Make It Real
The Imagination's Role in Living Our Beliefs
Mark D. Filiatreau
April 1, 1996
God is a feast for the imagination. Lest I be accused at the outset of hypocrisy or infidelity by unimaginatively settling on a cliche, let me add that he is also a smorgasbord, a holy carnival, an Everest for the imagination. Even the grandest earthly images shrivel when applied to the infinitely holy One and seem demeaning—this is the feast that can never be finished. Nevertheless, God is a feast for the imagination; and since each human being has by definition an imagination, each Christian should be well-sated, inspired, and visionary—every day. End of essay.
Unfortunately, I'm not like this and I don't know many people who are—I've met perhaps two in twelve years. Yet it is scandalous for the Christian to have an imagination starved for God.
Among orthodox Christians, much of the undeserved distrust toward the imagination comes from not realizing that the imagination's abilities are at least dual. The mind can not only imagine that impossible things are true. It can also make true things real. It not only can, but it does so every day. We imagine who is waiting for us at home; we try to picture where we last saw the car keys.
The imagination can also make past or distant events more real to us. We read a narrative such as the storming of the Bastille, and we hear the shouts, smell the sweat, and see the bloodshed, torn clothing, dirty faces, and stretched mouths.
The storming of the Bastille—or another mob, and ourselves in it, shouting for the blood of Jesus.
On Palm Sunday, my church does what many others do and reenacts part of the last days of Christ. And I have heard of many other churches doing so, churches that present dramas only once a year. Do the arts surge during Easter only because the material—God arrested, ...
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