Our Imagination
Caterer to Our Self Love
From Our Way to the Father, pages 376ff
“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world, keepeth it unto life eternal” (John 12:24-25)
“The sensual (worldly and selfish) man perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God … and he cannot understand, because it is spiritually examined.” (I Corinthians 2:14)
“The wisdom of the flesh is an enemy to God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither can it be. And they that are in the flesh cannot please God.” (Romans 8:7-8)
First Prelude: Listen attentively to divine wisdom: “But now put you also all away, anger, indignation, malice” (Colossians 3:8). “If thou give to thy soul her desires, she will make thee a joy to thy enemies” (Ecclesiasticus 18:30-31). “A hot soul is a burning fire; it will never be quenched, till it devour some thing. And a man that is wicked in the mouth of his flesh, will not leave off till he hath kindled a fire” (Ecclesiastics 23:22-23).
Second Prelude: O Lord, God and Father, grant that I may realize to what extent my impassioned imagination is ever tending to give me over to the restless and unbridled spirit of a more or less, vicious, bitter, and deceitful tongue, heart, and mid. Left to itself my imagination would allow neither my own soul nor the souls of companions or superiors to taste how sweet it is for brethren to dwell together in unity, nor to experience how light is the burden and to relish how sweet is the yoke of sincerely religious Christlike obedience, and charity, and humility (II Corinthians 6:1-10).
First Point: The Imagination, Its Havoc in General. For out present purpose we may understand by imagination that faculty of ours which forms mental, sensible pictures of objects presented to any of the senses, and then more or less spontaneously stores up these images, and may afterward reproduce them even in the absence of the objects themselves.
It is not difficult to realize what a criminal part was acted by the imagination in nearly every kind of human sin from the first in paradise onward, precisely be producing and retaining and reproducing vivid pictures of scenes, persons, and experiences, pictures of pleasures or pains, of favors or wrongs, of hopes or dreads, successes or failures and disappointments, of ambitions, envies, jealousies, and all the other activities of perverse self-love, and especially by fixing such images in the foreground of consciousness with all their evil power to inflame even the basest and wildest of human passions.
But the most prolific sources of evils created by the imagination may be its absolutely unscrupulous disregard for truth and justice and every other virtue. It paints, touches up, and reproduces its pictures arbitrarily to suit the merest whims of egoism and sensuality; it modifies, magnifies, reduces, or combines pictures so whimsically and fantastically that its purported reproduction of scenes and conversations and actions turns out to be substantially different from truth and fact. They thus become pictures of what never existed, outright forgeries and falsifications, which too often distort entirely innocent intentions or purely accidental actions or words or omissions into gross insults and unpardonable crimes.
To realize to what extent the passions and all the seven capital vices are served and fueled by unleashed imaginations, you need only consider existing open facts. How very busy, and how happy in their output of unscrupulous misinterpretations and misrepresentations of words, events, and figures are the world’s fully up-to-date neo-pagan promoters of confidence games in the domain of industry and commerce, of legislation, elections and politics, and even of education and religion the whole world over!
Second Point: The Imagination, Ready Tool of the devil. What might be that mysterious power, we may ask, which manages to keep persons in religion so attached to more or less deliberate faults and even outright venial sins, that the devil is delighted over the prospect of inducing them easily to be less and less willing to correct their unsocial and unreligious habits of mind and tongue? What it is, but our untamed and unguarded imagination, that makes employments or conditions or permissions, which are peculiarly to our liking, appear to be absolutely necessary for our success and happiness in religion, or for our perseverance and growth and perhaps even for our salvation? And what but our imagination cam make the consequences of some temporal loss or of some unwelcome work or change appear so terrifying, that our soul will recoil from it as from utter unhappiness and possibly as from despair and damnation itself?
Mark well, it is from within, out of the heart of men, that proceed evil thoughts, ambitions, deceit and pride, and all that St. Paul calls the works of the flesh-enmities, rivalries, wraths, quarrels, dissensions, sects, and envies, and such like (Galatians 5:19, 21). And indeed, not one of these regrettable community evils will develop to any seriously damaging degree, without such vivid, nervous, wild, and unscrupulous activity of imaginations, as may set aside all religious and even soundly Christian reason and then plunge along blindly with more or less disregard of fact and truth, or honor and possibly religious decency (James 3:14-16)
What is it that so magnifies passing slights and wrongs or even unfortunately but insignificant little frictions, as to break up a family or to disrupt a friendship of years, but the tyranny or ungoverned imaginations? What is it that keeps sores open, continues licking at them, never fully satisfied, not even when it has deepened and aggravated them into unsightly ulcers running with nauseating sins that meek St. John would rate as works of the world and of the flesh and possibly of the devil?
For your own self, is it not evident that the nearer your individual ambition or envy or jealousy or anger approaches the stage of grievous untruthfulness or offensiveness or recklessness, the busier and more arbitrary and lawless must your imagination have been in its pictures and descriptions and accounts of scenes and incidents, as they never happened at all?
Third Point: The Imagination, Mighty Instrument for the Perfection of Charity. Undoubtedly, it is our impetuous, over-wrought, flaming, and turbulent imagination that occasions and partially causes by far the greater number of our faults and sins, especially those we commit directly against the fundamental religious virtues of humility, obedience, and charity. In a word, our imagination is the mightiest and subtlest enemy of our personal progress toward truer sanctification and higher perfection, and the mightiest instrument to drive away the angels of peace from other souls and to kill the religious joy of whole communities.
However, like every other source and occasion of trials and crosses, this conscienceless troublemaker may be, for persons honestly pursuing religious perfection, a blessing in disguise. It furnishes them extraordinary opportunities for heroic self-conquest and consequent merit, and therefore it may be made to serve even as an aid for their ascent of the mount of perfection, for their steady growth toward the living heroic charity proposed to them as the ideal and expectation of their religious institute, for their unselfing of self that the love of God may possess their souls.
O my soul, do set your persistent efforts to curb and train this fickle, skittish, unspiritual, unreasoning, and egotistically inclined imagination to become for you rather a positive occasions and mighty means for turning all that bitter zeal and self-centered wisdom, which the Apostle brands as earthly and sensual and devilish, into the true wisdom and zeal that is from above. Train your imagination to the laws of charity, obedience, and humility. Keep its artistic talent employed in painting, touching up, and reproducing pictures of scenes and persons, or past, present, or future events, which will elevate your spirit and life to ever more truly Christlike sobriety, justice and Godliness.
To the exact degree to which your imagination is thus engaged, it will become in a way spiritualized into a mighty instrument of your heart and will, for the honest pursuit of that true wisdom and that perfection of divine charity which is without dissimulation, ever peaceable, modest, easy to be governed and directed, quick to consent to the true, the beautiful, and the good, and ever full of mercy and good fruits (James 2:13-18; Philippians 4:6-8; Matthew 5:2-12)
Colloquy: O Lord, God and Father, sovereign Ruler of my life, leave me not to the counsel of my impassioned imagination; for suffer me to be deceived and fall by it! Set scourges over my thoughts, and the discipline of wisdom over my heart, lest my ignorances increase and my offenses be multiplied and my sins abound and I fall before my adversaries and my infernal enemy rejoice over me! (Ecclesiasticus 23:1-6)
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