The Holy Imagination

Whenever we got a new major appliance, the kids got excited. Not because they were thrilled about having a new refrigerator, but because it came in a box.

And a box, everyone knows, is the raw-material of a fort, of an adventure.

That box can become, in the span of an afternoon, a pirate ship, a castle, a cave, a rocket to the moon.

I did this as a kid, too. I might have given them the idea to "play" in the box, but I didn't need to prompt their little imaginations to go to work.

We see a lot of excess carboard. A child sees an opportunity for play.

We cherish those memories, not just of our own childhoods, but of our own children. We recognize, somehow, that this kind of play is valuable. More valuable than sitting in front of a screen playing a video game.

But why, then, when we grow up does our imagination somehow get a "bad name"? When the kids become teenagers, we start telling them to “stop daydreaming.” We call a fear “just your imagination.”

Among serious Christians, the suspicion runs deeper still. Imagination feels dangerous, the playground of temptation. From the imagination springs fantasies that serve vanity, lust, and worry.

So, we try to suppress our imaginative faculties. We dismiss people who dwell too much in the domain of imagination as somehow "un-serious," or even dangerous. We write theology texts that state facts alone, with as much precision as possible, and even caution against too many metaphors or "stories" used to help us relate to revealed truth.

Surely, given how far so many people have gone askew with their ideas, the imagination shoulders a share of the blame. We think this faculty of ours is somehow "beneath us," even as we chastise those who entertain their imaginations too much for living in the clouds.

But the "imagination" is not a faculty born in sin. It is not a symptom of the fall. It is a gift of the Creator, a part of what it means to be made in God's image—an irrevocable part of being truly human, as God intended.

 

"Head in the clouds"

We often dismiss some people prone to "daydreaming" as having their "head in the clouds."

The phrase betrays our bias: we think of the imagination as a frivolous escape from reality, a refusal to deal with the solid, practical ground beneath our feet.

Well, there is a caution there worth heeding. Christianity is a profoundly incarnational faith. We believe in a God who made us from the dirt. A God who was made flesh, and who died nailed to wood. We recognize that God uses water in Baptism, breads and wine in the Eucharist, even human beings to proclaim His forgiveness.

But is having our head in the clouds necessarily bad?

Consider what clouds actually mean in Scripture. They are not symbols of empty distraction; they are the very veil of the divine presence. God led Israel in a pillar of cloud. He spoke to Moses from a thick cloud on Sinai. Jesus was enveloped in a bright cloud at the Transfiguration, ascended into the clouds, and promised to return on them.

In the Eucharistic liturgy, the priest does not tell us to anchor our minds to the floor. He cries out, "Lift up your hearts!"

The Apostle Paul likewise directs our gaze upward, exhorting the Colosians to "set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth" (Colossians 3:2).

We cannot yet see those heavenly things with our physical eyes. The only faculty capable of lifting our gaze to those heights, of piercing through the veil of the mundane present to see the eternal reality, is the imagination.

 

A Mistranslation

Part of our suspicion comes from what's a relatively poor translation in the King James version of the Bible.

There, Genesis 6:5, says that “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

Form this, some glean the notion that the imagination itself was the problem.

But the Hebrew word there is yetzer. It isn't talking about our "imagination" as we think of it. It means a forming, a shaping, an inclination. Modern translations capture it better: ”every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5, NRSV).

The verse does not condemn the power to picture things in our minds. It condemns the misuse of that faculty, and any other faculty of the mind, bent toward sin. In fact, the same root of yetzer is applied to God in Genesis 2:7 where the Lord “formed” the man from the dust.

The capacity to form, even to imagine, is divine before it became human.

 

Made in the image of the One who imagines

Consider how Genesis recounts the beginnings of creation.

God speaks. Things that did not exist before, come into existence. God is existence (ipsum esse, as St. Thomas Aquinas put it), so what he imagines, He speaks, and His words establish realities that participate in existence, which is to say, God Himself.

Light from darkness. The sea separated from the dry land. Every creeping thing (creature), every bird of the air. Everything God made, he first imagined.

Then he says of us, ”Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

Of all the creatures on earth, we alone can hold in our minds a thing that is not yet. The beaver builds the dam its instinct dictates. Only a human being can sit down, and imagine what a bridge might look like that crosses that same river.

This is why Scripture does not hesitate to call creative vision a work of the Spirit.

When God commanded the construction of the tabernacle, he did not only give Moses a blueprint. He filled a craftsman named Bezalel with his Spirit so that he could ”devise artistic designs” (Exodus 31:4).

The Spirit of God and the human imagination worked together. God invited hum an creativity to participate in His creativity, to build a place where God might dwell among men. And God called this place holy.

 

Jesus Told Stories

If imagination were a corruption, Jesus would have avoided it. Instead, he frequently used stories to communicate His teaching. He almost never gave his listeners a logical sequence of premises and conclusions (though he does employ logical argument at times). He does not give theology lectures. More often than not, He gave them pictures—he spoke into human imagination the truth He meant to teach.

"The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field” (Matthew 13:31). A lost sheep. A woman kneading yeast into dough. Another woman sweeping the house to find a lost coin and celebrating with her neighbors afterward. A father who runs to meet his son who had squandered his inheritance. Jesus trusted that fishermen, farmers, common people, could take these stories into their imaginations, and from those imagines, present the truths of God's eternal kingdom.

He did not bypass the imagination. He went straight through it to the soul.

And faith itself, the writer of Hebrews tells us, is ”the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Things not seen. To believe is to hold before the mind a reality your eyes cannot yet confirm: a tomb that is empty, a Father who is listening, a home being prepared for us in heaven.

Hope is, in a sense, the baptized imagination. If you cannot picture anything beyond the present, what meets the eye, hope will be difficult virtue to embrace. Because we hope for something real, not merely an idea. Hope allows us to imagine what that reality might be like—and while we might be wrong about the particulars, there's nothing wrong with allowing hope to wonder.

 

The Same Faculty, Two Directions

Now, none of this is to say that our imagination is harmless, somehow innately perfectly sanctified.

Lying awake at two in the morning, we are using the very same faculty the child used when he imagined adventures built out of a cardboard box. But now, we imagine disasters, not rocket ships and castles.

Anxiety often takes root in the imagination when we forget that God is a part of the picture. Lust is the imagination gone awry, reducing another person to an object. Pride often results from an imagination of self that's inflated. In the imagination, nearly every evil that we might commit in fact can take root.

Notice, though, what the apostle Paul prescribes. Not the amputation or suppression of the imagination. He says we must take it captive: ”We take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

A captive imagination is kept alive and put to service of what is true, beautiful, and holy.

The remedy for a misused imagination is not to discard the imagination entirely. It is, along with the rest of us, what must be converted. .

St. Teresa of Avila knew the dangers of the wandering mind as well as anyone. She often compared her restless thoughts to a noisy mill clattering away during prayer, a distraction she learned to tolerate rather than fight.

But for Teresa, the imagination posed a much more terrifying problem than mere distraction.

When she began experiencing profound mystical visions and hearing inner locutions, she was distressed as much as she was consoled.

She lived during the Spanish Inquisition, a time when claiming direct revelation was deeply suspect. Were these visions truly from God? Were they elaborate illusions spun by her own highly active imagination? Or worse, were they deceptions from the Devil masquerading as an angel of light?

Her confessors were divided; several outright told her she was being played by a demon, that the devil himself had given her these visions. Other confessors helped her discern the difference, and over time, she developed key insights to discern such things.

Teresa was not some kind of wily mystic, who took every vision—imaginative or otherwise—for granted as though it had come from God. She was cautious, and what she left us, one reason she was declared a Doctor of the Church, were the principles of spiritual discernment she detailed.

Her question: how could she distinguish her own imagination, demonic illusion, and the genuine voice of God?

The Mark of Passivity: Teresa realized that her own imagination required effort. She could conjure a picture, alter it however she liked, or suppress it entirely. She could turn it on or turn it off. But when God spoke or showed her something, she was passive. It struck her suddenly, with a clarity and majesty she could not have invented. She could neither summon such visions at will, nor could she banish them from her mind.

The Effect on the Soul: An overactive imagination, Teresa noted, leaves the mind exhausted, while the soul remains as it was, sometimes in more distress than before. A demonic vision present itself as coming from an "angel of light," mimicking God, but it always leaves behind a kind of residue more akin to agitation, anxiety, spiritual dryness, or pride. Conversely, when a vision was genuinely from God, it brought profound, unshakable peace, deep humility, and an expanding love for others.

The Test of Transformation: A daydream fades like dew in the morning, like a mist dispelled by the sunrise. We struggle to recall the details later. But God’s communications left a permanent imprint. A single divine word in prayer could instantly heal a long-standing fault or infuse her with a courage she didn't have before it happened. The Devil does not manufacture virtue, but more often, distress, despair, and vice.

The Anchor of Truth and Obedience: Finally, she knew God would never contradict Scripture or Church teaching. Furthermore, true divine encounters fostered obedience. If her confessor told her to ignore a vision, Teresa obeyed the confessor—and God later commended her for it, because the Devil cannot abide humble obedience. This was an advantage she had, having a trusted confessor. She did not broadcast her visions to every nun in the convent. When the other sisters found out about them, in fact, it disturbed her. Rather, she trusted learned, wise, and spiritual men and submitted to their judgment.

These insights did not come easily. It came through years of discernment. But ultimately, she learned how to tell the difference between the noisy mill of her own mind from the true movement of the Holy Spirit. As such, she eventually lost her fear of the imagination. She realized she could actively employ it for God.

Her masterpiece, The Interior Castle, is exactly that: an act of sanctified imagination, picturing the soul as a luminous crystal palace of many rooms with the King at its center.

 

The tethered balloon: Filling in the gaps

Yet, even with such criteria in place, there remains legitimate caution. If the imagination is to be trusted, it must be anchored. The Church has always maintained a strict boundary between public revelation—the deposit of faith, binding on all—and private revelation, which may happen through the imagination but can never add to or contradict the faith that's persisted through the Church for 2,000 years.

We've talked about how our imagination can speculate in the name of hope the realities of heaven. But what about directing our imaginations backward, into history, into the very events recorded in Scripture?

Can we imagine what Mary might have been thinking when the angel Gabriel departed and the room went suddenly quiet? Can we picture her specific, unrecorded agony at the foot of the cross? Can we allow our imagination to fill in the historical gaps?

Yes. In fact, saints like Ignatius of Loyola insisted upon it.

So long as the imagination is informed by the truth of what is already revealed, it is free to explore the "gaps" in the narrative. Picturing the dust on the road to Emmaus, the cold stone of the tomb, or the exhaustion in Mary's eyes is not an attempt to rewrite the Bible; it is a way of inhabiting the story. In this way, the imagination serves to take the events out of the realm of "fantasy," and actually makes them more real, because our experience is always flooded with sensory details that no author can exhaustively describe. The imagination acts as a trellis, if you will. The structure built so that a vine can grow on it, and thrive. The imagination does not change the vine itself—but it can help it grow according to the truth of what it unalterably is.

In this way, the imagination can serve to actually evoke more than "intellectual" knowledge about past events, but engages our compassion, our empathy, and allows the truth of the event to climb the "structure" of the trellis in a way that makes is more real, not less.

In this way, speculation can actually serve the truth. But we must, of course, be aware of where our speculation is speculative, so that we do not attempt to change the truth itself according to what is imagined. The trellis, again, supports the vine. It lifts it up so that the vineyard worker can properly trim it, take care of it, and harvest the grapes. It does not change the vine's essence.

 

Giving the gift back to the Giver

So how do we foster a holy imagination? How do we exercise our imagination in a way that honors God, rather than serves the inclinations of the flesh?

First, feed it well. Paul’s list is the nutrients of a healthy imagination: ”whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable... think about these things” (Philippians 4:8). What you put before your mind’s eye in the evening is what it will build with at night. This is why, honestly, we should exercise some care in terms of what we "feed" our minds, what shows we watch, what books we read, what images we permit to impress themselves on our minds.

Second, bring your imagination into prayer. Read a Gospel scene slowly, and then place yourself in it. Feel the dust of the road, hear the crowd, watch his face when he turns to you. This is not make-believe. It is allowing the Word to become flesh—in you.

Third, deploy your imagination in service of love. Before you judge the difficult coworker or the distant relative, imagine their morning, their fears, the weight they carry that you cannot see. Compassion is nearly impossible without imagination. But remember, bent inward, in service of vengeance, the imagination can be dangerous. Imagining our neighbor getting their just desserts, a comeuppance, visualizing their humiliation or demise... this can do real harm to our soul. That is why love is just as central to the faculty of imagination as the theological virtue of hope.

Finally, following this, allow your imagination to be governed by holy hope. Picture what God could do with your parish, your family, your own stubborn heart. Do not imagine your entirely life imprisoned by sinful habits. Imagine what God might do with you when He frees you from those sins. This helps us form a real, Godly desire. Out of that desire, pray. Ask him for it.

The child with the cardboard box is not wasting time. She is doing something human, and in a sense, participating in something Divine. God made us this way. With imaginations that can see beyond what is, precisely so that we might reach toward and strive for what He has promised. Do not bury that gift. Give it back to Him, and let Him build with it.

 

God Bless,

Judah