Quotes About Imagination

Christians swim in metaphor like fish in the sea. Spiritual formation requires some measure of analogical or imaginative ability, since we are, after all, dealing with an invisible God who can't be humanly grasped except in comparison to things that are, well, humanly grasped.

The imagination is not somehow divorced from reason or the intellect: it's one of the primary ways we learn. I'm indebted to a literary colleague of mine for suggesting that in classical tradition, the imagination is considered "the mind's eye" (emphasis on mind), an actual faculty of the intellect.

Story is one of the most powerful ways we pattern our world and discover its meaningfulness. It goes beyond mere embellishment of a spiritual point to providing a nurturing form or substance for the God-hungry imagination, one that helps young people inhabit a narratable world.

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning."16

One major difference between imagination and reason is that imagination often operates beneath the surface of analytical thought. Here I can't help thinking of Sherlock Holmes, musically brooding with his violin till the solution to the mystery presents itself.

For the past few years I've been on a quest to find a good definition of the imagination. To begin with, the task is rendered difficult by the general suspicion on the part of many decent Muggles1 that the imagination—loosely understood as the image-making faculty—is somehow evil or at least something we're supposed to grow out of.

Even though universal metanarratives are largely absent, personal "I" narratives are everywhere. The popular imagination is saturated with self-obsessive stories in film, television, advertising, music, MySpace, and YouTube—but this is the equivalent of bingeing on junk food while dying for want of substance.

No man is saved by his imagination," quipped nineteenth-century Scottish preacher George Morrison. "It is a question if any man is saved without it."18

imagination is the image-making faculty of the intellect that helps us discover, process, and creatively express coherent meaning.

For the story that shapes a child's universe also shapes the child—and by the child, the man thereafter. The memory of a burning fairy tale can govern behavior as truly as remembered fire will caution against fire forever. —WALTER WANGERIN

If imagination, as we've said, is the "region of discovery," story is the wardrobe door, sending our young people "further in" and "still further in" to possibilities and ideas they've never dreamed.

C. S. Lewis said it this way: "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."12

Story affirms that not everything in the universe can or must be explained propositionally; the loose ends of story aren't always neatly tied together, because neither are the loose ends of our lives. "Life can bear only so much reality," says poet and pastor Calvin Miller.

Instinctively and empirically we know that stories have the power and the potential to capture hearts and imaginations—we're just not sure how or why this is so.

Ministry with young people—in fact, ministry with anybody—intrinsically relies on imagination to vividly and compellingly invite others into God's presence.

For her, the conflict was a theological problem, a serious error on the part of her fellow Christians. "There is a new and troublesome fear of the imagination - though without it, how can anyone believe in the Incarnation, the Power that created all of the galaxies willingly limiting itself to be one of us for love for us! And this fear is expressing itself in a new kind of book burning and witch-hunting.

Tell me a story," says the poem by Robert Penn Warren. "In this century, and moment, of mania . . . Tell me a story of deep delight.

For (D.L) Mayfield, "Parenting has made me eschew religiosity in exchange for a real relationship - full of questioning - of a God I hope is more loving than I can possibly imagine. I don't think we talk often enough about how children both make it essential and impossible to write. Madeleine for me is a patron saint of this.

if there is no light by which we see, no Great Story that illumines our days—and no Storyteller—then we have no source by which to enchant the young people in our charge.

Our songs and our stories do more than persuade others that an order exists: they build the house; they weave a world; they companion our listeners into the experience of such ordered cosmos. —WALTER WANGERIN JR

food to nourish the imagination

the only thing I wanted was to walk with Frodo into Mordor. Because if I could live for a little while inside a great story written by a first-rate Christian storyteller, maybe my fragmented world just might make some kind of narrative sense again. And I was right.

The more I look into this issue, the more I'm convinced that the imagination is this mysterious thread: specifically, the imagination "baptized" and "sanctified" by the Holy Spirit.

If their imaginations are starved, you feed them; if they are thirsty, you give them something to drink. Trust the Spirit to bring the needed nourishment along the way. NURTURING