The Sacredness of Your Child's Imagination: Part I

In the middle of the night, my six year old came into our bedroom wanting to crawl into bed with us, saying he had had a very bad dream. When I cuddled him close I asked him if he wanted to tell me about it. He said he didn't want to tell because it was so upsetting. I prayed for him and assured him of his safety. But he could not fall asleep again. He whispered, "When I close my eyes, the evil man is still alive."

Isn't that the case with all of our imaginations? It is the world fully alive when we close our eyes, when we gaze out the window, when we are still.

So I told him that the next time he saw that man, I wanted him also to see the army of heavenly angels, armed with swords (it is easy for him to imagine any number of medieval knightly swords because of the books he pours over) standing with him against the evil man. Some time later after dozing in and out, I asked him how it was going. He said the evil man had been destroyed.

St. Michael slaying Satan

To say that what is in one's imagination is not real is to misunderstand the imagination. The imagination carries the symbols of the world that bind up realities seen and unseen, often realities too expansive to be expressed in anything other than images and symbols. The question is whether or not one's imagination has the true symbols, the symbols that express what is ultimately and eternally true. A healthy, true, vivid imagination is the greatest aid in living a life of virtue. Though Becket's battle was in his imagination, he was internalizing the courage to stand against evil with the weapons God has given his people and to see good triumph. This is real.

Our children have eternal souls, and they will participate during their lifetimes in the battle of all time--the battle between good and evil. As they mature, they have a growing realization of what that battle is and the forces that array the battlefield. The evil is an evil they will not always see, just as the courage and virtue required to overcome such evil is also forged in secret. Because we cannot see the spiritual entities that surround us--demons, angels, and more--and because the dark often poses as the light, and the good might come in an unassuming form, we will need healthy imaginations and mature, spiritually developed skills of discernment to recognize evil and know how to confront it with the victorious good.

Every person has an imagination. It is either full of true riches and becomes a tremendous assistance in feeding wholesome vision, thought, action, and character. Or it is depleted, perhaps distorted, and actually prevents a person from becoming all he or she was meant to be. We have a symbolic system for evil and for good, for God and for the Church. We have imaginations replete with images of what it means to be a woman or a man or a family or a friend, what it means to be a successful person. Sometimes these symbols embody the true real, and sometimes they are polluted with the false. But our imaginations have everything to do with who we become as people.

Napoleon said, “Imagination governs the world.” Why? Because we can only live out what we are capable of imagining. We can only be loyal if we can imagine loyalty. We can only love God if we have a true imagination of who God is. We can only sacrifice if we have an imagination for the joy beyond sacrifice. Napoleon's imagination was obviously populated with images of power, control, and personal aggrandizement, and he lived it out. But his imagination fell short because his imagination was not populated with the eternal real that would lead to lasting good. It could not win in the end.

Good requires a richer imagination. Sadly, we often have more imagination for the unhealthy and twisted. We see this in Hollywood depictions of character--the good characters are often lacking depth and interest. They are predictable, boring, simple minded and insipid, while the bad characters are intriguing, multi-layered, intelligent and strong.

The writer, Graham Greene, said, “Hate is a lack of imagination.” It is easier to give into evil than to be governed by good, and it takes little imagination to distort or destroy something solid and beautiful, but it takes great imagination to create it. That's why hate and evil have a shelf life, but it is also why when left defenceless, we will drift toward the easy road--a weak imagination.

Every child is born with an imagination that will be captured by some system of thought, populated by images that shape who he or she grows to be. As parents, we need to wake up and realize that our children have an enemy, Satan himself, and his first access to them is through their imaginations, and he is busy using anything at his disposal to gain ground, while we often are blinded to the battle raging already to steal their souls through the inroads of their imaginations.

Satan will also use educational systems to wear down the eternal values established in God's Word. He wants to create a false utopia, a kingdom he also calls love, not where one sacrifices for another out of love, but a kingdom in which each person is validated for their own selfish choices, a love of self. Of course the easy way of empty love will be more appealing to a sinful human being if the kingdom of real sacrificial love is not richly shaped in the imagination so that it is clear where self sacrifice leads and where self- aggrandizement ends up.



Joan of Arc by John Everett Millais: a woman who listened to God, cared little what others thought of her,
a valiant leader who fought on behalf of others with courage and self-sacrifice.

Through our imaginations, Satan can control our capacity to be fully alive by deadening us and reducing us to something very small and limited. He wants us to believe that this world is ALL there is. It is like the Green Lady in Lewis' Silver Chair who tries to hypnotize the children into believing that there is no sun, only the lamp in the room, no lion, but a small cat.

A well developed imagination can lift outside of the here and now, can rise up above and see beyond. A vibrant imagination can see the manipulations of an ad because the vision of the world they know in their imaginations is so much broader and richer than such drivel. A child being bullied at school who has had an imagination rich with story knows the end desserts of a bully and can be noble in the face of it, remembering that in due time, the noble knight wins the battle.

We want our children to be captivated for what is so much greater, so much more solid and real. We want them to be captivated by Christ, his kingdom, and the purpose to which they were brought into this world. We want them to see a world beyond this one that is so appealing because it embodies all we were created to be and experience.

Our children are completely susceptible to what the world says is beautiful, attractive, useful, and meaningful. We must be on the castle walls letting down the draw bridge to every friend that can expand and enlarge imagination space and fill it with the good, the true, and the beautiful and dropping down the portcullis on every fiend that wants to steal imagination space in the castle.

As parents, we are the opener and closer of doors for our children. We will not always discern correctly, but God is gracious and can help us there. We also cannot control some flaming arrows that will come over the walls unbidded, even unallowed. God, too, will show us how to snuff out those fires. But we can certainly keep foreign forces from occupying the castle of our children’s imaginations. It is our a sober responsibility to have first and greatest access to our children's imaginations, and we must take up our places on the castle wall, not growing weary, but watching and praying.

In The Sacredness of your Child's Imagination, Part II, I will explore more practical ways to do this as parents.