Do you ever wonder what place imagination plays in a faith in God? I've got to admit that I tend to rely on precise explanations of Bible verses and stories, word definitions, careful examination of the culture in which the Bible was written, etc. I'm a rational type of guy. Like Sargeant Friday it's "just the facts" for me.
Recently I've come to see that I've been short-changing my faith by being so rational. You see, the rational parts of our brains just can't grasp the full scope of reality. Spiritual reality is beyond precise word definitions. It requires pictures and images that only the imaginative part of our brain can begin to grasp. In fact, I've come to believe that that's why a book like Revelation is in the Bible--to fire up our imaginations, to help us think of our faith in a new way when our explanations come up flat and dry. To quote Eugene Peterson:
"Imagination is the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and past...For Christians, whose largest investment is in the invisible, the imagination is indispensable. (then he quotes Nobel-prize-winning poet Caeslaw Milosz) 'He is convinced that our imagination-deficient educational process has left us with a naive picture of the world. In this naive view, the universe has space and time--nothing else. No values. No God...it is by means of the imagination that we pack in the glory." (Under the Unpredictable Plant, pp. 169, 170).
This new awareness into the importance of our imaginations is opening a whole new world to me in my faith. Give it some thought (if you haven't already), and see what it does for your sense of wonder and adventure. Blessings.
Rick
