An Intro to Imagination
Getting started with a Sanctified Imagination
Imagination.
Feel free to disregard mental images of purple dinosaurs or imaginary friends (for now). In this series, we will handle something both more (and maybe sometimes less) childish than pretend play and adolescent fantasies. Something deep and wild and wonderful.
Something divine.
“Thought life” may get us closer to the mark, though that term feels sterile. For the duration of this book series (and I’d make a case for beyond it as well), we’ll define imagination as that place in our minds in which all thoughts, images, and senses dwell (whether from ourselves or elsewhere). It’s an imperfect definition, but this is an imperfect book post, and I’m an imperfect writer.
Such is life.
I have muddled through life for three (and a half) decades, and much of that time has been spent in the confines of my imagination. I’ve dwelt on fears, imagining and playing out the worst “what ifs” of life. Hundreds of times I’ve rehearsed arguments with my wife, my coworkers, or people in the church. I’ve loved and lusted. I’ve hated and killed.
Almost like VR or a simulation: both “real” and yet merely figments of my (here it comes) imagination.
And yet, who am I today except a man who has been formed, at least in part, by the figments of this thing we call an imagination? Who am I if not some distorted image of who I’ve pretended to be inside my own mind? Surely, I’m also a product of the tangible: the home I grew up in, the education I received, the trauma I’ve endured. And yet, how many others have endured my same traumas, were raised in similar homes, have identical educations, and turned out… different?
We aren’t merely byproducts of what has happened to us and the lives we’ve lived, we’re active participants in our responses to those tangible, outward, events. The thing is, our first active act is often in the way we direct our thoughts. Our autonomy begins in our imaginations.
And this simple fact is one of the most profound for those of us in discipleship to the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth. Christians can cultivate minds that predispose us to acting like Jesus by intentionally participating in the work God wants to do in our own minds.
We are intended to be as Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane.
On the night of Jesus’ betrayal, he goes to this garden across the Kidron valley called Gethsemane. Here Judas will lead the temple guard to Jesus and betray him, but before that happens Jesus prays. This time of prayer is well known, for here Jesus prays that the Father would “remove this cup from me”. But familiarity is blinding, keeping what should be obvious well out of view.
And what should be obvious here? The agony of Jesus in the midst of both the absence and presence of pain.
The Gospel according to Luke records it this way:
And He came out and went, as was His habit, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples also followed Him. Now when He arrived at the place, He said to them, “Pray that you do not come into temptation.” And He withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and began to pray, saying, “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done.” Now an angel from heaven appeared to Him, strengthening Him. And being in agony, He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground. When He rose from prayer, He came to the disciples and found them sleeping from sorrow, and He said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you do not come into temptation.”
This isn’t prayer like I’ve ever experienced. Jesus sweats blood as he wrestles with his desire to not drink of the cup of suffering that the Father wills for him to drink. When Jesus prays “take this cup from me”1, he knows there will be torture and shame and death.
And, in some meaningful way, Jesus experiences that suffering right there in the garden. Before any whip or fist touched him, Jesus bled.
Really process this for a moment: Jesus isn’t in bodily pain. What, then, brings him anguish?
It is the thought of what is to come. Before the events of his arrest and eventual execution, Jesus imagines these future events and wrestles with the temptation to avoid the pain and suffering. And he responds to that already-but-not-yet-pain then in the same way that he’ll respond to the fulfillment of that pain in the hours to come: he submits to the Father’s will. His submission happens first in his imagination.
This temptation is his Garden Test, experienced in the intangible and mysterious place of the mind. He passes this test in a way no other human has before him, then sees his act of submission through to its fulfillment on the cross.
He was, in a very real way, fighting a spiritual battle. But where was he fighting this battle if not in that place we’ve defined as imagination? And that’s the crux of this whole book series, the crux that everything here hinges upon: Jesus defeated the spiritual powers of sin and death in his imagination before seeing that defeat filled full on the Hill of the Skull. The wrestling and agony of the garden led to the peace and passivity of Christ’s trial and death. Our Messiah defeated the work of the Tempter in his mind, and then saw the work brought to its completion with body afterward.
There is a correct and wonderful order here, one that should be followed and one that is consistent with the wholeness of Scripture and likely your own lived experiences.
There is a work in the mind that is seen to fruition by the work of the body.
This little book obnoxiously-long-series-to-come is all about becoming Gethsemane people. It’s about cultivating imaginations that can progress towards that example set by “Jesus, the originator and perfecter of the faith”2.
It’s about sanctification, the process of being made into the image of Jesus.
But not the sanctification of our bodies, for as Jesus showed us, there is a place we first become sanctified before our lips and hands.
This is about the sanctification of our imaginations.
Matthew 26:39 ; Luke 22:42 NASB
Hebrews 12:2 NASB