The Importance of Forming a Catholic Imagination
 
In an age when the divide between secular and authentic Christianity has only deepened, parents and educators will likely experience occasions of sorrow for the youth entrusted to them. How can we pass on the faith when so much around these children seems to emulate darkness? Why does it seem that even those that attend an outstanding theology class, with a faithful teacher and excellent curriculum and pedagogy, struggle to believe? I have pondered these questions in my ministry days, as an educator, and as a parent. For such complicated questions there can be no easy solutions, but I would like to propose that one essential element missing for many in their formative education is the development of a strong Catholic imagination. A properly formed imagination will not only shape and color a child’s worldview, but also it will allow young people to more fully understand the faith taught in theology class and present in every subject and moment of the school day. When considering the Catholic imagination, there is first a need to understand its importance and proper formation. While my focus in this essay will be on the role of stories in shaping the imagination, one should not ignore the role of the Sacred Liturgy, personal prayer and reflection, life experiences, art and music, and fruitful conversations. 

The use of parables in Jesus’ teaching is a clear sanctification of storytelling and the imaginative process. Our Lord rarely explains the meaning of his parables. Parables compare a story to some moral or spiritual truth. They are like an extended metaphor in which a thing understood is used to help one understand something new. It is the imaginative process for the metaphor or parable that is essential in grasping the ideas and meaning presented. By teaching in parables, Jesus is asking listeners and readers to go through an imaginative process in order to better know Him and His kingdom, and so more fully seek first the kingdom of heaven. 

One can have the best preaching in liturgies, curriculum that is faithful to the Church, and dynamic catechesis, but if a student has a poorly formed imagination, this will likely cause regular obstacles for coming to engage, understand, and receive the faith. In an essay on metaphor, C.S. Lewis concludes that “reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”[i] What this means is that for a student to understand Jesus’ sacrifice, God’s love, the effects of baptism, or why vices are undesirable, he/she will need the use of the imagination. One cannot bypass the imagination. This is the central theme of Holly Ordway’s book Apologetics and the Christian Imagination.[ii] Reason requires the imagination in order to have things to reason about. This becomes particularly evident if one considers Jesus’ use of parables to transmit some of His teachings. As I mentioned at the start, stories are not the only means of shaping the imagination, but they do offer a unique and powerful way of proposing meaning. Therefore, the reading lists in a school’s literature courses are of the utmost importance. 

Good stories bring up big ideas for students to wrestle with. Fables show and teach moral lessons.  For example, Aesop’s “The Dog and his Reflection” presents the issue of greed; prudence and trust are topics of discussion for readers of “Little Red Riding Hood,” adaptations of Chaucer’s “Chanticleer,” and “The Gingerbread Man.” George MacDonald’s The Light Princess displays both selfishness and sacrificial love. In varying ways, themes of redemption and faith can be found in The Chronicles of Narnia series. C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet offers a contrast between secular materialism and the Christian worldview. When students begin to make more complicated decisions and realize that sometimes values come into conflict with one another, stories like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provide an opportunity to explore and discuss such moments of conflict and how best to handle them. Beowulf offers an opportunity to explore the qualities of a good leader as teens consider leadership opportunities or even voting for civil leaders. Fahrenheit 451 allows for discussions regarding social media, entertainment, and the path to happiness. In good stories we discover several big ideas to wrestle with just as life presents us with the same ideas. The benefit of confronting them in a good story is the ease of experiencing what J.R.R. Tolkien called recovery, a “regaining of a clear view” of those things we are often too close to for careful consideration.[iii] Tolkien continues by explaining that “we need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.”[iv]

In this process, a good story allows its reader to imaginatively expand his experiences. In Ray Bradbury’s story about the outlawing and burning of books, we find Professor Faber illegally reading books and famously saying to the protagonist, “I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m alive.”[v] Later he explains, “Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.”[vi] Stories allow us to enter into different lands, centuries, planets, worlds, or even the perspective of others. This imaginative experience of entering into the perspective of another also provides a pathway to sympathy, to consider the motives, experiences, and consequences that another goes through. The first time I read Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf,” I felt like I had entered into the life of one who is obsessive about exerting control and does not realize she is the cause of her own misery. Elizabeth George Speare’s The Bronze Bow showed me how rage and hatred can shackle an individual but also introduced me to the challenges of living as an occupied people. Such imaginative experiences help students in their choices and relationships by training them to consider the experiences of others.

The possibility for meaning in stories is due to the relationship between the story and the world which God created with meaning to be discovered, not dictated. J.R.R. Tolkien in “On Fairy-Stories” hints at this in his analysis of the created world from the Creator as the Primary World, and the world of the story being the sub-created secondary world of the author made in the imago Dei.[vii] This does not only apply to stories with churchy messages, scenes, or characters. Just like the Catholic Faith itself, it impacts all aspects of life, even the relationship of Wilbur and Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web. This is the beginning of a key dimension of a Catholic imagination: sacramentality. The readers’ discovery of meaning helps them to begin to see or be open to seeing the sacramental principle that St. John Henry Newman spoke of. Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of Newman’s spiritual children, famously described the world as being “charged with the grandeur of God.”[viii] From the Psalmist, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). The meaning in the world, or even the meaning in a story, begins to point to the ultimate source of meaning. Good stories will form a student’s imagination first to realizing that the world is charged with meaning and hopefully begin to see that meaning points to God. 

This does not mean that good stories for students can never depict evil or suffering or pain. After noting how God made the world, Hopkins asks, “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” The world has meaning and a meaning that points to God, but pain, suffering, and evil exist due to sin. Vatican II even taught that prudently showing evil could be beneficial (Inter Mirifica, 7). We see this in two outstanding Catholic authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and Flannery O’Connor. Tolkien’s work emphasizes the consolation that can follow a season of suffering, the Resurrection that follows the Cross. To do so, one must first pass through the horror of Good Friday. Flannery O’Connor also shows evil and suffering, and the breaking in of grace, but her stories highlight not the good turn in the end but often the rejection of grace. In both authors we see how stories can point to God but also recognize the reality of sin. 

This initial layer of a sacramental imagination is not enough. Although it points to God and can also help prime the mind and heart for God and hard truths, a Catholic imagination will also receive from stories themes that reflect elements, even outside of religious scenes and stories, of the Catholic images and sensory experiences that are central to the faith. These are the signs and symbols we encounter in the sacramental liturgies of the Church. The Catechism explains that a “sacramental celebration is woven from signs and symbols. In keeping with the divine pedagogy of salvation, their meaning is rooted in the work of creation and in human culture, specified by the events of the Old Covenant and fully revealed in the person and work of Christ” (CCC, 1145). This sacramental imagination is then also a biblical imagination. These elements may be introduced through bread and wine, water for cleansing or purification, the process of forgiveness, candles or light, processions or a journey, oil, lambs, blood, empty tombs, reverence for the dead, and so much more. They don’t need to be used allegorically but, as Tolkien uses some of them, they can include elements of the sacramental meaning to afford not allegory but applicability. For example, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings shows us bread that gives strength and hope for a hard journey without including the doctrine of transubstantiation. George MacDonald’s Light Princess has bread-like-food and wine present as a final meal before a sacrificial death or in his The Golden Key, an emphasis on water for transformation. Such sacramental symbols help to more fully form the Catholic imagination. 

While the reading list for literature courses will be important, so too will the suggested reading lists for a student’s reading in his free-time and for possibly cultivating a Catholic imagination within the family. Such lists can include non-Catholic authors. The two-thousand-year Catholic intellectual tradition, sensitive to the unity of truth, has never restricted reading lists to Catholic authors only. Applying these principles in the creation of reading lists should also be mindful of the kind of imaginative impact of the movies a student or family consumes. None of these principles are meant to say that the only method and goal in the study of literature is that which relates to the shaping of a Catholic imagination; rather, it suggests that we need to also be intentional in the works we study and to realize that forming the imagination is one of the ends of literary studies; or at least it should be. The stronger and more Catholic the imagination, the more it will be able to serve and enhance other subjects and their proper methods since it is the imagination gives reason something to reason about. 

Dr. Brandon Harvey is the assistant director of undergraduate programs and literature professor at Catholic International University.