Revisioning Our Imaginations - The Buried Imagination (Part 6)

Within these modes of imagination, we can see the truth of ourselves. We can go deeper than internal fact-checking and notice what has shaped us, how we perceive, and even find new spaces to encounter God’s presence. This may look like, instead of running to judgment, noticing first what is there. As an image, emotion, impression comes up, you might say, “Who knew I always framed that thought or emotion like that?” Then, validate the images that make up this landscape. For example, “When I imagined that, said that, or reacted like that, that was angry, or dark, or divisive, or numb.” And then, use the active imagination to interact with the landscape of our primary imagination, trusting that God’s both using and repairing that image of himself at our core.

These modes then become a vehicle for the incarnation of God’s love and presence in our souls. This can lead to conversational prayer, something like, “Lord, I’m so weary of this desert, the mountains are high and there’s no water—I can’t find my way through. Where are you here?” Or “This cave is so dark, and I’m just feeling around for walls and holes—Lord, I feel so lost, it’s so hard not to see—how might you meet me here?” Thus, we enter the pattern set for us in the Psalms of lament, reimagining our broken realities alongside God.[i]

For, despite all our logic and reasoning, often the wound resides and even permanently marks the landscape of our imagination. Salvation itself may include mental insights or intellectual answers, but it is often in the modes of the imagination where the deepest work is done—and this remains true in our sanctification too. In our past, memories are contained as images impressed on the mind.[ii] In the future, we anticipate stories as flashes of images that may happen, or we grieve images that could have or never will unfold. And in the present, we inhabit a mental space filled with a storehouse of images in which to consider, explain, hypothesize, question, worship, and believe. In approaching God with the reality of our hearts, the three modes of the imagination are actually tuned to him, and he will continue to use our grounded identity through the image of Christ, to shape the landscape of our primary imagination, through our active imagination.

As we engage with the three modes of imagination, it can clarify the frontiers spiritual formation has spearheaded and give further permission to shepherd the imagination in all its expressions and press into ministries that partner with God’s work in the emotions, experience, prayer, or healing. Whenever we dig deep enough in a person’s story, the modes of the imagination are there to shape and guide.

In a way, we are co-creating or re-creating with God in the care of the soul. You know that awful power at work in our anxieties? It also contains the same potency to lead our minds toward heaven. The force by which we oppress ourselves or each other? It is the same power by which we might elevate, serve, or affirm one another in love. The reinforcement of wounds and vices corrupting our bodies and minds to sin against God? These can also receive the healing and supernatural virtue that would captivate our desires and receive us with Love. All this awful wonder is trapped within the realm of our experience—the imaginative capacity—of what it is to be made and re-made in the image of God.

So, here we are standing at that doorway where we began.

I see you, framed by the door, framed by light.

Behind you is the landscape that only you and the Lord know. Its valleys, hills, mountains, and rivers—all yours to explore with him.

And ahead, you see a world of faces.

In your chest is that key.

They wonder too, is this a place where they can go?

Is this a place where they can meet with God?

Is this place safe? Scary? Lonely? Sacred?

Who will lead them there?

I see you grasp the key in your chest.

You lift it out.

And walk toward them.

[i] An amazing New Testament model for this is the passage in Luke 24:13-35 when God hides the resurrected Jesus from the two disciples on the Emmaus road, taking the time and space to unpack their stories, while he asks questions, reveals more of himself, until their primary imagination is “opened” and they see him in the breaking of the bread.

[ii] Memories are a great example of the power of the imagination—for we experience memories most profoundly as images or flashes upon the mind’s eye of a past moment. Sometimes these images nostalgic and other times traumatic. Memories are formed by repetition of experiences, sense, or emotions. As these combine over time our minds actually layer them together into a sort of mental painting that we then can recall later for good or ill. Another interesting aspect of memory, is it tends to be less connected to facts (this was how old I was, what day it was, what time it was, etc.) and lodges itself rather in an impression or sense which informs our actions, skills, or mood. The meaning-making of memories is a the craftsmanship of imagination, for it weaves the emotional, experiential, and actual into a conglomeration of information that can be used again and again as we mature. The invitation as Christians is for Jesus to be experienced as present in every memory, the wonderful ones and the hard ones, integrating the whole mind with His love for us and presence with us (thanks to my brother-in-law, Tyson Farris, for a fruitful conversation on these aspects of memory and imagination).