Who paints your soul? The Divine Artist can paint in us a Christian Imagination

I have always considered that the imagination was the gateway into the countryside of the soul, but one that needed to be baptised, redeemed and sanctified. And if so, it could furnish the grounds for a Christian Imagination on a personal level but also on a communal and cultural level too. Indeed, the words drawn from the second reading of the Mass for the 5th Sunday of Easteride aptly captures the foundation for Our Lord renewing all things, including our very imaginations:

The One who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”

But our imaginations draw from our life-stories and our life stories can be a preparation for the Gospel. All the stories, happenings, people, places, scenery, times, books, films, music and songs, losses and gains, tragedies and victories, joys and pains we have met on the many ways we have taken, chosen, left behind or stumbled on to or stumbled off from that go to form our many shaded and colourful story requires, however, a divine intervention. For only God can make sense of and bring into the light all these elements of my and your life-story. We need to let God do this for us and for this to happen we need to be still, silent and alone so the Lord can enter our depths through our willingness to spend time in mental prayer and reflection. It is in these depths that we can surrender to him and let him baptise, redeem and sanctify all that makes up our memories of our life-story.

In the midst of all these elements God like an inner editor, an inner narrator and an inner painter calls us to let him use them to paint the inner countryside of our souls, so that we will be able to have that imagination and that energizing drive that flows from it so as to discover and find the adventure that we call a Vocation.

So I thought I would try to share today some tiny series of elements of my life-story that for me has helped me to discover that a Christian imagination has been given to me with which I can counter the world, the flesh and the devil’s attempts to bring about a dark and distorted imagination that serves his kingdom, power and glamour!

St Michael protect me in this attempt and may this attempt help you too reflect on your life-story and discover those footprints of Our Lord Jesus that reveal that he has walked through your life-story and has used it to paint the countryside of your soul, like the Good Shepherd he is, so that your vocation has been revealed, confirmed or strengthened for the mission!

I am a man born in Ireland who, despite having short stays in my early childhood in Ireland and America, was brought up and formally educated in England. I say formally educated because I received a wider, more informal education through the interaction of a communal heritage received from family, relatives, friends, nations and cultures. My imagination began its formation in those first years of childhood amidst the fields of Erin wherein I played and had my first adventures. I can recall learning the art of collecting the cows, milking them, sitting astride a horse ploughing a field, cocking and later bailing hay, and picking silage in the winter snow for the cattle. My first years of childhood where immersed in the world of the farm and stable. Indeed, I entered the world of Art through my skill of drawing horses, it gave me a short lived popularity in the classroom reflecting a love of horses that had been given to me by my grandfather’s stables where I saw him train horses.

But my imagination was further fed by the stories recited to me by grandparents (one of whom was a seanachan), by parents, uncles and aunts, cousins, family friends and relations, and by teachers and priests. I heard stories of the heroes of Ireland and stories about ghosts, banshees, the pooka and the faerie folk. My first cinema experience occurred when my father brought us to watch ‘Jungle Book’ and this introduced us, as a family, to the film-world of Disney. I watched films like ‘the Song of Bernadette’, ‘Joan of Arc’, ‘The Ten Commandments’, ‘Samson and Delilah’, ‘They Died With Their Boots On’, and TV series’ like ‘The Champions’, ‘Jesse James’, ‘the Crusader’, ‘Richard the Lion-heart’, ‘White horses’, and ‘Doctor Who’. I listened, as a 10 year old, to the stories read out to us by my junior teacher from the books written by George Macdonald called ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ and ‘The Princess and the Curdie’. I acted out with my Irish cousins the drama of Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf, Cowboys and Indians, and later the stories about Michael Collins and the Black and Tans, the films of ‘El Cid’, the ‘Three Hundred Spartans’, and ‘Spartacus’.

My first experiencing of choosing books to read began with Science Fiction and heroes of Irish History. At the age of Twelve I read thrice over a book handed on to my father from his father called ‘The Story Of Ireland’ by the famous 19th Century Nationalist historian O’Sullivan wherein I found stories, epic poems, and songs that moved my heart to joy and sadness, laughter and tears, anger and a yearning for justice. In my secondary school I read avidly anything ancient, in particular, the Celtic and Greek myths and the stories of their gods and heroes.

But it was through reading Science Fiction that I discovered in secondary school the issues that I thought I would never live to see unfold. Issues raised by George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’, Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, E.M. Foster’s ‘The Machine Stops’, John Christopher’s ‘The Death of Grass’, Isaac Asimov’s ‘I Robot’ and ‘The Foundation Trilogy’, H. G. Well’s ‘Time Machine’. It was here that the issues of politics, justice, and futurology were awoken in my mind.

It was also in science fiction that I came across C. S. Lewis’ sci-fi trilogy (‘Out of the Silent Planet’, ‘Voyage to Venus’, and ‘That Hideous Strength’) thus my imagination entered into the world of C. S. Lewis who became a major influence. I soon discovered he had written other works and discovered the wonder of his books on Narnia beginning with ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’. Through them I entered the world of Christian fantasy that led me to discover George Macdonald’s works like ‘Phantastes’, ‘The Golden Key’, ‘Lilith’ and ‘The Northwind’. These would lead me to discover in Sixth Form the work ‘Lord of the Rings’ by J. R. R. Tolkein. This led me to look for other mythical stories not only from my own people as when I found stories about the Fianna and Finn MacCool, Oisin and Tir na Nog, but also from England such as King Arthur and Lancelot, the Quest for the Holy Grail and the Knights of the Round Table, but I also discovered the European heritage of Homer’s ‘Illiad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ and the French epic called ‘The Horn of Roland’.

During the heady days of Sixth form when I studied A Level English, Economics and History, I found that in Poetry and Music there was also a cultivation of my imagination. If the poetry of John Donne, Thomas Hardy, and Andrew Marvell gave me an awareness of something called metaphysics, but also types of meter and rhyme. But it was the Irish Rock group, Horslips, who brought me into a deeper contact with Ireland’s mythical past and the old stories that I once heard as a child, of the Firbolg, the Tuatha de Danaann, the Milesians and Cu Chulainn (in Albums like ‘The Tain’ and ‘The Book of Invasions’).

As an adolescent I also discovered the world of Rock in such bands like Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull which gave me lyrics that set me thinking about life. In Sci-fi rock groups like Rush I discovered the world of Philosophy and the quest for meaning. A quest that brought me to discover the works of C. S. Lewis as a Christian apologist who aided me in the debates we had at a non-Catholic Sixth Form college (‘Mere Christianity’, ‘The Great Divorce’, ‘The Pilgrim’s Regress’). I was also introduced by priests to books like ‘The Power and the Glory’ (Graham Green), ‘Keys of the Kingdom’ (A. J. Cronin); they also introduced me to musicals like ‘Godspell’ and ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’; they further introduced me to the world of pilgrimage and shrines in Servers-Outings and Vocation week-ends at places like Walsingham.  All this awoke in my soul the quest for meaning, the search for truth and the reality of heaven but it would take me years to mature in the imagery and concepts that were first laid in my mind by these early experiences.

Later in my late twenties I discovered Chesterton and in particular his two poems ‘The Silent People’ and ‘The Ballad of The White Horse.’ Thus it is that I have been the recipient of a folk imagination but also a Christianised imagination. An imagination formed by temporal landscape of meaning derived from families, cultures and nations shot through with a developing vision of faith through Christian Literature. It has been fed by the word-scape of bards, story tellers, poets and books; the sound-scape of music and song; the drama-scape of plays, films, and musicals; the toposcape of place, scenery and nature; the work-scape of farm, industry and technology; the icon-scape of art, image and symbol; and the ritual-scape of ceremony, rites, and sacramental liturgies.

So I find when I look back that I have been someone who has experienced three forms of culture:

1. the world of my Grandparents where the farm, the stable and the fields and  woods were the topography for my imagination to explore and play – the rural culture;

2. the world of my parents living and working in Luton – the industrial culture;

3. the world of modern technology of computers – I was the first generation to have Computer studies as part of my curriculum – the Info-Tech culture.

Thus, I have experienced how a parish community in a rural community, in an industrial community and in a technological community celebrated the Eucharist from the days of Latin when I was baptised and received my First Holy Communion in the Tridentine Rite and then served Mass and received Confirmation in the Rite of the Norvus Ordo.

So on reflection, I realise that I have lived in a terrain that has experienced what Alvin Toffler calls the three Waves of Revolution: the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Technological Revolution. It has been a temporal terrain where my imagination has been formed and cultivated by images, signs, words, artefacts, places, buildings, people, sounds, smells, sceneries, stories, dramas, books, information, ideas, debates, discussions, experiences and encounters.

In all I must conclude that I have experienced my life as one of gift. It is a life where so many have given so much and all I can do is to try to give and hand on what I have received. Our lives touch so many other lives, it would leave an awful hole if we were not there…and if they were not there! (cf the film: ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’).

There is one book though that I recommend and which I discovered late in life that is of great importance, not just to priests but to parents, adults and young people too. It is a book by Michael D O’Brien, where he states the following and, in so doing, calls us to seek out an evangelisation of the imagination, beginning with our own:

‘The imagination must be fed good food, or it will become the haunt of monsters’ [p. 33, ‘A Landscape With Dragons: The Battle for your Child’s Mind’ (1998, Ignatius Press, San Francisco].

So why not write out your own journey of what has cultivated your imagination be it books, films, art, drama, music, people, places, life experiences and ask the Lord to redeem it, baptised it and sanctify it so that it may become an archetypal force for your vocation?