What Is Imagination?

Quiet led me to a space of creation. 

It’s easy to look back on childhood or even an earlier season of adult life with the diamond lens of nostalgia. I’m sure there was just as much fallenness and struggle around me as there is now, but there was also a lot more boredom. That’s putting it in negative terms, because I know it now for one of the great gifts of my formation. The hours of late afternoon stretched empty each day; I could play outdoors, I could read a book, I could craft or draw or find a few friends and siblings to entertain me. But often those hours opened and closed in a great swathe of independent solitude. In that space, so difficult to cull these days for child and adult alike, I gained one of the great gifts of quiet: imagination. 

To know the world in such a way that one can touch the surface but also reach through the outer facets to the love that pulses in all beautiful things, to be gripped in turn by the goodness beyond them; such knowing is imagination. And in the long silences I found out of doors, in the wide space I had to inwardly question, to ponder, to scratch out my poems or make up my stories, I learned what it meant for imagination to be one of the great languages of truth. 

Such knowing is natural to every human born, our heritage via our creation as beings in God’s image, the one whose own divine imagination formed the world through which we move in such yearning curiosity. But to enter the fullness of this gift requires a mind capable of wonder. It needs the watchful space of a listening, seeking quiet in which we may move beyond the surfaces we see into the inmost realms of ourselves. Imagination asks of us a quiet space where we may attend to all that sings to us from outside the walls of time, from the deathless world in which our hearts seek roots.

What is imagination, and what bearing does it have upon our search for quiet? 

I think we must answer with story first. In George MacDonald’s fairy tales, there’s a fascinating theme that often occurs: the wise woman’s cottage. Those who enter it think they are walking into a humble little house, usually with just one room, perhaps in a forest or perched by the side of the sea. But once inside, they discover a door in each wall. To walk through even one is the opening of a great adventure. Vast halls and other worlds, the past and the future, forests and caves— each door from that cottage might lead to anywhere else in the world … or out of it. The cottage is bigger on the inside than the outside, a space of seemingly unfettered discovery from which and through which all manner of great quests might lead. 

I think we each have a wise woman’s cottage in our minds, and that is the inward space of our imagination. We bear interior worlds; do you know this? Can you remember the moments of childhood in which you looked out some window in your soul upon a place or story, an image or word that stirred you with yearning hope? That inward house; we each have it, that cottage of the mind in which we will always find endless doors leading out from ourselves into story and song, vision and prayer. 

The psalms speak over and over about the inward place of the heart, what my trusty old Strong’s Concordance describes as the ​“inner man, mind, will, heart, soul, understanding,” the seat of appetite and emotion, passion and courage. This is the place Jesus means when he says it is the things that come forth from our hearts that defile us. It’s also the place indicated when he says, ​“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”2 I believe imagination is integral to what Scripture means when it speaks of the inward person, the realm of the heart. Imagination is the way we translate the world to ourselves, the inner room in which our outward vision is interpreted by our ​“in” sight. We all deal in imagination each day of our lives. 

We cannot escape some sense that we are enmeshed in a larger story in which we are agents for good or ill. 

We cannot create what we have not imagined. 

We cannot love without an inward idea of the person we hold so precious. 

We cannot grow without entering that inmost room, opening the doors that lead us deeper into vivid images of all we might make or become. 

But many of us have lost the way to that house, have forgotten that this inward place of potent meaning is our native land. We talk much in the modern world of introverts and extroverts, of those who like to be alone and those who really can’t stand it, those more creative and those more driven to action. And we run as much as we talk— from this post to that screen, from this meeting to that call— never halting long enough to even remember the aching rooms within our hearts. We speak of these proclivities as if they are optional ways of being guided by preference, as if our need for hush, our need to excavate and understand the inmost rooms of ourselves and all that open from them isn’t fundamental to each human being alive. 

What is imagination? 

The inmost room from which we glimpse God at play in the world and among the people he has so lovingly made. 

The wise woman’s cottage with its doors leading to the story we might live, the art we might make, the song we might sing, the hero we might become, the prayer we might offer; our window upon the eternal. 

And the way to that room? It’s straight and sure. We just follow the paths of quiet that lead to the holy, enchanted door.