Truth gained by reason provides the substance and limitations for the imagination which works to give meaning to the appearances of life. Imagination’s creativity must give meaning to what is, which is to say, wherever imagination works creatively, it must give public meaning to reality.

Growing up in the 1950s in a rural village in mid-coast Maine, the only thing I knew about imagination and how we used it was for our play times. I suppose many of us remember that our playing was often mimicking what we saw adults around us doing.

My father had a small herd of milk cows, thus much of my time was spent working on the farm. So, much of our playing involved pretending to be farmers (I do not do that anymore). My brother, Wayne, who was 3 years my elder, always made some of the distasteful farm chores tolerable by the use of his imagination to create stories.

We did not call it imagination, for us it was just something we did. We did not say, let’s pretend we are so-in-so and do this or that, we just entered into the world of pretend.

Later in life, I began to learn more about imagination within a Christian view, but no matter what I learned, it was difficult for me think of imagination as a part of who I was as one made in the image of God. For me, imagination was pretend and pretend was not real.

With time, I realized that pretending was based on reality. Reality was first and our pretend world was a take on the reality around us where we mimicked adult activity or pretended to be adults.

It has taken time for me to see how imagination is not just about children making up stories (pretending, not lying) but that it is an ability to envision something by which we give meaning to reality. This is what artists do and here I am thinking particularly of the visual arts.

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