Christ & the Mundus Imaginalis

How do we feel colour?

Do you think that’s a daft question? We see colour. We define things by colour. We wear colour. Surely we don’t feel colour?

Greens: the colour of cool refreshing spring; the hope and promise of summer. Reds/Oranges: warmth of fires on winter nights; embarrassment, anger. Greys/Blacks: shadows and sadness, perhaps fears of the dark. So on and so forth.

Unlike riding a bike – once learned, never forgotten – imagination, if we don’t use it or even if we just don’t use it very much, can become stilted and fragmented, even lost as we become too rational, too literal and too much in our heads. We have probably all experienced the attitude that dismisses an event, a dream, a vision, something in our peripheral vision; something out of the corner of our eye and rather than simply be with it or explore as something worthwhile we say . . . it’s only my imagination. Why are we so quick to dismiss those things? And why is the imagination so easily belittled as a non-important part of our makeup?

This is basically what I want us to look at here; to have fun with, enjoy and explore. Hopefully, at the end this will supply another string to the bow of Christian living that simply provides a different angle on life and another way of considering the good and the bad that comes into our lives.

What is Imagination & Why do We Have it?

Why do we have imagination? What is it? Why has God created us with imagination? What’s it for? And for us as Christians, how can we use it? Are there specific ways we should use imagination as followers of Jesus Christ?

Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians encourages Christians to capture the imagination as a tool for serving Christ: “The weapons we fight with are not the world’s weapons. On the contrary, they have divine power to pull down strongholds. We demolish arguments [imaginings] and pretensions that set themselves up against the knowledge of God and we secure every thought [imagination], making it obedient to Christ.” (2 Cor 10:4-5)

What I find amazing, is that imagination in the Scriptures, is rarely referred to positively.

“The Lord saw how . . . every imagining of people’s hearts was only evil.” (Gen 6:5)

Seven things detestable to God include, “. . . a heart that devises evil imaginings.” (Prov 6:18)

There seem to be no actual positive statements concerning imagination, despite the obvious and massive point that God created the world and everything in it out of nothing but his own imagination. There is, thankfully, a wonderful principle to apply whenever we’re searching for truths and understanding – especially when we come to the Bible, since we know only too well how misused the Scriptures can be; and that principle is: ‘The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because something isn’t mentioned, it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Being too literal and too rational about what is and isn’t said about imagination in the Bible might actually be a clue why, consciously or subconsciously so many Christians feel the need to be wary of imagination; to be careful of what can be thought up, and not to regard creativity as important, to ignore dreams and visions (even though the Bible is full of dreams and visions and how important they can be as a means through which God communicates with people). There seems to be some underlying idea that using the imagination, or over-using it, is a bad thing, that it’s all too airy-fairy and wishy-washy, without any practical use. Along similar lines, the idea stands that fantasies are, by nature, dark or sexual, selfish or brutal, or just plain unhealthy. There’s almost no room for considering imagination or fantasy as a good thing unless you are a writer or a painter or a film-maker because what is fantasy is not real. Therefore, anything to do with the imagination is, by definition, not real and therefore of no use; but is that really true?

Imagination & the Unseen Real

How often do we regard the imagination as not important today? We’re relieved when something turns out to be only our imagination. People might throw out something we believe in or something we think we’ve seen with a dismissive, “Oh, it’s just your imagination!” There’s a sense that, if something is just in our imagination, then it isn’t real, and what isn’t real can’t hurt us, or it can’t be trusted, or it isn’t important.

Sometimes I find tremendous inspiration in certain books and films that are Science Fiction or Fantasy Drama in genre, like the Matrix Trilogy for example, Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the X Men films and the like – and I know you may well feel the same . . .yet, if we share enthusiastically about such books and films with those friends who may be a little less inclined to appreciate the truths of those non-literal worlds, don’t we sometimes get the impression that they begin to glaze over as they listen; and we get that feeling of, ‘Uh, oh. . .they think I’m a geek.’

The flip side to that, of course is that our imaginations can sometimes run away with us; and run away with us negatively. I tend to find that when that happens it’s usually along the lines of personal things like jobs or money or the tasks performed at church or it’s about the worrying we do over our loved ones. How often has your partner or your children been out and they’re not back when they say they’ll be – don’t you start to imagine the worst? The car’s broken down or there’s been an accident. They’ve been mugged. They’ve met a friend and can’t be bothered to let you know. They’ve run off with someone. Why don’t they just phone or text? Then they turn up right as rain and you find out the traffic was horrendous; the tube got delayed because a passenger was ill; they couldn’t call or text you because there was no signal - or their phone credit was down to 9p! Nothing much happened at all, but you’ve imagined just about everything bad that could have happened.

If imagination runs away negatively for too long or too frequently, we can risk shattering our relationships. I have a couple of acquaintances, Christians, a husband and wife who’ve been together happily and faithfully over twenty years. One day the husband found a bright neon purple tie behind a chair in their bedroom and he knew it wasn’t his. All sorts of things ran through his mind for days, until he finally summoned the courage to ask his wife about the tie. She was as surprised about it as he was and couldn’t think where the purple tie had come from. Still, her husband had his doubts. Then a little while later they got a call from a dear friend who was gay and who had recently stayed with them – he said he just wanted to thank them again for a lovely visit and for giving up their bedroom for him . . . and had he by any chance left one of his favourite ties, a purple one behind? Needless to say, hubby felt very daft and rather ashamed for even daring to doubt his wife.

Christ as Imaginative Story Teller

Now Jesus was a master of imagination. We only need to start looking at the parables he told and the stories he shared, unwrapping gems of insight and divine wisdom that are simply delicious to get to read and play with and learn from. Consider the Parable of the Prodigal Son (or Parable of the Good Father), all about the boundlessness of God’s love and compassion for us, whatever scrapes or troubles we’ve gotten ourselves into he can’t wait to wrap his arms around us and help us, if we just ‘come home’ to him. Or how about the Parable of the Sower, about how the knowledge of God can be received with joy and grow in us, or be refused, or choked out of our lives by other things, or simply whither and die because we pay no attention to strengthening the root. There’s the Parable of the Persistent widow crying out for equity and justice and the judge (or God), giving in to help her just to get a little peace. Or the Parable of the Talents, about taking responsibility for the gifts we have, however huge or small they may seem.

Imagination enables us to grasp truths more easily, not just with our heads, but with our hearts and souls. It is imagination that helps us to see things from a variety of angles and gain a felt self, a gut-feeling of the truth, about what something is all about and what we can learn from it, allowing it to benefit our lives. Imagination brings clarity to the depths of who we are when we ‘drop down’ from rationality and conscience and materialism and over-spiritualising things that may be out of our reach to attain. And the core-giver of imagination is God. The core-giver of our teaching as Christians is Jesus. And Jesus, as the wonderful Thomas Moore points out,

“. . . is not a purist or perfectionist. He appreciates the mysterious complexities of human life and therefore is patient with human foibles.” [Thomas Moore, Writing in the Sand: Jesus, Spirituality & the Gospels. P 50]

Jesus knows exactly what runs through our hearts and heads as individuals and as community, in all our strengths and in all our weaknesses. And how else, but through imagination, can we actually fully appreciate his teaching as something not ancient and dusty, but always fresh, always new and always challenging.

This is why Christ was and is a storyteller. To appeal to our imaginations and bring wisdom rather than knowledge into the depths of who we are; to affect how we think and feel about God and life, not with a list of dos and don’ts but with a transformation of attitude that touches everything we are and can be. Think, for a few moments, about a favourite Parable that Christ told and why it appeals to you more than the others. Use your imagination and consider, at a slightly deeper level than usual why it appeals, what strikes you about it.

Imagination & the Kingdom of God

The one consistent teaching Jesus lays out for us, from the start of his earthly ministry to the end, concerns the kingdom of God, his kingdom, what it means to live in the kingdom and how to live in the kingdom. At the core of kingdom living is one teaching, made up two commands: “You shall love [agapeseis] the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul, all your strength, and your intention. This is the greatest and first instruction. The second is like it: You shall love [agapeseis] your neighbour as yourself.” (Mt 22:37-39)

Here, Jesus summarizes how to live in the kingdom and, in doing so he’s addressing two streams of life: spirit and soul. He’s calling us to love the source of life on the one hand and our neighbour, our world and our self on the other; each stream of life is vital and each is implied by the other in these two simple statements; each noting the other; each pointing to the other.

By holding on to the precious vision of life found in our spirituality, we can learn to love what is dearest and closest to us. And, we can really only engage with higher reason, our exalted spirit, when we show love for the mundane world around us. And this is where it gets tough. This is a huge lesson to really take in and fully grasp the balance of it, because the temptation for us in all spiritual matters is to split the spirit and the world, so our souls – the seat of our very selves where emotion and experience and memory and imagination and insight all meet together – tends to be ignored and left behind. Lofty spirit, conscience, higher reason and logic versus fleshly world, the body, mischief and sin is all we tend to consider as our reality as Christians: What we tend to see are points of truth needing guidance, issues needing answers, problems needing solutions – that’s what appears important. The depths of soul, the soul’s call to ponder and slowly ‘be’ with where and how we are in our lives and why, tends to be dismissed as unimportant and unreal. God as a concept and as personal experience is considered real. Biblical teaching and revelation is regarded as real. Life, people and situations are real. But our inner workings and processing, the development of our felt self, the expansion of the soul as part and parcel of who we fully are, is not considered real and so is dismissed on the whole when we actually get to grips with what it means to love God fully and love neighbour as self. And that’s what’s at the heart of why we trip up in the areas of life that are or should be important to us. We are so busy concentrating on what we assume to be real we forget about other possible realities and ignore them as unreal and therefore unimportant.   

Okay, here’s the tricky question: What is real? How do I define ‘real’? What do I mean by it?

We can, I believe, appreciate that just because something isn’t tangibly touchable and solid, it doesn’t mean it isn’t real. A concept, a pondering, a thought process or a fantasy that delivers truth or insight that nourishes our understanding can be just as real and as wholly valid as a good physical meal that satisfies the body. People of ancient cultures, such as the Egyptians and the Greeks, used their religion and mythology to gain insight and understanding into all aspects of life, the good, the bad, the wondrous and the problematic. This is exactly why people like James Hillman, for example, a highly regarded depth psychologist and philosopher could say, “Mythology was the psychology of antiquity. Psychology is the mythology of modernity.” [1] The world of myth held – and for some of us still holds – a reality that contains deep and insightful guidance for the place of ‘being’ in life and the place of liminality, or threshold, when considering where we are and what’s happening in our lives.

For us as Christians, doesn’t our faith relate to believing in the unseen real? It’s not about believing in what has no existence in the seen reality. Seeing or believing/trusting in the unseen real is central to a truly Christian world view. We see the kingdom of Christ with our hearts and imaginations; we may see it literally and factually as real in the work and worship of the church, and in the expressed work of the Spirit, but as a general recognition of its presence we see it with our imagination. Faith utilizes the soul’s capacity to imagine; and our ability to imagine is related to language, symbol and communion with the divine.

I think this is why Paul says: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Cor 4:18) And again: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Heb 11:1) What is unseen, then, can be just as real as what we consider to be perceived by our physical senses. I remember, from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the passage where it appears that Harry has been killed by Voldemort and in some ‘in between’ state, he meets the deceased Albus Dumbledore. They have a deep and meaningful conversation and finally Harry asks Dumbledore if what he is experiencing is real or just in his head. Dumbledore answers profoundly, “Of course it’s all in your head! Doesn’t make it any less real.”

Long before the establishment of Christianity and a few centuries later Islam, there was a general acceptance across humanity that there were three realms or plains: the realm of the divine where gods lived, the earthly plain where humanity and natural beings dwelt, and the plain of the underworld and supernatural where daemons lived and where the spirits and souls of ancestors generally passed to after death. In mythological terms it was Hermes for the Greeks / Apollo for the Romans who was able to transcend all three realms of the gods, human kind and the underworld. Daemons were regarded as spiritual entities that could often be benevolent and helpful to people, sometimes mischievous, and sometimes malevolent if they wanted to be, but always regarded with respect. With the rise of Christianity the world of daemons was split between angels, who were moved to the divine plain and demons who were moved into the now regarded evil plain of the underworld and, instead of Hermes, it was Christ who was regarded as the one who transcended all three plains of divine, earthly and underworld plains.

However real, in a religious sense, and whatever level of reality the stories and legends of the gods and daemons, and human heroes, held for people, the mythology (Greek, Roman, Celtic, Nordic, Eastern, Egyptian or Aboriginal) was constantly used for gaining insight, understanding and strength for the every day hiccoughs, troubles, trials and crises that came along. And it was always tapped into by way of the imagination and pondered intuitively. Sadly, albeit well-meaningly, Christianity pushed all that away and, over time, with the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason and growing scientific realms, it was pushed ever further away until we were left on the whole with religion and faith on one side, science, logic and rationality on the other and a gaping chasm in between, and it’s the gaping chasm that is life. Yet life is precisely what Christ would have us enjoy in abundance, for self, for family and friends, for church and all aspects of life for us as individuals and for our communities, balanced with holy living, love and compassion – as stated in his kingdom commands to love God fully and love neighbour as self

Utilizing the Riches of imagination:

Christ as Dionysian

 One way for us as Christians to be mindful and heartfelt of our call to that balance between holy living and life in abundance is to bring Christ into our imagination as the bringer of wine: the One who calls us to remember his life, death and resurrection through the sacred Eucharist or Communion, but also the One who transformed ritualistic, purified water into fantastic, deicious wine all for the sake of a party, for people to have a good time. Jesus Christ uses wine in life to draw us into the holy, awesome presence of God in quietness and contemplation; and he uses wine to call us into the enjoyment of life to the full, to throw off inhibitions and abandon ourselves to delight and joy.

Now, remember I am speaking of imagination here. So I am speaking, at least to some extent, of metaphor. We all appreciate we may have brothers and sisters in our churches who are dealing with sobriety or recovery from alcoholism, or who perhaps have difficulties with alcohol and haven’t yet realise it, so I am not suggesting we start trying to get closer to God by getting regularly plastered! Whether we are teetotal, dealing with sobriety or like a drink, we can all grasp the metaphor of loosening up and being utterly intoxicated, abandoning ourselves to life’s enjoyment and that’s what I’m talking about here as illustrated by Christ’s relationship with wine. Mind you, you would be forgiven for thinking that there are one or two folk who might really benefit from a glass of wine or a beer - and that is precisely the point I am making in regard to enjoying (or not enjoying) life.

So, Christ enjoyed a party! He accepted dinner dates; he dined with the religious echelon of the day; he dined with tax collectors and prostitutes the social and religious outcasts of the day. It is John who relates in his Gospel the account of the wedding at Cana that Jesus and his family were invited too, and where, when the wine ran out, Jesus created gallons of the best wine for the guests to enjoy. What I want to make clear is that the Christ who made wine sacred and holy, a remembrance of his blood poured out for us, a memory of the last supper before his betrayal, arrest and brutal execution, is also the Christ who created wine for intoxication and enjoyment.

There is a balance for us to strive for here, in both our understanding and the way we live life; it’s a balance between recognising our call to live as holy people, wrapped up in Christ’s teaching, empowered by the Holy Spirit seeking our calling and a closer walk with God; and to strive to live life in abundance, enjoying life under God’s grace, making the most of the magic and intimacy of deep friendship and family commitment and partying! All of this, we can only really do, I believe, when we allow this Dionysian Christ to touch and affect our imaginations as we live as Christians, reading the Scriptures, walking with God, praying and living a huge life.

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[1] James Hillman, The Dream & the Underworld (New York, Harper & Row, 1979)