Francis Gonsalves

“It’s only in your imagination!” or “Don’t let your imagination run wild!” are statements that we often hear. It indicates that imagination is something we mistrust. It is true that imagination can distort truth when someone fabricates fanciful tales to peddle lies. However, do you realise that imagination is an inherent power that enables you to transcend the here and now when required? Imagination can help you to look back to relive a treasured past, or to look forward to build a better future. It also helps in relating and responding to God.

Today, though science and technology have brought many benefits, they have also created in us a diminished sense of wonder and a depleted sense of the sacred. The material and the marketable is all that counts. Anything invisible or non-quantifiable in monetary terms is considered worthless. Consequently, we get imprisoned in technocratic spheres wherein love, devotion, goodness, beauty, self-sacrifice and relationships have little value. Worse, we miss out on the joy of seeking life’s deeper meaning. Here, imagination helps us to reorient our life and reinvent our world.
Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about primary and secondary imagination. Primary imagination is our capacity to perceive and organise stimuli from the outside world. We have the power to order and orient our lives. Secondary imagination refers to the ability to go beyond primary organisation to reassemble perceptions and synthesise fragments of truth. This enables us to create new meanings, which help us to relate to the Divine.
“In one salutation to thee, my God, let all my senses spread out and touch this world at thy feet”, wrote Tagore in Gitanjali (n. 103). Look! Listen! Smell! Taste! Touch! Our world is pregnant with signs of the sacred and stirrings of the Divine. While primary imagination makes us recognise these signs and stirrings, secondary imagination creates new meanings with symbols, rituals, myths, poetry, art, music and stories. This transports us into the Beyond. Imagination becomes our gateway to God.
More than being intellectuals, the world’s greatest gurus have been visionaries with immense imagination. Jesus was one such. He spoke of a so-called “Reign of God” where everyone would be sisters and brothers parented by an Abba-Amma God. This God, Jesus explained, was like a father who would lovingly embrace his son even though he had shamelessly squandered all the family wealth on licentious living. Jesus held his audience spellbound by using everyday examples of sowers and seeds (Matthew 13:1-9), of shepherds and sheep (John 10:1-18), of bridegrooms and banquets to convey the deepest truths about Life.
Life is full of paradoxes. And promises. We sense that beneath the pain of death lies the promise of life, that beyond doubt lies faith, that despite the falsehood around us truth must prevail. In all this, our imagination manufactures symbols, rituals, myths and stories to help us deal with the contradictions and challenges of our finite human lives.
Our cultures and religions give us the raw material to imagine our own little stories within the larger landscape of their “Big Story”. On the one hand, being products of tradition, we accept a lot of what is given to us; however, on the other, we are also producers of meaning. Thus, in a flattened, secularised world, we could jointly gather up narrative material for our imaginations to weave into life-affirming stories to offer to ourselves, our children and their children.
As creators of images and consumers of imagination’s artifacts, we must carefully accept or reject what culture offers, for there is the possibility of imagination running amuck and deceiving us to mistake evil for good, the transient for the eternal. Hence, we must wisely choose the movies we see, the books we read, the music we listen to and the friends we make. If this can be done, all of us — believers, non-believers and those in between — can share our stories and construct new worlds for the welfare of all, driven by that dream of many of us today that “another world is possible”.

— Francis Gonsalves is the principal of the Vidyajyoti College of Theology, Delhi. He is involved in interfaith dialogue and peoples’ initiatives for fostering justice, harmony and peace. He can be
contacted at fragons@gmail.com