When I was with a friend once driving through the countryside, we passed a field of daisies. I remarked that there were many young girls who would love to stroll through just such a field. My traveling companion replied that the dry stubble on the ground would only cut their feet, adding that the romantic is all in the imagination. I was troubled by this statement, but said nothing.

Many months later I was walking along a street in Europe and passed a poster with the photograph of a woman. The photo was clearly intended to catch the eye of the masculine sex–which, of course, it did. And I thought to myself: “how many other women are there on this very street of comparable beauty? And yet the mind is drawn to this particular photo.” The answer is that the woman in the photo was portrayed in such a way as to provoke the imagination. This disturbed me, but not quite as much as the statement of my traveling companion several months previous.

There would be no great buildings, colorful paintings, astounding achievements, apart from the projections of the imagination. Such things must first be seen in the mind, and desired, for them to come to fruition. So the imagination has the incredible power to bring forth reality, not on its own, but by its command of all the powers of the human psyche and body.

If it is the image of God to create, and so humans are builders and creators in their own right, then is it not also the image of God to be imaginators? If the Holy Spirit is God’s working agent, his indwelling and efficient doer, and if the Son is God’s word, his communicator to creation, we could say in one sense that God the Father is the divine imagination.

The tree of life is incomparably beautiful in that it prompts the imagination toward all that is in God, all that he desires to give. Yet Eve’s imagination was turned to the knowledge of good and evil, seeing that it was desirable. So then our sanctification is being renewed in the hope of the new creation in Christ, that is, obtaining a beatified imagination through faith in its perfect embodiment, the beautiful lamb, the crucified and risen Son.