The Baptizing of Our Imagination
When I was in seminary, Kelsey was watching Dietrich and Simeon in the pews while she was very pregnant with Adelaide. As usual, I was assisting at the altar, as I did most Sundays. During the consecration, Dietrich runs up repeating the word "body" as he attempts to scale the altar rail. In the recording of the service you see Kelsey, clearly pregnant, run impressively fast to grab Dietrich, reverence the altar, and return to their seat. I was oblivious to most of this until after the service when it was recounted to me with great amusement.
Engaging in a sacramental worldview requires the baptizing of our imagination. Perhaps this is why Christ says, “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." Adults see imagination as the luxury of childish innocence. Yet it is the children who are quicker to believe "the body of our Lord...the blood of our Lord" and without qualification. If only we all were as excited to go to the altar to receive the sacramental Body and Blood of our Lord as children often are.
Many of us have been hoodwinked by the modern notion that truth is found only in what can be scientifically proven and, therefore, imagination has no place in the minds of adults. How do we, who with great dismay have fallen prey to this trap, reclaim our imagination and grow in its sanctification? How do we baptize our imaginations?
These past weeks, the nature of these ponderings looked at engaging the world around us in a way where we expect to encounter God. Along the way, we have looked at Scripture and Church history. These are essential tools in a sanctified imagination because they create the borders of our sacramental world and provide portholes to peer into this holy world.
Scripture provides the grounds for such a pursuit. It offers us the language to use. Most importantly, it is the lens by which we can see the true and sacramental nature of the world around us. Scripture must lap over our minds, washing and forming them so they can naturally flow through us.
In many ways, Church history gives flesh to this worldview and embodies this reality lived out. It teaches us the importance of icons, incense, beauty, and relics; however, it also shows how some of these things can be taken to an extreme when they move beyond the bounds of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. And, thanks be to God, it often shows us the way back to a holy understanding. These might be the tools for engaging this world, and we need to be fluent in them, but besides knowing them, how do we get to a point to use them?
Though there are many rungs to the ladder that lead to the font where our imaginations are baptized, the two most prominent, in my own experience, are poetry and fiction. They captivate our minds and utilize our imaginations. Of course, not all are equally beneficial. We must choose to fill our minds with those things that lead us to those heavenly gates to encounter the Christ who created all things and in whom all things find their fullness. Those great poets and writers like George Herbert, John Donne, George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, R.S. Thomas, or Wendell Berry (to name a few) help point us to our humanity and ultimately to the God who took on flesh to show us the fullness of humanity.
Let us begin to regain our imagination and let our minds, eyes, and ears be baptized so we can encounter the God of all things. And by encountering God we might see who we are called to be and how God is bringing all things to be fulfilled in himself. So go, read a great book or a poem, it may just be the holiest thing you do today.
“Through the veil”,
Fr. Aaron