Imagination & Alabaster’s Ink Well

Alabaster’s Ink Well dwells in the lift of beauty, imagination, and truth.  Today’s focus is imagination. Author and essayist E.B. White declared “But real life is only one kind of life-there is also the life of the imagination.”[i]

Imagination is “the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.”  Synonyms are “imaginative faculty, creative power, fancy, interest, fascination, attention, passion, curiosity, preoccupation.” [ii]

Imagination is a gift to birth arts into the broken world that bring life, lift, and hope.

Artists with a redeemed nature can let the Holy Spirit guide and empower their work to glorify the Creator.  The fallen imagination apart from God can lead to heinous goals and death instead of uplift. But artists of all perspectives can mine their imaginations and create expressions that are more expansive, more beautiful, that hint more of the unseen and eternal than they realize.

Imagination and play are closely related.  They help us look forward to the time when we are not time bound and fully restored to the life God intends for us where we will experience glory our rational minds cannot grasp.[iii]

Poet Lucy Shaw wrote “It came to me, recently, that faith is a ‘certain widening of the imagination.”  When Mary asked the Angel, ‘How shall these things be?’ She was asking God to widen her imagination. All my life I have been requesting the same thing—a baptized imagination that has a wide enough faith to see the numinous in the ordinary.  Without discarding reason, or analysis, I seek from my Muse, the Holy Spirit, images that will open up reality and pull me in to its center. This is the benison of the sacramental view of life.”[iv]

Dear God,  Please baptize our imaginations so we can see you at work around us.

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[i] E.B. White as quoted in Michael Sims the Story of charlotte’s Web (New York: Walker, 2011), Introduction.

[ii] Oxford Dictionaries http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us  by Oxford University Press.

[iii] Moltmon, Jurgen, The Theology of Play (New York: Harper, 1972). 12-13.

[iv] Lucy Shaw, Winter Song, (Vancouver:Regent College, 2003), 30.