The significance of the imagination is deepened when we consider how our imagination is formed. I watch Hope, our 1-year-old daughter, toddling through her days, touching, seeing, reacting—learning everything for the first time. Her experience is constantly intaking the new. She touches the order God created—and the image in her eyes reoccurs as a first form in her mind. Over her first year, she is watching and hearing interpretations of those forms from me and my wife, and, of course, has her own natural reactions too. Her soul absorbs conclusions about herself and the world even before she is even conscious of concept. These are the first glimmers of the primary imagination, the landscape in which she will live her days.[i] It is beautiful but can be scary at times too.

All this informs Hope’s little soul before she is ever conscious to say, “Yes, I like that. I will believe that. I trust that. That is true. That’s good. Bad. Scary. Wonderful.” She is soaking up everything, all the beautiful and the awful around us. And as she grows up, amongst the wonder and discovery, she will also find disappointment, fear, loss, sin, and drudgery interwoven into the fabric of this landscape. These are the first movements of her imaginative world. And she will spend a significant part of her life living in, and in a way, unweaving her experience of herself through the modes of imagination so she can see herself and her world a bit more clearly. And as her parents, we are shaping all three modes of her imagination now, but as she grows up, she will need her Heavenly Father to come in through the Holy Spirit to reveal, rebuild, and, redream over that her life will become.

The goal of the imagination is to chase after our Father by using these three modes to actively partner with the Holy Spirit in ways that re-image our minds and hearts after the Image of the Son in our lives and contexts. “The imagination has…a duty…which springs from [man’s] immediate relation to the Father,” said George MacDonald, the mentor of imagination for C.S. Lewis, “that of following and finding out the divine imagination in whose image it was made.” As a repetition of the creative act of God himself, there is a rightness to the imagination, for God himself is righteous, holy, true—and imaginative.[ii]  The modes of imagination are true, good, and beautiful as they are orchestrated under his care. This means each mode can be a space to encounter and connect with God. All our longings, prayers, wonderings, doubts, fears, and griefs, can become founts of the imaginative life, spaces where we can fellowship with God. The heights of heaven and dark seasons that haunt us can be brought into conversation with the love and power of Jesus.

But entering this imaginative space, doesn’t mean just “cleaning up” our imaginative landscape. Some will find their intuitive response is to whitewash their imagination into a “safe version” or “our version” of our soul. We imagine that we can just “delete” or “edit” certain images before God, rather than letting God be the one to shape and work amidst our imagination. Instead, consider the imaginative landscape as the central space for Christian experience of God and self. Invite God into each mode of your imagination. Let him rule there. Though broken, the image still reflects something, and in God’s love, it can be repaired.

[i] G.K. Chesterton says, “Nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”[i] The whole wonder of entering a story is to repeat afresh—to reenact and reinterpret—the original formation of our imagination. This can present new insights of root images and can shift and repair broken or bent ones—hopefully leading to new imaging-forth.

[ii] “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. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself.” - C.S. Lewis, Bluspels and Flalansferes: a Semantic Nightmare