The Imaginative Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

C.S. Lewis was asked at one point where the idea of Narnia came from. He admitted to having an image, back when he was a teenager, of a faun standing in the snow. Talk about an unbridled imagination. He could have been doing something profitable like his character Eustace Scrub who liked pinning beetles on cards or reading books of information about grain elevators or the gross national product of Zimbabwe. Fauns are a notorious waste of one’s time.

 Imagine this:

Young Clive Lewis, gangly and awkward like most teens, with a picture of a faun in his imagination. The faun had a setting: crisp snow, trees, and a lamp post. Was the faun real? That depends on what is meant by real, I suppose. Was the faun three-dimensional? Was he two-dimensional? Did he have personality? Did he have a name? Did he do anything? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. In Lewis’ imagination the faun had all these things in his favor. Even that early in the imagining, the faun was doing something: he was standing. So was the faun real? Yes, Tumnus the faun was real, he was real in the mind of his maker. All the faun lacked was the proper time and place to be materialized, which came forty years later in a land called Narnia.

I first met Tumnus like many of you, with Lucy, tumbling out of the wardrobe and out into the brisk air. There stood Tumnus, skittish and alone, with a satchel of books slung over his shoulder. Tumnus was real long before my daughter tugged on her mom’s shirt sleeve while watching the movie and said, “Oh, look, Mommy, there’s Tumnus! I love Tumnus.” Whether he could be touched by a finger, rather than only seen or heard, is irrelevant. He existed without ever being touched because he existed in the mind of his maker. All that was needed was for the maker to speak or write Tumnus onto the page. Tumnus lacked, of course, all the trappings of a life—a fireplace, bookshelves, Lucy, snow, and an evil queen. He even lacked a sensible witness to his person (outside of the author), a reader or a little girl sitting in a theater. But Tumnus existed. His entire life, all the beauty and all the pain, was in the imagination of his maker long before it ever happened to Tumnus.

You are Lucy. I am Eustace. We are Tumnus, written in God’s book and spoken into this whirling galaxy of stories. Knit together in the womb by the spoken, and still speaking, word of God, we are fearfully and wonderfully made and the days of our pilgrimage are already written in God’s book (Psalm 139:11-16).

The writer of Hebrews reinforces the psalmist when he writes, “by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which were visible” (Hebrews 11:3). God speaks the world into being and the visible is born of the invisible. He speaks you and me and all our individuality and uniqueness into being. All the words that form you and me and all creation came tumbling out of the creative mind of God. Those words are the formulations of what is already real in God’s imagination. You and me, with curling toe nails and nose hair and nasally voices, were first formed in God’s imagination.

We’ve been imagined.

That fact alone makes us very unique and precious to the Master Storyteller. Every difficulty, every memory, every happy moment of our lives is a single point in the plot which God is weaving. If a healthy imagination is had only by aligning our imagination with God’s imagination, then we need to see things as God sees them. Every story maker spins his or her story from the active workings of the imagination. We are the offspring, the children, the whirling galaxies, of God’s imagination. The business of life, then, is to see our lives as narrative and to see that narrative as the Master Storyteller does.

Life takes on a different hue, a nuanced perspective, when we perceive our lives as stories, but they take on another level of dimension entirely when we perceive our stories as God imagines them: our life stories are parables. All these cherry blossoms? All these figs and gravel and granola? These are the setting. This whirling globe is the setting for over six billion converging parables. Like molecules, we spin and collide without stopping to interpret those parables. How unfortunate. God gave us the imagination as a tool to not only perceive those parables, but to read them, interpret them, learn from them, and enjoy them. It is the only faculty we have that is capable of looking at the parables and seeing the parables simultaneously. The imagination is our only resource when it comes to both observing life as a parable and fluidly learning its lessons. If only we could observe the parable correctly and learn the lessons that God intends for us to learn. So often, however, we focus on the wrong parts of the parable or take away the wrong lesson. How very much like Christ’s disciples. Perhaps Christ would speak similar words to his people today: “How is it that you fail to understand?” (Matt. 16:11).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images created through some visible or audible medium give shape to the human experience of the world. The word “dry”, for example, can refer to many things. By itself it is not much of an image. But “dry as a bone” is.  “Exhausted” is not itself an image, but “I felt like a wrung-out dishcloth” is. In both cases, the speaker has reached for some concrete thing in order to vivify abstract language. Dryness or exhaustion are states of affairs, and something in us mortals forever urges us to give shape–concrete shape–to these and other realities we experience.

We are coming up here to the word imagination, which is the image-making faculty with which we mortals are crowned. We have reason and will and affection and appetite–and imagination. We can scarcely open our mouths without reaching for some image. “Reaching” I just said. BUt I didn’t stretch out my arm here to grasp anything. It was “just” an image that presented itself naturally to my imagination int eh course of typing out that sentence. A few lines ago I said that the word “dry” is not, by itself, an image. But if I were to say, “Professor So-and so’s lectures are almost insupportably dry”, the adjective would conjure an image. An interesting question that comes trotting along (“trotting along”, he says) at this point is the question of the literal versus the fanciful. There is nothing literally “dry” about the good professor’s lectures, in the sense that the Sahara is dry. On the other hand, however, the image somehow not only does not attenuate the literal statement: rather it clarified it, or fortifies it, or vivifies it. The statement becomes tru-er when it is assisted by an image.  I myself have always distrusted the –to me– cavalier remark, “Oh, that just an image. It’s not literally the case.”

No. Perhaps not. But the word “just” is a perilous one there. It implies that an image is “merely” this or that, and that it draws us away from the literal, which is the locale of the real, we would say. But does it? My own guess is that on the contrary, a well-chosen image draws us further into truth than, say, the syllogism, or the equation.

And suddenly we are head over heels in the mystery of the Incarnation. The Word of God, the truest thing there is tended toward concretion. “In the beginning was the Word…That event was very far from being a detour, or a mere charade, on the part of God. Nor was it a pis aller, as though God said to himself, “Hum. What strategy will answer to the collapse of things in that universe that I made? We’ve almost run out of ideas.” No…It is of the very nature of the Word that it tends toward Incarnation.” Or put it this way: we, who find ourselves in this species called man, seem to have an incorrigible wish to approach reality via the concrete.

(from The Night is Far Spent, p. 27)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine this:

Floating down the river with my little brother. I was thirteen. He was eight. The bright sun winked on the rippling water. We floated on inner tubes with faces pressed against the water’s surface in search of fish, golf balls, or whatever. Two boys savoring a summer day. Then I heard dark laughter on the hill and looked up to see bare-chested high schoolers with sinister intent in their eyes. I had never seen them before and wished they would go away. They called us names and chucked rocks in our direction. Their aim was awful and I let them know it. My words provoked nothing but rage and they trudged heavily through the underbrush and stepped into the river. They were bigger up close and in person. I was unafraid, used to seeing and fully expecting a pushing fight.

“What did you say?” said the ugly one. He menaced over me as I remained prone on the inner tube.

I was brash and naive to the world of high school conflict. “You heard me,” I said.

He balled up his hand into a fist and sank it deep into my eye socket. There was force behind his punch and he lifted me off the inner tube. I fell back on the tube and clutched its side because the world was spinning and grew dark. As the windows of my world dimmed, I saw the strangers plowing through the water with high steps. One of the boys held his hand while the other comforted him in his pain.

It took all my mental attention to keep from succumbing to darkness.

“Lead me to the bridge, Nate,” I whispered to my brother.

He lead me three hundred yards downstream to the bridge. I held the tube like I held my consciousness: desperately, afraid of slipping into the river and sinking to the stones below.

My little brother, silent and strong, lodged me between boulders beneath the bridge.

“Run home and get mom,” I whispered and then I focus on a small point in my brain while the walls closed in. I heard my brother’s bare feet slapping the stones as he scrambles up to the main road.

Maybe I slept, maybe I didn’t. The mile and half of hot asphalt must have blistered my brother’s little feet. I never asked. I only remember the long wait, the closing walls, and then the fragile call of my mother as she inched down the gravel and river rock to where I was lodged.

We made it home. I’m not sure how.

One week later, the pain was still severe. As the swelling decreased, I found my vision shambled. I could see double. I could look straight ahead and still see the objects to my left as if they were right in front of me. It was a gift for a lad who wanted to covertly assess the opposite sex, but the throbbing pain persisted and I was frightened. Dad decided to have a test taken. I remember the night that he took me to the hospital and they slid me into a doughnut shaped machine. The scan was a long process, made longer by the storm outside. Lightning shut the power down twice, forcing emergency generators to kick in. Each time the power went down, we had to start the test over.

They tried to explain the results to me in language a kid could understand. The moment the fist struck my eye, the bones in my face cracked and opened. In that instant, the muscles in my eye were jolted and finally lodged in the fissure that opened. When the facial bone came together again, the ligaments were trapped, inducing the double vision and pain. The folks in lab coats called it a blowout fracture. All I knew was that everything I looked at was skewed, dizzying, and doubled.

Our lives are not very different from my boyhood vision problems. We are a people characterized by pain, by fracture, and by disjunction. Even as a boy, I knew that I could not live the rest of my life with such severe vision problems. I knew that something needed to change.

Despite our susceptibility to the false message of the good life paraded in front of our spiritual eyes, deep down we sense a fracture in our imagination. We know that something needs to change. We also know that it will take more than incantations or a vague hope to bring about this change. What we need are more than sentimental wishes and a saccharine love. What we need is real, life-changing transformation.

Lasting transformation does not grow out of fear. Nor does it come about by sheer willpower. Those soils are too shallow for strong roots to take hold. We need thicker loam in which to plant the seeds of change. So how does lasting transformation happen? It begins by seeing an alternative to the current state of things. Lasting change comes not simply by moving away from something, but by moving toward a different vision. Change is only inspired by compelling possibilities. The alternative picture needs to be both attractive and plausible. A drug addict, for example, will not endure the pain of getting sober unless the alternative picture is appealing enough to inspire lasting commitment. A man will remain a workaholic, spending all his extra hours away from home, until the picture of home is attractive enough to lure him toward hearth and home.

How does one see this alternative picture that is not currently before the eyes unless it be by the imagination? Only the imagination can see what is not before the eyes. Only the imagination can generate possibilities or envision alternatives. If the alternative story or picture that I envision in my imagination is both convincing and compelling enough to adjust my actions, then change takes place. An unhealthy imagination has no strength to see alternatives or it chases the wrong alternatives.

Personal and relational healing will only come by such transformation and this is how the imagination will save humanity: it is the vehicle for real and lasting change. Real transformation occurs when we identify the right, desirable picture of the good life and realize that our current reality does not coincide with that picture. When the right picture of the good life is vivid enough and beautiful enough in our imagination to compel change, then we are motivated to adjust our choices accordingly.

For this reason, Romans 12:2 tells us to “not be conformed to this world: but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The Greek word for mind in this case, nous, might be translated “the mind’s eye,” the perception and determining faculty of the mind. Since the imagination sees what is not presently before the eyes, interprets life, and constructs a meaningful story out of experience, it is precisely the faculty addressed in Romans. If the imagination is transformed, then we are transformed. If the imagination is healthy, then we are healthy.

My boyhood visual fracture occurred by way of an assault on normalcy: crisis. God gave me twenty-twenty vision before that, but crisis changes everything. Crisis, brokenness, distorted my vision and provoked change. Everything I looked at was skewed, dizzying, and doubled. My days were characterized by pain, by fracture, and by disjunction. Sin has caused the same breakage in our lives. Crises provoke us to imagine an alternative. Even as a boy, I knew that I could not live the rest of my life with such severe vision problems. I knew that something needed to change. We know that something needs to change. What we need is real, life altering transformation. What we need is the ability to see as God sees, to imagine as God imagines.

I went under the knife: a procedure that was rarely done with any effect at the time. The doctor said he had performed that surgery only twice before and neither patient had regained full sight. The situation demanded prayer. A flash notice went out to everyone I knew and everyone I didn’t know. People got up in the middle of the night to pray for me before and after the doctor made an incision among the folds of skin beneath my eye. He peeled back the skin and separated the plates of my facial bone so that he could release the trapped muscles, then stitched me back together.

I wore a patch over my eye for some time afterward: light was harmful and healing was at a fragile point of flux. Within only a few months of the surgery, I was miraculously restored to full health. We could not explain it except by way of miracle. The prayers of the righteous availeth much.

We need change. We want change. The means to lasting change is found not by doing something differently or thinking differently, but seeing with new eyes. Nothing short of a miracle will give us that vision. If we want a miracle, we need to pray for one. We need a healthy imagination that sees what is not directly before our eyes; an imagination aligned with God’s imagination, so let us pray for new eyes.

“The Lord of Heaven changes not, and even when our view’s most dark, he’s there above us fair and golden as the sun. God’s never gone…It’s only men go blind.”

-Frederick Buechner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following quote from Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor illustrates the power of embodied practices that not only inform the imagination, but also direct its desires. His quote reinforces James KA Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom.

“A great deal of scholarly attention has been given to the power of liturgy in forming identity and the shaping effect of narrative in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. The way we learn something is more influential than the something that we learn. No content comes into our lives free-floating: it is always embedded in a form of some kind. For the basic and integrative realities of God and faith, the forms must also be basic and integrative. If they are not, the truths themselves will be peripheral and unassimilated. It was with a kind of glad surprise that I realized that long before the academicians got hold of this and wrote their books, I had been enrolled in a school of song and story, God songs and God stories, said and sung by my God-passionate mother. Virtually everything I received in those impressionable years of my childhood had arrived in teh containers of song and story, carried by a singer and storyteller mother–everything about God, but also about being human, growing up to adulthood, becoming a pastor” (The Pastor, p. 34)

How do we find meaning in life? We find meaning by conceiving a story out of the building blocks that we see around us and by measuring that story against our picture of “the good life”. That formulated story is fed by images that we presently perceive and images that we do not immediately perceive except through memory. Where is this picture of the good life formulated? It is formulated in and by the imagination. This process infiltrates all areas of our lives. For example, my synthesis of advertisements takes place in the imagination and, therefore, naturally places me in relation to the thing advertised. Whatever it might be, whether cell phone or new car, I imagine my life—if only for a moment—with that object. The power of those images is undeniable. They are surrounded by the colors and sounds of my life and set directly in the narrative path. I quickly and perhaps unthinkingly reconstruct my story around the attainment of that object and I deftly defend the cost accordingly.

Because we are searching for a purposeful story and because it has largely eluded us, we perpetually ask questions, often subconsciously, like “So what? What’s in it for me?” Those in the advertising industry are highly attuned to this reality. They know that every effective advertisement will provide an answer to this question with promises that are actually impossible to fulfill.

According to commercials, beer is no longer simply a beverage and technology is no longer simply a time saver. Now, beer is a magnet that attracts happy and beautiful people into our lives. Technology now serves as a social networking tool that will, like beer, attract happy and beautiful people into our lives. Both will apparently banish the loneliness and unhappiness.

A Superbowl commercial for Monster.com. Various kids—pudgy, short, dynamic, eccentric, skinny—speak to the camera, some with vigor, some with bland expressions of opaque hopelessness.

“When I grow up,” says the first kid, “I want to file all day long.”

“I want to climb my way up to middle management!”

Cue the background choir music.

“…Be replaced on a whim.”

“I want to have a brown nose.”

“I want to be a yes man…”

“A yes woman!”

“Yes, sir, coming, sir.”

“Anything for a raise, sir.”

“When I grow up…”

“Grow up…”

“I want to be under-appreciated.”

“Be paid less for doing the same job.”

“I want to be forced into early retirement.”

Cue the tag line: “What do you want to be?”

 

Monster.com’s current motto? “There’s a better job out there.”

In thirty seconds or less, this advertisement for a career matchmaker resonates with the incredibly common desire we share for change. With change, we assume, will come more personal happiness. It taps immediately into our collective longing to be something more. What do you want to be? Well, I don’t want to be doing this meaningless job forever. By making the spoken dreams of the children ridiculous and yet eerily similar to the day-to-day mutterings of our heart, the advertisers convince us that being under-appreciated or being obedient or being middle-management is simply not good enough—not worth valuing.

How is the ad industry so effective in selling its imaginative message? How has it significantly defined, even for those of us who are wary, what life is all about and who we are? Advertisers have not made all these promises conceptually, in propositions; instead, they have presented a picture to us. They have appealed directly to the interpreting and storying faculty of the mind: the imagination. Our interpretations and the subsequent story we construct is grounded in our deepest desires. Advertisers do not appeal to reason per se; they appeal primarily to our desires because, as St. Augustine said, we are fundamentally desiring beings. What we tend to desire most is “the good life,” which we consciously or unconsciously call happiness or meaning.

So, what will make us happy and what will give us meaning? Whoever has the power to answer those questions, whoever has the power to define the good life, will not only control culture but will sway the masses. As things currently stand, that power usually lies in the hands of the advertising agency and the music industry. How do they define the good life? They define it as the gratification of pleasure and they do so quite tantalizingly with images that draw us into their descriptive definition.

Advertisers have effectively redefined both “good” and “life” by presenting to our imaginations a picture of the possible. They know that we are constantly—every minute of every day—synthesizing events in a hunt for the possibility of the good life. We are longing and looking, always looking, for what will provide happiness and meaning.

 

Imagine this:

I spent my teen years on a river so small that there was some debate amongst the boys as to whether it should be called a creek or a river. It was a moody tributary, lofty and high spirited during the Spring melt off but crestfallen, mumbling, and melancholy during the late Summer. Much of the Summer was spent wandering up and down the river with a fishing pole and a stringer looped over my shoulder. My mother was frustrated by all the tinfoil wrapped trout clogging her freezer. She understood that my soul was soothed by the gurgling and giggling of the water around my legs and the distant sighing of the cotton wood trees, but she didn’t like the results. I don’t blame her, but nothing made me happier than the sudden grab and fight of a trout at the end of my line.

In the early mornings, as the mist sagged and brooded over the waters, I often saw the graceful deer or the rotund raccoon in the back yard. The deer always struck me as stately creatures, fluid and agile, and I was inspired by the ease with which they hurdled the high fences. Raccoons, on the other hand, amazed me with their waddle and stealth. They appeared out of nowhere, slipping in and out of the mist. They stooped beneath large packs, masked offenders of a bygone era who refused to outgrow their secret identity. They skirted the bank of the river and forded the waters like derelicts: furtive, quick-tempered, and lonely.

Perhaps inspired by Where the Red Fern Grows, a favorite by Wilson Rawls, I entertained the idea of catching a raccoon on my own. I talked it over with Dad one evening.

“I’m thinking of catching one of those raccoons, Dad,” I said. I thought about calling it a coon, just to see how authentically wonderful it felt rolling off the tongue, but I thought better of it.

“Really? How do you plan on doing that?” he asked.

“Just like Billy does in the book,” I said.

“You don’t have any coonhounds, son,” replied my Dad with all the sensitivity of a scientist. I glanced at our cocker spaniel who slept by the door. We named her Little Ann after one of the greatest dogs in literature, subconsciously hoping that she would live up to that high title. No such luck. We loved her, but she never treed a coon and dad’s comment goaded my discontent.

“I don’t need a coonhound. I just need to set a trap.”

Dad nodded and so I continued, trying to recapture what I had read in Where the Red Fern Grows. “I’ll find a strong log and drill a hole in it about six inches deep. I’ll drop a piece of shiny tin in the bottom and lay it flat so that it catches the sun and draws the raccoon’s attention. Then I’ll drive some nails at an angle into the log so that they stick downward into the drilled hole. Each nail point will have another nail point opposite it in the log, see. That will leave enough room for the raccoon’s paw to enter, of course, but it won’t be able to pull out.”

“Why not?” asked my brother.

“Because when the raccoon balls up its paw into a fist around the tin, his fist won’t fit back through between the nails.”

“He could just let go and slide back out,” suggested my brother.

“That’s true,” said Dad, “but he won’t let it go. He’s a greedy little bugger.”

I reminded my brother of what we’d learned in the book: raccoons are the preeminent thieves of shiny trash. They are junk collectors whose eye is easily taken by the flash of something bright and pretty. No matter how painful the trap or how imminent the danger, the raccoon will not let go of his prize.

“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” said my Dad. “What will you do when you’ve got him trapped? How do you plan on bagging him?”

This was rain on my parade. I hadn’t thought through the plan to the very end. I had no gun. I did have a fish bonker. Maybe I could club him to death. But then I remembered the fury of the trapped raccoon described in the book. I remembered the slashing claws and the bared teeth.

A whirling dervish with enormous claws and a black mask haunted my dreams. It thrashed my mind all that night: reason enough for not following through on building the trap. My idea of building a coon trap never actualized, but I remembered the coon and his silly stooping tendencies whenever I was tempted to spend my hard-earned money on a new tape cassette. Why I have boxes of tape cassettes piled in the basement is difficult for me to explain without losing my dignity. Why I’m willing to pay a thousand dollars for something that will end up on the scrap heap in three years is likewise difficult to explain.

Here we are stranded in a spiritual wasteland and brazenly snatching at whatever shiny objects catch the eye. Like raccoons, we skirt the neighbors and ford the spiritual shallows like derelicts: furtive, quick-tempered, and lonely. We have sold our souls for nothing and garnered our lives with tin. God’s question to his people in Isaiah 55:2 is the same question he asks of us: “Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy?” Our answers, if we offer any, are hardly satisfactory. We know something’s wrong. We know, deep down, that something needs to change, but we keep stuffing our mouths with air and wiping the tears prompted by hunger.

Even from a very young age, we observe various sources of happiness—the cookie jar, mom’s lap, the sandbox—and pursue them. Even children imagine the happiness they will find if only they can reach the cookie jar. That formative power to envision ourselves in the good life only magnifies with age. Instead of the sandbox, we envision Maui. Instead of the cookie jar, we envision a fat bank account full of cash and then we act to bring those imaginings into reality.

It is fair to say, then, that how we live is based on desires conceived in the imagination. And if our current imaginations are myopic, then we are in bigger trouble than we know. Like Jill and her traveling companions, we scramble angrily over the very objects that God wants us to see. For all our huffing and puffing, we cannot see what God has given us to see.

We have forgotten what Aslan said at the outset: “Whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs…Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly; I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind.”

But we are confused. The Holy Spirit is not in our eyes¹ and we have wide-spread rupture. What we are looking for is wholeness: the abundant life. Christ came to give life and to give life abundantly (John 10:10), so it must be possible to have. Christ made it clear in Matthew 13 that we refuse to turn and be healed by him because we cannot see. What we need is transformation, and meaningful life transformation only happens by way of spiritual eye surgery. If so, we should take great pains to keep the imaginative eye, the spiritual eye, healthy.

Sophocles has been credited with saying that “a wise doctor does not mutter incantations over a sore that needs the knife.” Let’s stop the insane muttering. Let’s go under the knife.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In order to reclaim the imagination, we need to know what it is. In order to understand what the imagination is, we need to do some rather heavy weeding of our tangled understanding. We have grown up in a world where the word “imagination” has come to mean simply anything fictional. The Calvin and Hobbes comic is the quintessential emblem of that escapist view of the imagination. Calvin, usually desiring to be somewhere other than in his current reality, spends most of his weekdays as Spaceman Spiff or a raging dinosaur.

Since we equate things fanciful or fictional with falsehood, the imagination is practically irrelevant, a mere flight of fancy. I agree with Thomas Howard when he suggests that “imagination is a commonplace of our experience, and that is probably why we do not spend much time thinking about it, any more than we think about eyesight.” But the imagination is as central to life as breathing, perhaps even more central, because while breathing is not a capacity that informs and enlightens the mind with meaning, the imagination does. The imagination not only sees beyond our natural vision, but it also interprets life and constructs a meaningful story.

You and I are composites of many parts. At any given moment, we express emotion, make decisions, reason, perceive with our senses, and utilize simultaneously many of the gifts God has given us. I am not simply “emotional” or “rational” or “perceptive” because none of those attributes or activities stands in isolation. The imagination takes every part of who we are—our emotions, our reason, our sense perceptions, our memories—and synthesizes them into a coherent story.

Reason constructs a comprehensive ideology from various gathered ideas. It always learns, always gathers new information to process into that ideology. That’s what it does all day, every day, and that’s what God made it to do. The imagination, however, effortlessly and perpetually forges an embodied, complex, and imaged narrative expression of that ideology and our lives are the lived expression of that imagined narrative. The imagination is in the business of constructing meaningful narratives. We can’t help but imagine and we can’t help but imagine a life of meaning.

The imagination actively conceives a story with meaning because God has built it to do so. For this reason, we keep waking up in the morning, working to accomplish something, and loving our families. Our daily choices are based on the belief that life is not the plaything of Chance, but rarely are those choices the sum of logical deduction. We live faithfully according to the story of which we see our selves a part. We wake up every morning and tackle the daily grind with a determination only possible for those living with purpose. Unfortunately, we’re often not sure what that purpose is and we’re not sure what the meaning of life might be. The imagination is nonetheless actively constructing a story that we cannot see, out of the things we experience: the things we can see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I remember finding some old black and white photos of my parents. They were just kids in the photos. In one, Mom leans over a rail, bright-eyed and eager, flanked by a batch of other kids. In another, Dad poses by his model train set, clearly feeling the imposition of having his picture taken. He rests on the carpet in a white tee shirt, his chin on his hands, and tries to smile. I remember filing through picture after picture and assuming that my parents grew up in a flat, black and white world. My parents had difficulty convincing me that their world was as bright and translucent as my own.

My childhood perception did not match reality, but the consequences were benign. The consequences for two disciples on their way to Emmaus, however, was immediate and unfortunate. Bedraggled, huddled, and grieving, they were unable to see past their present circumstances. The eyes of their souls were darkened by grief and bewilderment. When Christ joined them on their walk, they could not see him for who he was. Even though they heard Mary and Joanna exclaiming that the tomb was empty that very morning and even though they heard Peter verify the facts, still they conversed and reasoned on these things and were sad. Christ bemoaned their stunted spiritual vision, saying to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!” He then “expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27), beginning at Moses and the prophets.

Still, would you believe it, they did not see him for who he was. Even when Christ untangled the Scriptures for them, they did not see until he blessed and broke the bread just as he had done a few nights before. Then Luke says, “their eyes were opened and they knew him.” These two disciples knew the Scriptures and they loved Christ, but their spiritual vision was unhealthy. We also have difficulty seeing beyond our vision and in this way, the disciples are our modern predecessors.

The revelation of Christ, as prefigured in the Old Testament and incarnated in the New Testament, was and is a matter of spiritual sight. The word “revealed” carries with it a sense of unveiling, of peeling open the eyelids to see. The two disciples walking to Emmaus could see but their spiritual sight was restrained (Luke 24:16) and so Christ remained unrevealed until he snapped their imaginative stupor by breaking the bread. Until that moment, they could not perceive reality.

 

Imagine this:

Jill, poor Jill. Stranded in a hard land with hard companions, she remembered what Aslan told her: “Whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs…Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly; I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind.”

Well, here she was hungry, lost, and confused. Her companions, Eustace and Puddleglum, were irritable and irritating. She missed Aslan’s warmth and strength and clarity. She missed his thick main and hot breath. His words, though dim, still wandered the hallways of her mind: “And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances.”

Pay no attention to appearances.

Signs? “You must journey out of Narnia to the north till you come to the ruined city of the ancient giants.” That was the second sign. The third: “You shall find writing on a stone in that ruined city, and you must do what the writing tells you.”

Whatever.

The north wind slapped their cold cheeks. The road led through narrow valleys that channeled the wind straight into them. Their feet were raw because the ground was stony, and they woke up sore after sleeping all night on lumps of frozen earth. Puddleglum was tired of Eustace, Eustace was tired of Puddleglum, and Jill was tired of them both.

Finally, when hopelessness had rooted out all their resolve to remember the signs that Aslan gave, they stumbled out of a gorge and onto a desolate plain. Behind them rose the mountains through which they had wandered. Beyond the rocky plain rose snow-capped mountains. In the middle of the plain was a low hill with a strange flat top and on top of that hill winked welcoming lights.

They camped within sight of the hill that night and set off for it in the morning. Mid-morning, however, snow started to fall. They had to pick their way through rubble and between boulders. The snow by now was thick like a veil over their eyes, and they had to squint just to see a few paces ahead. When they reached the foot of the hill, they thought they saw squarish rocks on either side, but a four-foot-tall wall blocked their path and they had to scramble over its snow-covered ledge. After that ledge, they stumbled onto another and then another and another: four ledges all told and each ledge at quite irregular intervals. The top of the hill was filled with more strange shapes and ruts. They were soaked to the bone when Jill fell down a small ravine and found herself in a channel tucked beneath the blowing wind and snow. Eustace followed her down and out of the storm. The pair wandered straight, took a right, then another right, but that right came to a dead end. They retraced their steps to the last turn and took a right which led to another right turn. Finally, after much slipping and passing through similar channels, they found themselves before an enormous castle: the source of the winking lights.

Those who know this story remember the castle of the Gentle Giants and all that transpired there. We will focus on what they saw the next morning when they looked out one of the windows high up in the castle. The sun was shining, the snow melted by a night of rainfall, and they saw stretched out before them a ruined city still paved rather flat. Over that pavement was etched the words UNDER ME.

Revelation.

“What I don’t quite understand,” said Jill, “is how we didn’t see the lettering ? Or could it have come there since last night. Could he—Aslan—have put it there in the night?”

“Why you chump!” said Eustace. “We did see it. We got into the lettering. Don’t you see? We got into the letter E in ME. That was your sunk lane. We walked along the bottom stroke of the E, due north.” He turned to Jill. “I know what you were thinking because I was thinking the same. You were thinking how nice it would have been if Aslan hadn’t put the instructions on the stone of the Ruined City till after we’d passed it. And then it would have been his fault, not ours. So likely, isn’t it? No. We must just own up.”

 

Yes, we must simply own up. This portion of the The Silver Chair illustrates a spiritual state many of us recognize. Many of us are cold, tired, and bewildered. The winds slap our cheeks and we have nothing with which to stay warm—nothing lasting at least. Our feet are sore and we sleep restlessly, tossing and turning on the hard lumpy surface of our thoughts. Worst of all—worse than being muddled and confused—is the tiring effort required to push each other over all of these life barriers.

The story also exposes our spiritual myopia. We squint through the storms of life but lack the imaginative power to see anything more than what is right in front of us. We seem unable to see even the present for what it is. In our haste to pass through the present trial, we lack the awareness to see what God is telling us right now. We stand neck deep in the ravines of God’s fingerprint, but lack the imaginative vision to see it. As a result, our spiritual lives are truncated, our souls are calcified, and our vision is murky at best. “We, who are too blind to read what we have written, or what faith has written for us, do not understand; we only blink, and wonder” (Edwin Arlington Robinson).

Our current spiritual journeys are short, cautious stints because our spiritual myopia hinders our progress. What Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum lacked, we also lack. We lack a healthy imagination. Their journey might have met with greater success had they seen the barriers for what they were: the letters of a divine message. We also might meet greater success if we could align our spiritual vision, our imagination, with God’s ability to see the barriers in our lives.