Faith and Imagination

Recently someone got me thinking about something I was looking for when I read Children's Spirituality. Hopefully, this won't be too wierd. This isn't science or research-based. I'm not a Greek or Hebrew student. I'm just wondering. I'm thinking about the imagination. It's one of those facets of childhood that we tend to dismiss when we become adults. But more than most of us would ever admit, it's part of adulthood, too. I believe spirit, faith, and imagination are somehow tied together.

For me imagination is vital to childhood. It's one of those things that makes childhood, childhood. But I'm also thinking that it's vital to faith - particularly child-like faith. I'm thinking that God didn't give us our minds, hearts, bodies, and imaginations only as things to overcome but as tools we can use for good or evil.

Someone recently read that "Kardias" a Greek word, could be translated not only as "heart" but as "imagination". I went into a Youngs Concordance: "heart, heart's, hearts, mind, minds, quick, spirit". Sadly, "imagination" wasn't on the list but I'd venture to guess that no one can dispute that it's there somewhere in the heart and mind of each of us to a greater or a lesser degree. I'm leaving out soul but you can include that, too, if you want to. Maybe they're all facets of the same thing or maybe they're distinctly different. I'm thinking their definately interdependent.

We think of the mind as the part of us that thinks. We think of the heart as the part of us that feels, the seat of passion (for anything we're passionate about). Physically speaking, the human body can't survive without both brain and heart. There are ways they're different, ways they depend on each other, ways they're intertwined. The imagination? Brain or heart? I don't know but I do know it's the part of us that creates visual, auditory, kinesthetic images inside of us where no one but God can see unless we have the tools, the words, and the will to translate, the way artists, musicians, writers, and engineers translate ideas into forms that other people can appreciate.

Imaginary. Real or not? Most of us can differentiate between what's "real" and what's not, what's useful and what's not. But doesn't God have an imagination? Wasn't God the first one to speak something that wasn't and it was? Didn't God first reveal Himself to us as Creator, giving us a world and a body to explore [meaning the way babies learn about being physical beings]? Didn't He make us in such a way that we can imagine possibilities? Where did it all come from?

And the spirit of a man? Elusive? Perhaps the part of us revealed to God, to ourselves and to others through our choices, our thoughts, feelings, passions, deeds, and expressions of creative imagination? The part of us that was originally created God-shaped?

The other word that went with kardia was sklhrokardiða - hardness of heart. What if what Jesus was talking about was a hardness of imagination? An inability to believe what you can't see and touch? An inability or an unwillingness to imagine with God what could be - both the good and the bad? An unwillingness to believe that God spoke and it was. God speaks and it is. Hardness of heart. A hardness of imagination. "O ye of little faith." Faith is substance. Imagination, maybe not but I still think they're related.

No wonder God loves children. No wonder God condemns us if we cause them to stumble, or undermine their faith, or try to take it away from them. Yes, they have to face a "real" world and learn how to differentiate between imaginary friends, real life, and a God who is, even though we can't see Him. Pretty confusing.

Whether parents, teachers, or friends, God's given us an awesome responsibility part of which is distinguishing between faith and imagination yet acknowledging the ways they depend on each other.