IMAGINATION: THE SECRET OF LOVING
Robert Meyers

We are born locked in the prison of self, and Jesus understood our dilemma. Against the grim word of a Hawthorne —“What jailor so inexorable as one’s self!” —he spoke the thrilling promise: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

His prescription for breaking out of the mirror-lined dungeon where we see only ourselves was written large in his own life: we walk free by loving one another. Love is the sending of the heart upon a journey, an escape from the prison of self to breathe the air of another’s personhood.

But love, the supreme imperative of the Christian life, cannot exist except in people who have developed the faculty we call imagination. This is the prelude to loving, the strange power by which we discover what it is like to be someone else. In that magic moment we are free to love, and thus to fulfill the highest command of Christ.

But for most of us, it is not easy. It takes practice to learn to stand in another’s shoes, to live inside another’s skin, to feel as another feels. We cannot do it literally, so that unless imagination frees us to make such journeys they cannot be made. No wonder William Penn said, “Love is the hardest lesson of Christianity.”

What a large order Paul gave his Philippian friends when he said to them, “Let this mind be in you which was in Christ.” They could only obey if they had enough imagination to escape their own minds and invite his in. Breaking free of habitual ways of responding, they would have to ask: “How would my Lord have acted in such a moment?” and their imaginations would have to picture him in a response which they could imitate.

It may sound startling, but the fact is that there is no sainthood without imagination. “Think constantly of those in prison as if you were prisoners at their side,” the author of Hebrews tells his readers. But he is requiring an act of pure imagination. Everything hinges on the “as if.” People with stunted imaginations will not be able to escape their own hearts to be behind bars with others.

Critics of Christianity seem sometimes to have understood this better than its defenders. Walter Kaufmann’s provocative book, The Faith of a Heretic, has buried in it somewhere a sentence I cannot forget:

“Even the difference between theism and atheism is not nearly so profound as that between those who feel and those who do not feel their brothers’ torments.”

One ought to memorize it and call it up daily. A greater gulf between imaginative and unimaginative people than between believers and unbelievers! If that seems radical, remember that a man who does not feel the anguish of others is so distant from the mind of Christ that he is a practical skeptic no matter how often he says, “Lord, Lord.” It is one of history’s ironies that the man who linked imagination most closely with goodness was excelled from Oxford University for writing an essay called “The Necessity of Atheism.” Shelley, writing a defense of poetry in later years, put the relationship between Christianity and imagination as succinctly as it can be done.

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”

It takes only moments of reflection to know how true Shelley’s proposition is, yet I think most Christians have not consciously faced the challenge it provides. Its implication is that anything in modern life which blunts or stifles the imagination is working directly at odds with our Christian hopes. If this is true, we must find every possible way of encouraging the “going out” of mind and heart in the imaginative act.

Such journeys are costly. It is far easier to stay at home and ask how people are, than to flee the prison of one’s own comfort and learn by identification. “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels,” Whitman declared. “I myself become the wounded person.” It is a profoundly Christian statement.

Perhaps, in direst circumstances and —for a limited time, one might have to blunt the imagination in order to survive and be sane. When Wilfred Owen said of soldiers in World War I: “Happy are those who lose their imagination. . their hearts remain small drawn,” he understood that amidst such horrors one may be unable to respond to the massive demands upon sympathy.

But the last thing a Christian wants, under the sky of the normal day, is a heart “small drawn.” This is to die, not to live. “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy,” said Whitman, “walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.”

Christ saw that there were enough buffers already between one man’s hurt and another’s heart. The knowledge would have cost him dearly. He could not have looked so sweet and bland as popular pictures make him out. The ravages of compassion would have marked his face deeply.

He was —and insists that we be in exactly the opposite condition of in exactly the opposite condition of the one in which Somerset Maugham found his fellow novelist, Henry James. “He did not live,” he said; “he observed life from a window.”

Put Maugham’s picture over against a remark of Paul’s to see the cost of discipleship. “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart for my kinsman.” He would, he said, surrender his own chance for eternal happiness If this would win those with whom he identified himself. This is what it means to feel from inside another’s heart.

Lacking such imagination, men may become scholars of sorts, may even become pulpit rhetoricians of renown, but they cannot be great Christians. That blessing is reserved for men like John Woolman who, toward the end of his life, had a dream in which he was so mixed with the gray mass of suffering humanity that he could no longer reply when his own name was called.

His imagination, his key to the outside, worked so well that far from being a prisoner to self he had almost lost the sense of who he was. The American novelist Theodore Dreiser forgot himself in that way once. Sherwood Anderson tells of seeing him sit and weep as he watched orphan children file back into their cheerless dormitory from the playground.

Men with imaginations that sensitive have fashioned all the great reforms in our history. They knew how it felt to be a slave, though they had never been one, and they made the rest of us feel it until we could not be at peace. They made us smell the filthy prisons until we cleaned them up. They made us live inside children who rose before dawn to work in factories, and slumped wearily home after darkness fell, until we were troubled enough to change laws of employment.

And in these still turbulent times of racial hatred it will be those who can escape the bondage of feeling their own color, white or black, and enter into the minds of others, who will show us the way out of the prison of prejudice.

I remember still a day years ago when the first race riots over integrated schools struck Little Rock, Arkansas. Etched on my mind is this enduring image: a tall, handsome black girl walks down the sidewalk toward the nigh school when. suddenly a white man jumps out of the crowd to spit savagely into her face.

My eye records the moment when she is fully aware of that obscene spittle on her cheek. Her eyes look straight ahead and she walks on with regal dignity, but any imaginative person among the watchers can feel the horrible wound to her sense of pride.

The man who spat on her lacked imagination, of course, or he would not have been able to perform his vulgarity. He would have felt all her loneliness and fear and anguish already, and it would have been impossible for him to add to it. It would have been like spitting on himself. All racial hatreds result from stunted imaginations.

The glory of the healthy imagination is that it teaches us to see the external event and then to feel what it means. Shelley called it “the creative faculty to imagine what we know.” To possess facts without imagination is to become inhuman, to turn into a robot who looks real and functions in all the programmed ways, but who feels nothing.

There is a way of seeing which has nothing to do with the optic nerve. When Shakespeare’s Lear cries out to blinded Gloucester on the heath: “You see how this world goes!” Gloucester answers, “I see it . . . feelingly.” Many with 20-20 vision do not see that way, and their blindness is more tragic than the loss of physical sight.

Imagination is the feeling-life of the mind. He who lacks it does not involve himself in his knowing; he stands apart from it, a computer with no heart, only half knowing. Elizabeth Peabody was asked one time how she happened to run into a tree on the Boston Common. Her explanation was classic: “I saw it, but I did not realize it.” It is the story of our lives.

In my own childhood I was deliberately trained to see without feeling, to see without realizing what I saw. A small example comes to mind. I was taught to deride the making of the sign of the cross by people whose religion was different from my own. I can remember crude jests about it. I could not imagine how that ritual could have meaning.

Perhaps if I had said those very words aloud, slowly, I might have seen the prison I was in. My deficiency was precisely that: I could not imagine. The moment when I could, at last, came many years later when I sat one afternoon reading James Agee’s lyrical book, A Death in the Family. Gripped by a woman’s agonized sense of loss, I found these words on the page before me:

“‘O God, if it be Thy will,’ she whispered. She could not think of anything more. She made the sign of the Cross again, slowly, deeply and widely upon herself, and she felt something of the shape of the Cross: strength and quiet.”

I understood then, and my imagination released me from the narrow conviction that every man who makes the sign of the cross does it mechanically and without benefit. I would, perhaps, never make it myself, but I had stood for a moment in another’s place and understood for the first time how consoling it might be.

Multiply that single incident a thousand times and you begin to understand the desperation behind Thoreau’s question: “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”

It happens so seldom that it seems, indeed, a miracle. “I sat where they sat,” Ezekiel marveled long ago, overwhelmed by the difference it made to get out of himself. And a greater prophet than he knelt one day while a woman stood red-faced with shame before men who could not identify either with her hunger or her humiliation. They were in prison. Jesus, who dismissed her tenderly, was free —liberated by the feeling-life of his mind.

We can understand now why George Bernard Shaw said what he did in his play about Joan of Arc. Some men in that play, dull of heart, listen to Joan’s story of what happened to her. Then they deliver what all such men believe to be the ultimate put-down:

“That is only your imagination.”

“Of course,” she replies. “That is how God speaks to us.”

We should have known. Because it is also how we speak to Him. And to each other.

—Robert Meyers, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas