lungs are crushed. I cannot breathe. I reach out my hand to stop the machine, but my hands will not budge, and then it is rolling over me; first, my feet, then my knee caps, and it moves toward my head.

This is the point at which I woke up. At least, my reason told me I was awake, but my imagination painted a different picture, told a different story. My imagination, and my physical body as a result, told me that the catastrophe really just happened. I was convinced that it happened. I checked my feet. They could move.

Every night it was the same: night terrors became a regular and unwelcome bed fellow. After one night terror, I needed to use the restroom and this was evidence that my bladder worked: some good news. This is how I remember things: I am standing in the bathroom, staring at the mirror, adjusting my world—body and imagination—to “reality.” The terror slowly subsides and I move to use the toilet when, quite unexpectedly, the machine comes through the bathroom wall. It moves slowly, but it is huge, and there is nowhere to run.

If my parents remember this event in my life, they will tell you that they found me huddled in the corner of the bathroom by the toilet, weeping uncontrollably. They will tell you that they spent many minutes—how many, I cannot tell—trying to persuade me that there was no machine, that I was only dreaming, and that I was safe. My imagination had fully accepted a new reality and placed me in an unmerciful story of anguish. It was my imagination, that synthesizing and unifying function of the mind, that needed convincing, and so my parents had to open my eyes and give me new images to overcome the old ones: no broken wall, no machine, no high rise buildings.

Dad helped me use the restroom and lead me to bed where I worked overtime to believe what my parents had told me. I am sure that sleep eventually found me because I was in a terror again and facing a new twist this time. This time, I am in my room upon my bed and I know, somehow, that my sister and brother are in grave peril. I know without a doubt that they will die horrible deaths, and I also know that the only way to save them and to save the rest of my extended family is for me to do the unimaginable and eat them.

Yes—eat them.

I am in a catch-22 that I cannot explain, but that I know exists, and I know the only way out is to perform what I cannot perform. I also know, without a doubt, that my siblings are hanging, imprisoned, in ropes attached to the ceiling above my bed.

No rolling machine this time, my lungs have enough oxygen to scream for help, but I know that doom will fall upon them if I scream. I also know that whoever has placed me in this impossible dilemma will come any moment and I will be out of time. There is no exit strategy, no door of escape, so I can only weep. Sobs wrack my body and my imagination begins to buckle under the strain of this unbearable thickness. I weep and weep and weep until my father, hearing the sobs, comes in and sits down next to me. He holds me in his arms until I am awake. Again, my reason is awake, but the story in my imagination, the worldview which now swallows up all others, is still quite relevant and active, so I will not look up. My father and mother probe for reasons, but I cannot give them a reason. I know, even though half asleep, that it will sound ridiculous when it comes out of my mouth, and I cannot afford to so mislead him. My poor parents have spent all night consoling me and reasoning against unbridled panic. I explain the situation to them in whispers. My face is still burrowed into the pillow.

“Nobody is making you eat your brother and sister,” Dad says. Oh, how naïve he sounds to me. I remain burrowed. “Look at the ceiling, son.”

I shake my head, ever so slightly.

“They’re not up there.”

He quietly prays by my side for a few moments. I begin to sob again.

“Tell me why someone would make you eat them?” he asks.

I cannot tell him. I know that, but I also know that he is fighting the fire of the imagination with propositions—logic will not fly.

My brother and sister are standing next to the bed. My weeping has woken them. I know this in my mind, but my imagination is locked upon one particular story. I am even more terrified than before.

“Look up, son.”

I will not. He moves my body and head and I resist.

He is stronger than I am, but the fright grows, and even as he forcibly moves my face, I weep uncontrollably and squeeze my eyes closed.

Dad’s hands cup my face and point me upward. “Open your eyes, son!”

I won’t.

“Open them! Nobody’s on the ceiling.”

Still, I won’t.

“Your brother and sister are right here by your side.”

Yes, but the fear is also here. It broods over every breath I take.

“Son, you need to believe me.”

Belief is hard right now.

“I promise.”

This is something, at least.

I open one eye. That is the beginning of a reawakening from terror. My father leads me from bed to bed and makes me look upon their empty beds and then he makes me look into their bewildered and sleepy faces. The fright subsides, and so I collapse in a heap of emotional, mental, and spiritual exhaustion. Dad carries me to bed and tucks me in.

 How did my father combat such a wild imagination? He started by making appeals to reason, but he did not settle for logical defense alone; instead, he replaced one image with another image. He replaced the false image with the true one. Dreams are sometimes a picture of our entire lives. Some of us have survived the terrifying. Some are still not out of the metaphorical woods. The outcome is very much in doubt. For many people, life is a kind of prison camp, a brutal existence where pain is the common denominator. The imagination takes all these events we would rather forget and synthesizes them, integrating them, and finding correspondences. We need the Truth, biblical doctrine, to point the mind’s eye toward God, as he actually is. Our faces, our imaginations, our hearts and minds, are cradled in God’s hands and he calls to us. The night is pitch dark, but he has given us a torch by which to see the path:  “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105).

            The imagination needs a guide. It needs a touchstone; namely the Scriptures. God has given us an imagination so that we might look for him and find him. He has set our souls on pilgrimage and surrounded us with signs, pictures, that point back to him.

A Quote From Geoffrey Chaucer

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“All men know that the true good is Happiness, and all men seek it, but for the most part by wrong routes—like a drunk man who knows he has a house but can’t find his way home.”

                                                                                                                                    -the knight in Chaucer’s A Knight’s Tale