Imagination has been a motif in Good Letters of late, so I was intrigued to hear a new variation on the theme in my pastor’s homily last Sunday. He began by quoting Shaw’s play St. Joan, from the scene where Joan of Arc is being interrogated:

JOAN: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.

INTERROGATOR: They come from your imagination.

JOAN: Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.

“Your imagination,” my pastor repeated. “Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.” He elaborated: “Imagination is indeed central to our Christian faith; it is to our imaginations that God speaks. We see this in today’s Gospel reading: Jesus speaks to us in parables, which are stories that call our imagination to life.”

The day’s Gospel was Matthew 13:24-43, which includes some of the marvelous “parables of the kingdom.” One was the parable of the mustard seed, “the smallest of all the seeds, yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants. It becomes a large bush, and the birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.” Another was the homey image of the kingdom of heaven as “like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened.”

In trying to evoke for his listeners a sense of the fulfillment that God promises, Jesus turns throughout the Gospels to images like these, images that are familiar yet speak to the imagination of wondrous life-giving growth. Images…imagination. The two words are close kin; our imagination is our faculty of both absorbing and creating images.

Images, imagination: they’re not necessarily at the service of God’s kingdom. Images can depict ugliness as well as beauty, evil as well as good. Similarly, our imagination can produce evil images as well as good ones: scenes satanic as well as godly. (At least, that’s how I understand the imagination’s powers; maybe readers will have a different view, which I’d be happy to hear.)

When Jesus calls on our imagination, he is of course calling on it for the sake of the good: for the building of God’s kingdom here on earth. That mustard seed, for instance. It is “the smallest of all the seeds”; yet if I sow it, it will grow into a bush so large that birds will come dwell in its branches, making it a bush full of colorful life and song.

How do I sow this marvelous seed in my own life, my own community? This is the question that Jesus’ parable challenges me to ask. Similarly with the woman’s yeast: a tiny thing that, when mixed and kneaded correctly, will yield a large batch of bread. In what small way am I making bread for the world—making it for others who are hungry rather than consuming it all myself?

Because he often speaks in parables—in images that only the imagination can “hear” and respond to—Jesus is sometimes called a poet. And, indeed, in these parables he is urging our imaginations to take the world creatively into our hands (to sow the seed, to knead the bread) much as Scott Cairns does in his poem “The Theology of Delight” (in Compass of Affection) which begins:

Imagine a world, this ridiculous,
tentative bud blooming
in your hand. There in your hand, a world
opening up, stretching, after the
image of your hand. Imagine…

Or as Denise Levertov, in her essay “Works that Enfaiths,” says: “Because I’m a poet, and I do have faith in what Keats called the truth of the imagination; and because, when I’m following the road of imagination (following a leading, as the Quakers say), both in the decisions of a day and in the word-by-word, line-by-line decisions of a poem in the making, I’ve come to see certain analogies, and also some interaction, between the journey of art and the journey of faith.”

Levertov’s statement, Jesus’ parables: they make me think that living our daily lives is an artistic enterprise, and when we do it well we become poems enfleshed, creativity in action.