transformed imagination

I’m supposed to be finishing my notes and handout for leading a workshop on imagination tomorrow and I don't feel particularly imaginative about it! I have been thinking and researching it for weeks and weeks, but nothing is cohesive and I’m tempted to do what my college students used to do: string together a set of quotes.

Of course they would be good quotes , but what’s going to hold them together?

Specifically I’m speaking on the transformed imagination. This is a writers’ conference for Christians who want to mature in their craft.

Hmmm. Perhaps I’m trying to be too linear. This is a workshop not a lecture, so the aim should be interaction and discovery. I do have an outline in mind, some ideas for application exercises. Perhaps it would be okay if the handout didn’t go from one thing to another to another. Perhaps it would be okay to equip the students with a few pages of quotations, thus introducing them to a range of thinking on imagination, faith, transformation, and the arts—especially the literary ones. I want them to “meet” Eugene Peterson, Wendell Berry, Dorothy Sayers, Leland Ryken, Luci Shaw, Mary Oliver, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, Madeleine L’Engle, W. David O. Taylor, Betty Carlson, George MacDonald, Chelle Stearns, and more and more and more. 

Yes, that’s what I’m going to do. Prepare a handout that could lead the holder in any number of directions. We all have to start somewhere.

Ah, but where do we start? As Christian artists, we start in the mind of God. Edith Schaeffer was apparently fond of saying, “The Lord has infinite imagination.” From the creation of the world, to the formation of Israel, to the kingdom of God, and the Good News of freedom in Christ Jesus. God created ex nihilo. We do not create something out of nothing: there is always some kind of inspiration behind our work. The work we produce reflects the objects of our attentions. Our imagination can be simply our own and misguided or downright evil, or it can be reclaimed for higher purposes, renovated, as Dallas Willard and Eugene Peterson say.

“If Christ is the King, everything, quite literally, every thing and every one, has to be re-imagined, re-configured, re-oriented to a way of life that consist in an obedient following of Jesus…A total renovation of our imagination, our way of looking at things–what Jesus commanded in his no-nonsense imperative, “Repent!”–is required.” ~ Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way, 9

There. That’s a reasonable foundation. More later. Right now I need to make a non-linear handout.