Can You Even Imagine? The Long Lost Spiritual Tool
No time for cute stories or intriguing quotes today. We’ve got serious business to attend to. And that serious business, my friends, is your wild imagination. I’ve got a hunch that it’s actually not so wild. Or perhaps it is, just in the wrong ways. It turns out that the art of imagining is not just child’s play. It’s a spiritual sport, discipline, tool, art… whatever you want to call it. It’s God-given and it’s overlooked.
So if you’re, say, over the age of eight, listen up—this one is for you. Here are four reason why we need to lean into engaging our imagination as spiritual.
1. To help you with your worry and anxiety.
I have learned that my imagination is never better than when I am worrying. I can creatively catastrophize with the best of them. I tell you, I get a tummy ache and immediately I start imagining how Wade’s next wife will redecorate our home. We so often live in the realities we create in our heads, and so much of our identities are formed by the stories we tell ourselves. The ability to imagine the worst is, on one hand, a helpful evolutionary tool to steer us toward safety. But, if you’re anything like me, it often runs away to unhelpful extremes that just produce more anxiety.
It is so helpful to me in those catastrophizing moments to reframe things in terms of imagination. “This fear is in my imagination, not in the world. What can I imagine differently?” Imagine yourself realizing your creative genius of catastrophe and then sending that creative genius down another path. I believe our imaginations are sanctify-able. What if this part of being human, like every other part of being human, is one which we can be formed to the image of Christ in the hope of his resurrection? What if, in those moments, our imagination could be a tool by which the Spirit speaks to us?
We must remember that imagination is not opposed to reason or logic. Imagination is a meaning-making and future-creating tool. We might have imagination opposed to ‘the real world’, but imagination is potential for reality. It is something that mirrors the creationing of God in our own imago dei in that it allows us to make ‘something’ out of ‘nothing’. In this way, our imagination can be the meeting place of heaven and earth. It is incarnational in that it can bring embodiment to that which was merely spirit.
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2. To enter more deeply into the Holy Scriptures.
If you never read the Scriptures with your imagination at play, you’re really missing out. Something profound is possible when we open our imagination to the text of the Holy Scriptures, especially (but not only) with the narratives. It always benefits us to have a more sensual (think: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) or embodied experience, and such is more human, more incarnational, more much likely to sanctify us. What is it like to “see” the Garden of Eden, to “hear” Jesus call you by name, to “feel” the presence of the lion in the den? Can you “taste” the water turned to wine or “smell” the cedar in God’s house?
Having an active imagination isn’t just living with one’s head in the clouds. Ironically to that popular idea, practicing imagined participation in the Holy Scriptures grounds us. It grounds us to our God-given bodies, the real world, this world where God really visited in our bodied form. When we enter into the stories of the Bible, we are entering into the on-going story of God. Maybe it’s better put that we are making room for God in our story, inviting the God of history to not stay there.
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3. WYTAGITMITAY and our image-filled religion
The third reason our imagination is so spiritual is because of our image-filled Christianity is. Imagination is of course closely linked to imagery, and images do not spell things out for us like words. They inspire us for meaning, ask of to participate with them, and are always open for interpretation. The cross, the dove, the wine… there are so many symbols that operate as signs for us, and how we imagine them provides what they mean to us.
The images aren’t just about our ‘stuff’ either, but are actually necessary for getting to know God. If you just try to imagine “God,” “the Divine,” or an “Almighty,” I hope it proves difficult. The One of Whom we can make no graven images has TONS of images He is known by. Father, Mother, Lion, Lamb, Rock, Midwife, Bridegroom, Door, Vinedresser, Shepherd, Potter… the list goes on and on. How kind of God to give us all of these different ways to imagine how God relates to us. How we imagine these symbols is directly connected to what we think God is like. Our finite faith depends on them.
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4. Hope
Lastly but not leastly (just let me have it), our ability to hope is directly tied to our ability to imagine. You cannot hope for what you cannot imagine. How can we hope for restoration, reconciliation, healing, and change if we can’t even imagine it? I think about Mary and Martha at the death of their brother Lazarus, who were so disappointed not only because of the death of brother but because they knew it wasn’t necessary as they could imagine an alternate way with Jesus. “If you had only been here!” they both say to him. They had high hopes because they had imaginations that had encountered Jesus.
Hope is, of course, a dangerous game. So let’s take the risky business of imagination and push it another step farther. This is not just about us and our desires, but friends, the life of the world depends on it. For some beautiful and scary reason unexplainable to me, God has decided that we should get to participate in the redeeming of the broken world. So the sake of our world depends on us partnering our imaginations with God. Can we see a world in world in which all have access to clean drinking water? A culture where innocents are not killed? A country where healthcare is not a mess? If we can’t imagine it, we cant hope for it. And if we can’t hope for it, we can’t work towards it.
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So maybe we make time to close with one fun quote. In A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Shakespeare gives Theseus a line that speaks to the incarnational nature of the imagination:
“And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown,
the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
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May we be spiritually mature enough to imagine. Just as the Word became flesh, may our imaginations body forth the hope of love. May we be brave enough to partner our imaginations with the Risen Christ, and not only dream of but work for a world in which hope leads us.
If the Lord don’t come and the creek don’t rise,
Casey
PS: The artwork for this blog entry is a photo I took of a Benjamin West painting which hangs at the Met. It imagines Moses being shown the Promised Land.
