Imagine That!A Reflection

Selection of part of an image from Dr. Seuss: If I Ran the Zoo

Imagination!
It’s the fertile ground from which
All that’s new springs forth.

                                                Jim Peterson

One of my favorite Dr. Seuss books , “If I Ran the Zoo,” is the story of a young Gerald McGrew who finds the animals in his local zoo rather ordinary, plain, and predictable and he imagines himself in charge of a “New zoo, McGrew zoo” with all kinds of wonderful animals.  The story unfolds of how he would seek out the most interesting, exotic, unusual, never-before seen animals for his zoo.  He goes out exploring and comes back with an Elephant-cat, a flock of Bippo-no-Bungus, a Mulligatawny, a family of Joats, and a Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill – among many others! 

What an imagination!  We might smile at the book, and enjoy the weird, crazy, even impossible creatures Dr. Seuss dreams up for the new zoo-keeper to discover.  Yet as the story unfolds it is the imagination of the young boy that leads him, in the story, to explore the far ends of the earth for the new.  It makes us like children again, with an imagination that sees no limits, no boundaries, no possibilities that cannot be.  In our adult maturity we may think, “How quaint, how childish.”  Yet I would suggest that imagination lies at the heart of creativity, as the source of invention, as the motive that spurs us on to new ventures and possibilities.

The Spanish architect, Antoni Gaudi, who designed the Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona, imagined forms, structures, towers, columns, vaults of the basilica that at the time were technologically impossible to build.  Yet he imagined what it would become and now, nearly 100 years after his death, the basilica is about to be completed much as he imagined it.

Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain

It takes imagination to conceive what may be but is not yet.  All invention, all art, all growth and development begin in the imagination before it moves toward realization.  Only if we imagine something, will we undertake the effort to bring it about.  Rembrandt imagined The Return of the Prodigal Son before he painted it.  The Hebrew prophet Isaiah imagined the peaceable kingdom before he could write about it.  Only if we imagine a seemingly impossible peace (as President Carter did with the Egyptian-Israeli peace accords) will it possibly come to be.  Only if we imagine the transformative possibilities of the human spirit will we seek to support transformational change.  Only if we imagine a poem, a novel, an essay (like this!) will it be written.

Imagination is both the beginning and the end of our creative efforts – the alpha and the omega.  Imagination gives us a vision of what could be, what it would look like or be, a guide for our efforts.  Only then can we initiate effort toward its realization.  At the same time the vision itself is the end toward which we strive, the guiding star, the hoped-for destination that spurs us on.  Imagination tells us what this end point looks like and instills within us confidence that it is a possibility.  Thus, imagination feeds hope, spurs effort, and guides action.

We might find parallels in the natural world.  When a caterpillar becomes a pupa, it contains what are called “imaginal cells” that guide the transformation of the caterpillar into the moth or butterfly.  Without these cells the transformation has no “guiding star” or “vision” for its end-point.  We might even say that DNA is molecular imagination.  The seed of a redwood tree, not much larger than a pin head, has the “imagination” within it to become a soaring 300 foot giant of a tree.  Einstein’s theories of relativity were aided in their development by his “thought experiments” – a form of “what if” imagination.

Pause and reflect: How would you fill out imaginatively your response to --
            What if … ?      or,
            If only … ?

Where does our imagination come from?  When we imagine something new, surprising, delightful, nourishing, from what source does what we imagine arise?  We can certainly recognize that imagination is evoked when we bring our human faculties to bear on a situation or issue that we face: our mind, feelings, body, spirit, and will.  And sometimes what we imagine comes unbidden from somewhere else – in dreams, sudden insights that simply appear, a word seen or heard that suddenly makes a connection or opens something new.  Sometimes, the mystery we may call God, or Love itself, is the author of these imaginations, whether through our own faculties or from without.  It is our attending to and looking for the possibilities that imagination is fired up and becomes especially active.

In the Hebrew scriptures, imagination is clearly implicated in the mystery we call God, who calls into being all of creation, step by step.  Each “day” of creation, God imagined something new, and it was so.  Ultimately, this includes the creation of humankind “in God’s image.”  We, along with all creatures, God generates out of Divine imagination.  And God saw all that God had created and said, “It is very good!”

A word of caution:

Just because it’s new
Doesn’t mean it’s good; for that
New must dance with love.

God’s creations may be good indeed.  But that is not always the case with ours.  We need to introduce the cautionary note that imagination can lead us to create for harm as well as for benefit.  Sometimes, at our worst moments, we do this intentionally.  We imagine vengeance for others’ harm to us.  We imagine ways to gain power over others to enhance and protect our possessions.  We imagine being recipients of praise and celebrity and manipulate people and circumstances toward that end.  This is disordered imagination.

Other times harm comes as an unanticipated consequence of our creations.  We imagine better means for good, such as using fertilizer to improve crop yields to better feed a hungry population, then discover that field runoff pollutes streams.  We invent central heating and air conditioning to improve our comfort indoors in all weather, then contribute to climate change when the scale of energy use becomes too big.  When it comes to human imagination and creativity, a great deal of wise discernment and of humility is needed. 

This sense of caution about human capacity I find in Stephen Mitchell’s (A Book of Psalms) rendering of Psalm 8.  He begins:

Unnamable God, how measureless is your power
on all the earth
and how radiant in the sky!

In the middle of the Psalm he has these seemingly uplifting lines:

You made us almost like the angels
and crowned us with understanding.

You put us in charge of all creatures
and placed the whole earth in our hands.

But he concludes the Psalm:

Unnamable God, how terrible
is our power on all the earth!

Yes, imagination is essential to the human spirit and soul.  It is the God-given source of our creativity and inventiveness.  It generates within us hope, possibility, guidance, purpose.  For imagination to be the blessing it is meant to be, it must dance with love to be aligned with the Divine Source who itself acts with imagination working out in love.

As you tap into your own imagination – and trust that it is alive and well within you! – you might ask yourself what hopes and dreams (small or big) do you carry that you can imagine coming to be?  Maybe it is peace – in the nation, world, or simply at home? Or maybe a  calling that you recognize is yet to be fully lived into?  A relationship that you would like to see deepen and become more real and intimate?

Use your imagination to ponder what it would be like to already be in the situation where this desire, or these hopes are already realized.  Then keep your eye on that goal, act in alignment with it, and let your imagination and Love guide you.

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