Imagination
A story from the Book of Genesis recounts a fugitive’s dream of angels descending and ascending upon a ladder extended from the lower reaches of heaven’s vault. And an account from the Book of the Revelation chronicles a war that no one saw, save in the reaches of the mind. These stories are not grounded in our own experience. They do not have the ring of substantiated proof. In many ways, they are make-believe.
Make-believe. It is a childhood expression, another name for pretending, a practice which has taken on a negative connotation. We no longer appreciate the necessity and wisdom of pretending. We have lost our imagination.
Tomorrow, Sept. 29, is the Feast Day of Saint Michael and All Angels. The story of Jacob, and this strange festival of angels and archangels, reminds us of our need to pretend, to make believe.
The author of Revelation draws a picture of something that cannot be seen with the eye, but only in the imagination of mind and heart. Living in a time of terrible persecution and turmoil, the vision of victory for God, the belief that God is winning despite all the losses piling up so near at hand, sustains us (as well as the author of Revelation, and gives meaning to his difficult life). The attempt to believe in God’s triumph was what made the story of Michael and All Angels.
We think we no longer need imagination. We are literalists: we still believe, but only in the tangible. Unbounded faith, in human progress and in our own accomplishments, is faith without imagination, based solely upon what can be seen and touched.
The author of Revelation made believe and saw a vision of what must surely be. Jacob fell asleep with his head upon a rock and found himself at the very gate of heaven. “How awesome is this place!” he declared. (Genesis 28:17) Did he mean the place where he was standing and the rock he placed to mark it? Or, did he mean that place within himself, that wonderful space within the mind where imagination lives … where we see angels, where we imagine a different world and a better one? There it is, that we make believe the house of God and the door by which we enter.
