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The Imaginative Life

Imagination Defined

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Josef Pieper wrote, “Certain things can be adequately discussed only if at the same time we speak of the whole of the world and of life. If we are not ready to do that, we give up all claim to saying anything significant” (In Tune with the World, p. 3). Imagination is one of those things. If we plan on talking about the imagination, then we should probably plan on talking about everything else in the world and in life. After all, what is more worthy of our contemplations and our conversations than a topic that touches everything?

Metaphors to describe the metaphor maker, imagination:

Perhaps light would serve as an apt metaphor to help us understand better the role of the imagination: If we set ourselves in a dark room where no light can creep in under the door or through the blinds then we have no ability to judge. We have no ability to move with any confidence because we are unsure of just about everything. Our insecurity is relieved, however, by any light, even the meager light offered by a match. The smallish light from that match is enough to provide an image for reason to judge. Reason sees a form that appears hard and, therefore, reasons that moving around that object would be wise. What if we had a lantern instead of a match. Obviously, sight would be greatly increased by a lantern. What if we cut a bank of windows out of the wall? More visibility? Better ability to judge? Now what if we took the entire ceiling and roof off so that the room is flooded with sunshine? We are more secure in our judgments beneath the sun at noontime than we are in a dark room with only a match. Light is necessary for orientation and this is a fact made clear from the beginning when God organized the deep by speaking. “Let there be light,” he said. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness (Genesis 1:3-4).

Let’s run this light metaphor a little further. What if we only have a flashlight to give illumination in the dark room? Our perception depends very much on how we shine that flashlight. A flashlight aimed directly under the chin casts shadows that transform a friend’s face into something eerie. Likewise, a flashlight aimed directly above the head or at varying angles evokes a different feeling altogether of the same object. We might have something as familiar as our best friend in front of us, but that flashlight provides very different takes on the same object.

What if we replace the glass at the end of the flashlight with different colored lenses? What if we use infrared or black light? We see the same object but it looks very different once again. The metaphor illustrates that proper judgment depends not only on the volume or quality of light in the room, but on the kind of light. The smaller the light, the more the angle of that light transforms an object. Likewise, the imagination is the light that images forth, illumines, what remains dark to the mind without it. Without the imagination, all of existence is so much chaos requiring arrangement. It is the light by which the reason functions. It is the condition, the prerequisite for any judgment. I see an object in front of me, but even that language is deceptive. I don’t really see the object, I see light bouncing off the object and providing an image very much dependent upon that light. In our day to day existence, light goes unnoticed and unappreciated, like breathing, even though it is essential and defining. This kind of imagination that serves as light, providing meaning to our lives, is what Coleridge called Primary Imagination. This is the imaginative power that is creative, but synthesizing, a power that organizes life into meaning.

Defining the imagination:

The imagination is the imaging, orienting, meaning making faculty of the mind. How’s that for a short definition? To fill it out a bit, let’s remember that it is the imaging and orienting faculty of the mind because it mediates sensory information to reason, conceiving what is perceived into a narrative that provides the context for reason’s work. Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be frustrated by applying such univocal language to something so difficult to pin down. How much better to just use a metaphor and say that the imagination is like light: it makes meaning out of meaninglessness.

Narrative as light:

Here’s where we should extend the metaphor out of necessity. What form does that light take? In other words, what structures the meaninglessness into a meaningful “light” by which we make decisions and otherwise interact with reality? The form of that light is narrative in shape. Almost everything in life is made meaningful using narrative categories: first this happened, then this happened, and that’s why I kicked my brother in the shin. Meaning is found narratively in mathematics as well. The equation 2+3=5 is a plot sequence. Chemical equations function similarly. The overlap of imagination with the sciences is worthy of its own study, but for now let’s just suggest that narrative is the framework of both the micro and macro levels of our lives.

The imagination is the imaging, orienting, meaning making function of the mind, stringing all sorts of images together into a meaningful narrative that becomes the lens or light or world perception (worldview) by which or through which I see everything. The imagination is “the implicit and mostly unconscious presuppositions through which we view reality.”

While it is difficult to talk about Christian reason, it is not only possible, but essential to discuss the Christian imagination. The imagination does not function according to some transcendental principles like reason does with logic. It simply functions as light does, orienting us toward something imaged. The unbelieving imagination conceives a narrative that orients in one directions while the believing imagination, the Christian imagination, conceives a narrative that orients in another direction entirely.

Informing our implicit narrative with Scriptural narrative:

The imagination is the imaging and orienting light of the mind. Scripture says that those who do not believe “live in darkness” (Psalm 82:5), “they meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope at noontime as in the night,” (Job 5:14) but Christ is the light of the world and those who follow him shall not walk in darkness anymore, but have the light of life (John 3:19). God “uncovers deep things out of darkness, and brings the shadow of death to light” (Job 12:22). We echo with all those who have walked by faith that “The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light” (Rom. 13:12) for “it is God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (II Cor. 4:6). It is, indeed, Christ who will bring “to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of of the hearts. Then each one’s praise will come from God” (I Cor. 4:5).

The more we submit our imaginations to the work of Christ, the more we grow in sanctification, proving that we are all “sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of darkness” (I Th. 5:5). And yet we live in a time very much like the Egyptians under God’s judgement: “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, darkness which may even be felt. So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days. They did not see one another; nor did anyone rise from his place for three days. But all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings” (Exodus 10:2-23). The Christian imagination images and orients in a different direction from the unbelieving imagination because the Lord is our lamp and he shall enlighten our darkness” (II Sam. 22:29) and so we have light in our dwellings.

Reclaiming and reorienting the imagination under Christ:

Because the imagination is this important, it deserves more attention than it casually gets from Christians who claim the lordship of Jesus Christ over all creation. We have forgotten that the imagination is the lamp of mind, the vision that orients how we think, what we think, and ultimately what we do. It would behoove us to remember, especially in this context, Matthew 6:22-23. “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If, therefore, the light that is in you is darkness, how dark is that darkness!”

Our job is to reclaim the imagination from its unbelieving masters and reorient it towards its source, God’s imagination, so that we can follow it to its source as was God’s intention from the beginning. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Pilgrim’s Regress, “For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see my face and live.” And here we find ourselves back where we started this conversation. Josef Pieper was right. “Certain things can be adequately discussed only if at the same time we speak of the whole of the world and of life. If we are not ready to do that, we give up all claim to saying anything significant.” What is more worthy of our contemplations and our conversations than a topic that touches everything?

Worldview, Reason, and Imagination

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If you asked any Joe on the street to define “imagination”, what might he say? Thomas Howard humorously captured the popular view of imagination this way: “Imagination is often treated as the country cousin, frolicking about in a flowered chicken-feedbag jumper, gathering dandelions and ragwort and supposing them to be orchids and birds-of-paradise flowers. When you want a recess from wearisome reality, you summon the foxfire of imagination” (The Night Is Far Spent, p. 46). This view articulates the common misconception that humanity can basically be broken into two groups: the irresponsible and impractical imaginative dreamers called “artsy folks,” and the rest of us who have our feet planted firmly on the ground. It takes only a hop, skip, and a jump to reach the conclusion that the imaginative and the rational don’t play well together. Now this dichotomy might be oversimplified, but from a young age we breathe it in to some degree or another. My aim in this article is to rethink this dichotomy and reconstruct a new way of seeing that embraces the absolute necessity of both imagination and reason working in tandem.

The essential need for and purpose of reason:

Reason and imagination are God’s gifts and both are marks of God’s image in us, crowning humanity with glory (Hebrews 2:7). Both have an essential function in the life of the mind, and both impact not only what we do, but who we become. So, let’s address each in their turn, beginning with reason.

Reason is the judgment faculty of the mind. By reason we judge whether something is true or false, right or wrong. It has the capacity to censor ideas. Peter Kreeft says that reason has a little old man at its door who censors what is welcome and dismisses what is unwelcome. This metaphor is one way of showing that reason is the organ of Truth, as Samuel Johnson has said and others have echoed. Rational argument traffics in definitions, logic, and univocal (unambiguous) language. Reason functions well when it is precise and careful, as evidenced across all the disciplines, from theology to genetics.

It’s worth noting the difference between reason and reason’s assumptions, so let’s take two scientists as examples. The first scientist is a Naturalist. The assumption upon which he bases all his careful reason might be simplified down to a metaphor: “The universe is a self-contained machine.” His reason functions upon this premise and his conclusions play out accordingly. The “little old man” at the door of his reason welcomes any data that supports his premise and rejects any that does not fit with it. The second scientist in our example is a Supernaturalist and the assumption upon which he bases all his careful reason might also be simplified down to a metaphor: “The universe is the spoken word of God.” His reason functions upon this premise and his conclusions play out accordingly. We would call this reigning metaphor, this underlying premise, a worldview,”The implicit and mostly unconscious presuppositions through which we view reality” (Martin Cothran). Sound important?

The faculty of reason functions the same both for the Christian and non-Christian. Both have either weak or strong inductive and deductive reasoning, but the measurement of weak or strong is based on transcendental principles not especially belonging to the Christian. Like measures of beauty, strong logic is available to both the Christian and non-Christian alike. Can one defend something like “Christian reason”? I think it would be difficult, if not impossible, to do so. Reason can function more biblically or unbiblically not so much in its careful definitions, logic, or univocal language but in its assumptions, its premises.

Stark examples of this implicit and mostly unconscious presupposition abound in life and in Scripture. Two immediately come to mind: Gideon cowering in the corner of his threshing floor had one view of the world (his weltanshauung) and of himself that had no room for the way God actually saw him: “And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him, and said to him, ‘the Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor!'” And then there is Moses who saw himself as an exiled stutterer incapable of the task to which God had called him. Exodus 3 and 4 are a litany of excuses refuted one by one by God himself, but even after Moses performs multiple miracles through the power of God, he offers one last gem: “O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before nor since you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). His worldview, his implicit and mostly unconscious presuppositions gave little room to accept the way God saw him. If a worldview is an implicit and mostly unconscious presupposition, then it functions at a precognitive, intuitive level as it did with Gideon and Moses. So the senses provide information that passes through this weltanshauung (world perception) before it ever reaches the old man waiting at the door of reason. He bases his censorship, his judgement, upon the way that sensory information or ideas has been mediated by that worldview. For both Moses and Gideon, and many others, the old man at the door rejected God’s vision because it did not align with his own.

God is fond of doing this sort of thing. In Isaiah 41, he addresses Jacob in this way: “Fear not, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel. I will help you” (v. 14) How will he help? “Behold, I will make you into a new threshing sledge with sharp teeth; you shall thresh the mountains and beat them small, and make the hills like chaff” (v. 15). Worms don’t do that sort of thing, but God’s vision is rarely our own.

It’s right about now that you’re asking what all this has to do with imagination and it’s right about now that I attempt an answer. Any kind of perception is the ability to become aware of something and so requires vision. The same is true of worldview perception. Every worldview requires a vision that constructs a meaningful metaphor (worldview) through which we view all of reality? I have become convinced that the imagination performs this crucial role in our lives.

The essential need for and purpose of imagination:

Although the word “imagination” has a messy philosophical history, philosophers have agreed on one thing from the beginning: the imagination serves as a crucial bridge between the senses and reason. Aristotle wrote, “every time one thinks one must at the same time contemplate some image” (De Anima, 432a). Imagination, therefore, plays a constant role in perception and contributes necessary material for rational thought.

The imagination mediates between the data pulled from our senses and what is finally judged by our reason. The imagination translates what is perceived by the senses into some image or string of images that reason can understand. It traffics in images of various kinds, particularly metaphor and narrative. It is a combiner, gluing various images together to create a new image entirely. We see this in the common notion of imagination as a faculty of unwieldy fancy as when it concocts a Chimera, a myth, by combining a lion, a serpent, and a goat. Or we see this gluing ability when it combines an eagle with a horse called Pegasus. This fancy is, indeed, one function of the imagination, but not the sole function, and for this reason Coleridge called it Secondary Imagination.

Another way that the imagination glues images together is when it takes moments from memory (what happened yesterday) and combines them with what is happening right now so that it can anticipate what will happen later. The imagination images the sensory world and strings those images together to form a kind of movie, a visual narrative. It is the imagination’s task to take sensory information and translate it into a usable narrative for the reason, imaging the sensory information so that it fits into what is already known in the narrative conceived thus far. It takes the chaos of our lives and arranges all of it into something recognizable, meaningful.

Thomas Howard put it this way: “Imagination, far from being an unfortunate inclination in us mortals that leads us down the garden path toward illusion and a region that is nothing but wish fulfillment, may, rather, be the faculty in us corresponding in a unique way to reality. We cannot pit it over or against intellect and will and affection. All of these properties rightly crown our humanness, and each, after its own mode, enables us to respond to reality” (The Night Is Far Spent, p. 46). That last line is critical for rethinking false dichotomies set up between reason and imagination. Both reason and imagination enable us to respond to reality, but let us recognize that reason functions by the light of the imagination.

C.S. Lewis agreed, “It must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”

In the final line of this quote, Lewis says that the imagination is not the cause of truth, but its condition. As light is the condition for the perception of any object, so imagination is the condition for the perception of any truth. We even say, “Let me shed a little light on the subject” as a metaphor for understanding. Reason is the organ of truth, judging what is true so that the old man at the door can reject that which is false. Imagination, on the other hand, is the organ of meaning, the light without which everything would be nonsense or meaninglessness. In other words, reason cannot trump the imagination, but the imagination usually dictates what we reason. .

Now, if only it were all that easy to make such delineations. Unfortunately, imagination resists categorizing. For this reason it becomes difficult if not impossible to talk of “the imagination” as though it were a single and simple function of the mind: a noun. In some respects, our talk of “the imagination” is deceptive. Reason is more like a noun, something that holds still long enough for me to point at it and say, “Look kids, that is a thing.” Imagination, however, is more like a verb, even a state of being verb that just is. I never really turn on the light in a room, the light just is. I switch a circuit, a noun, but I don’t turn on the light. Light is and does. Imagination is and does; hence the complications of talking about “the imagination” as if it is a static function of the mind waiting to be turned on. We’ll be more effective in reclaiming the imagination when we recognize the potency of its power as a perpetually revved and orienting function.

How the Imagination Dominates 75% of Your Day

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I’m writing this post about twenty minutes from home and about an hour from dinner time. Part of my mind is on the content I’m writing and part of my mind is thinking about dinner plans, what the evening will look like, whether my kids will cooperate with my plans, and wondering how to get all my chores done before dinner. Sound familiar? This is how we function during the majority of the day.

When the alarm goes off, we think about the morning routines that force us out from under the warm blankets; while we’re in the shower, we think about breakfast and the demands from the day; while we’re driving to work, we think some more about the demands of the day, already planning out a narrative for what lies ahead.

We call this action of the mind “anticipating” and it remains one of our favorite pastimes, so much so that we give it no real analytical thought. Anticipating is as natural as breathing. What’s anticipation got to do with the imagination? Everything. Anticipating is simply a function of the imagination. We construct a mental picture or narrative of what is not presently before the eyes, thereby calling it anticipation.

The imagination functions in many ways and fantasizing is its major claim to fame right now even though it does much more than that. It’s interesting to note that this anticipation is actually a form of fantasy. By the time I get out of the shower, I’ve constructed an entire narrative that doesn’t actually exist yet. I’m thinking about dinner time right now and anticipating the narrative this evening might hold as if it probably will be that way. Of course I base this fantasy upon given facts and data from previous evenings, but it nonetheless remains a minor form of fantasy. No dragons are involved (unless you count my son’s tactics, dragon-like) and yet the narrative I’ve drummed up is simply a fancy that lacks sensory proof.

I sound negative, a little demeaning of the imagination perhaps, but that’s not my intention. What I want to point out is just how much of our life is spent anticipating. What percentage of my day is spent imagining a picture or narrative that is yet to exist? Fifty percent? Seventy-five percent? Sometimes I wonder if it gets as high as ninety percent. But these aren’t hard proofs and this is no reliable study, only anecdotal. Still, it’s worth considering how much of our mental functions are spent imaginatively.

If that much of our time is spent imaginatively, maybe we should think about how God would have us use that time. That kind of evaluation requires some biblical questions and some honest answers: 1. Is the narrative or picture we create consistent with what God would like us to create? 2. How do we know? 3. Do we anticipate in hope? 4. Do we anticipate in love and self-sacrifice and joy? 5. Is the narrative I construct in the morning a narrative that presumes God’s promises and looks for their fulfillment?

Let’s recognize how much of our life is dominated by the imagination and then start training it to imagine aright. It’s hard work, I should know, but baby steps are still steps worth praising.

The Sanctified Imagination, Part 4

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The sanctified imagination will serve us well along this pilgrim way because it will see correspondences—in nature and everywhere else. It will pay attention to a world—a universe—pregnant with metaphors, each of which is a bread crumb, a pointer further up and further in. As Eudora Welty wrote, “connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together…And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you’ve come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect” (One Writer’s Beginnings).

The imagination of the world is pocked, palsied, and bent double by the weight of personal pleasure and misdirected pursuits. It cannot see the connections because connections require more than one thing and there is room for only thing in the unsanctified imagination: the self. What if my stodgy pedestrian imagination discarded the self and was given free reign to gallop after God, to see the world as he sees it?

Here’s a thought experiment: the self loves a system built to satisfy a myriad of desires and there is no doubt that such a system must be highly complex and readily flexible. What if we shed the complexity for a life more simple? Would our imaginations have room to breath and, therefore, less distraction from the face of God? I have a propensity to allow the complexities of life to dictate the story my imagination perceives. Instead of seeing as God sees, instead of seeing a story colored by the transcendent spiritual freedom found in pursuing God, I am habitually bound by the difficulties inherent in a system of self-satisfaction. This system has made life more difficult, not easier, and I seem intent on maintaining that system. The poem “The Fascination of What’s Difficult” echoes this propensity:

 

The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theater business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

–William Butler Yeats


Our imaginations have stayed too long in the stall of empty, self pleasure and misdirected pursuits.

Maybe its time to imagine like children again, to be captivated by the glory of God.

Maybe it’s time to slip the bolt.

 

My three-year-old, Sammi, is named after my dad. They are alike in many ways: both of them are animated and engaged with people, both of them are enchanted by the world.

Sammi runs through the wild grasses on an August evening, with her dress slapping against her small legs. She bounces, goat-like, when she runs.

“Daddy! Daddy! The snow turned pink!”

“What snow, honey?”

She spreads her arms and raises them toward the heavens as if to hold the wonder of the world in her embrace. I follow her eyes to see the piled clouds touched by the sun’s setting finger: salmon and rose hues set against azure deeps. My daughter smiles, knowing she has someone with whom to share her ecstasy.

Pink snow!

“Imagine that!” I cry out. “It has turned pink. How spectacular!”

This is the sanctified imagination, the simple imagination, for which I long.

The Sanctified Imagination, Part 3

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Like harvesters, we walk the fields of this world and look for the marks of Jesus Christ, gleaning the savior1 wherever he may be found. When our imaginative vision is consumed with God, captivated by Jesus Christ, and nourished by the Holy Spirit, then the imagination is sanctified and 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).

1Anthony 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.

The Sanctified Imagination, Part 2

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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. We all have an imagination and it always runs hot, but the sanctified imagination is 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 sanctified imagination sees connection and difference, types and shadows, symmetry and singularity; in a word, correspondences. The sanctified 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).

The more healthy the imagination, the more it sees the world as it really is: enchanted with the divine presence.