Use Your Imagination –  “Lend” Your Imagination

The magi follow a star in the night and arrive at the stable where the Christ child is.  And yet we don’t picture them arriving in the morning.   We picture them looking in on the manger at night.

That at any rate is my rationale for writing a piece about the Epiphany in the overnight, not in anticipation.   I moved through the day, a remarkable day in many ways – and it was in the dark of night that I had the epiphany I’d looked for.  

It involved a book called Seeing Things, by James P.M. Walsh, a Jesuit who taught Old Testament at Georgetown and served as an advisor to the Chimes, an a cappella singing group at the university.   

Seeing Things carries the subtitle “How the Imagination Shapes You and Your World,” and the subtitle is accurate enough – but the book is in many ways a strong polemic against the sort of literalism the subtitle implies.   For Fr. Walsh – who died last summer – “seeing things” meant seeing them with the imagination, whether in everyday life, in the consideration of literature and history, or through a religious discipline such as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.  

Fr. Walsh naturally finds an imaginative way of characterizing this process.  He shows how we “lend our imagination” to different situations.   In the Ignatian retreat set out in the Exercises, he explains, the individual is enjoined to “lend one’s imagination to God on the retreat.”  

The realization of one’s own spiritual need, because it is centered in the imagination and therefore bypasses our rational defenses, is a vivid, powerful experience but (perhaps not surprisingly) in no way depressing … It is God lifting the veil, leading us to the heart of things, sharing with us his knowledge of us.

In a similar way, Fr. Walsh explains, we “lend” our imagination in the act of putting ourselves in another person’s place – the beginning of the process (often called empathy or compassion) that leads us to love our neighbor and our enemy.

Fr. Walsh doesn’t say so, but the strong implication is that act of “lending” one’s imagination is central to the experience of artistic creation, too.  In this, his line of argument is strongly consonant with the argument of The Gift, by Lewis Hyde.  Hyde characterizes art as “the gift that is given back,” and he sets out the process whereby the artist must place herself in a “receptive” mode in order to receive art in the manner of a gift.   In Fr. Walsh’s terms, the artist must “lend her imagination” to the creative process, or to the work itself, in order to be open and receptive to its full possibilities.

And that sense of the artistic process is akin to James Joyce’s idea of literary “epiphany.”

I never got to know James Walsh, who taught at Georgetown’s campus in Qatar in his last years; but as I read this pointed, vivid, effortlessly personal book, I felt that I have known him.   The gift economy – as Hyde and others call it – will receive sustained attention at Georgetown in the coming years, and I wish Fr. Walsh were still with us to help us to lend our imagination to the effort.

Of course, in important ways he has done so already.

The painting, by the Italian Renaissance artist known as Sassetta, is the image of the Epiphany I know and love more than any other.  It’s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• 7 January 2016
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