How Imagination Grows 5 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

There’s something to be said for a purge of one’s belongings every decade or so. Well, at least every fifteen or twenty years. The latter is how long papers had been accumulating in my files when a rearrangement of my home office forced me to purge them.

Going through the dozen drawers of folders to decide what to keep and what to trash was like watching my life passing through my hands. The job resumés from the 1980s were easy to part with. So were letters to and from people whose identity was now lost to me. And multiple drafts of articles and books long ago published—tossed right into the recycle bin.

But what about the never-accepted book proposals and the unpublished essays that I’d utterly forgotten I’d ever written? And the stashes of favorite poems, carefully categorized by topic, that I might some day write a little something about?

The fun part of the purge was re-discovering papers that speak to me now afresh. One was an article I’d clipped from the Autumn, 2000, issue of Christianity and Literature: “Mortal Beauty: Ignatius Loyola, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Role of Imagination in Religious Experience” by J. Robert Barth, S.J. Lately I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about beauty, mortal and immortal as well—so I paused in the purge to treat myself to a revisiting of what Father Barth had to say.

I was gripped—and especially by one paragraph on the profound human need for imagination.

It is only the imagination, I suggest, that can bring us...to the full encounter with religious reality, because it is only the symbolic language of imagination that can resist the human drive for simple clarity and determinateness. The divine, the numinous, the transcendent, can never be encompassed by the clarity of what Coleridge calls ‘consequent Reasoning.’ Mind, without imagination, is not enough. Transcendent reality can only be intimated, guessed at, caught out of the corner of the eye, and for this only the splendid ambiguity of symbolic utterance and experience will serve. Since God cannot be seen, we must work with analogues of God: stories, images, rituals and gestures. And it seems to me inevitable that anyone who wishes to discover as fully as possible the human experience of the divine will turn to the artist’s attempts to capture—in paint, in clay and stone, in words and the sounds of music—her and his own experience, whether within one’s own heart or in the beautiful and terrible world around us, of the God who continues to reach out and touch us.

Amen, I said aloud after reading this. Barth’s brief here could be fund-raising text for Image itself! More personally, it reinforced my conviction that without the arts we cannot be fully human. Whenever public school budgets are cut, art courses are the first to be axed; and I always scream in anguish when the blade descends. How can society be slashing the heart out of these children’s humanity?—this is my repeated cry.

On a more positive note, what Father Barth says of the imagination’s indispensability reminds me of a place whose very mission is to nurture children’s imaginations through the arts. It is the Inner-City Neighborhood Art House in Erie, PA, founded and run by the Benedictine nuns of Erie. Located right in downtown Erie, where the neighborhood poverty rate approaches 95%, Art House states as its mission:

to enable children to experience beauty, grow in positive self-expression and self-discipline, and develop into full and productive human beings.... We believe the human soul is shaped by beauty and the arts.

So how, in practical terms, can beauty and the arts shape a human soul? At Art House, children from the neighborhood are offered free lessons in all the media that Fr. Barth names and more: paint, clay, words, music, and also theater arts, costume design, dance. The converted Goodyear Tire building is abuzz with children’s creativity; about 600 neighborhood kids come each year to classes taught by 2000 volunteers. When I visited Art House, I was dazzled by the colorful brightness of every room, and by the works of imagination on display from ceiling to floor.

Sr. Mary Lou Kownacki, founder of Art House, expresses its spirit in her poem on the website:

Come, Bring the Children
Stand them on their toes and let them twirl into tomorrow....
Sneak them into the land of Oz, let them live Where the Wild Things Are....
Pour a bucketful of paint on gray sidewalks and empty dreams....
Toss hundreds of letters in the air and see how they land.
Say to them, ‘This is how IMAGINATION grows.’