The bigger picture: Angela Arnold considers the value of imagination

‘Images we encounter inwardly are powerful.’

Quaker worship and testimony are spiritually based, we say – Spirit being the basis of what we do. But my logical mind grapples with these words. I seem to need help from other mental processes to make sense of it all.

Using emotional intelligence is one approach: being open-hearted to the feelings that arise during worship. Maybe less obvious is paying attention to an inner ‘sense-of’. But, most vividly, I need imagination. This a faculty that can get dismissed (‘just imagining things’), but I believe it can help us engage with Spirit.

In the context of worship, many of us use our imagination to centre down. Beneath the choppy waves of our monkey mind, we can sink to calmer seas underneath. But do we feel free to listen to what it can reveal?

To give a random example, one day during Meeting, sunk deep in non-thought, I was suddenly struck by a… well, a cross between an inner sensation and an image: Spirit was rising up from the ground under my feet. From the laminate flooring, to be precise. I looked at it closely, stayed with the image and that feeling of something (a) rising, and waited for an explanation. A thought occurred, about how we are conditioned by our cultural heritage to think of ‘spirit’ as something insubstantial, airy, up in the sky. But here it was, a clearly-perceived spiritual base to stand on, to be upheld by, to jump up from, to go forward on. ‘Basis’ indeed. I saw it first with the imaginative eye and then experienced it emotionally too, a feeling of what I can only describe as tenderness towards the material world.

My point is that understanding takes many different forms, often concurrently: from the rational to the sensed, the emotionally or imaginatively perceived. Any of these mental tools can be used (or abused, in self-absorbed ways). They can be directed, or they may jump out at you with a surprise message.

‘I see’, you say when you understand. Or think you understand. A concrete image has arisen in your mind, or at least a vague one pointing to how things might hang together, or how a suggested plan of action might work out. The image in your head may not correspond well with what the other person is envisaging, but it is a starting point, a step up on the ladder of understanding. Words never seem to be enough, in themselves, but need to be fleshed out. As Albert Camus had it: ‘When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning.’

There’s always a downside – of course there is. Hope relies on our capacity to envisage, but so does despair. We may fall into the trap of interpreting things too literally. This is reason enough to tread warily, but not to ignore or belittle a valuable gift.

These ‘visions’ may be conjured up, or they may come to us unbidden. Another time during worship I found myself ambushed by an image of a deadly-looking whirlpool (think outer space, black holes, ultimate abyss) and felt myself being sucked in. Go with it, I thought, curious to the end. The surprise was that I found myself suspended above it, looking down and into the gyre, gently floating and upheld by a different force. This is not the least bit logical, of course. But it spoke to me, saying something about thinking it possible that one’s best understanding might be mistaken. Or that fear breeds its own delusions. Or that ‘all will be well’.

Images we encounter inwardly are powerful. They can support, uphold, reinforce, expand, challenge, scourge and blow apart. Equally, we may experience various forms of something inwardly heard, or otherwise sensed. An underlying music or rhythm maybe, or an all-connecting structure not even pictured, just somehow felt. Spirit can take on many forms, imperfect, incomplete, because that is all form can ever be. We shouldn’t dismiss these because they don’t come in the shape of sensible words in an orderly sequence.

When we sit in worship we are asked to let go of our own willing, including our own thinking. We allow ourselves to be led to new thoughts. But we shouldn’t shy away from allowing ourselves to be led equally towards new ways of seeing, sensing, feeling – and to share what we receive. That is not to diminish the importance of reason. But where does our inner knowing go if it cannot find the ‘right’ words, ones that are intelligent, thoughtful, and oh-so-reasonable? Wordyness does not equal worthiness, even for us Quakers.

Even fiction consists of images that are converted into words in order to make them take shape in the reader’s head. These fictions illustrate truths beyond what exists in concrete form.

The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: ‘Science does not know its debt to imagination.’ And Albert Einstein, during an interview in 1929, had this to say: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’

Dreams, asleep or waking, are another source of insight (to be treated cautiously, certainly, even as they are honoured). Should we let Spirit speak to us in ‘dream language’ as we worship, let it take us somewhere new and un-thought of? In one of her TED talks Karen Armstrong, a historian of religion, referred to imagination as ‘the religious faculty’ which tries to ‘envisage the eternally absent God’. She called it ‘a moral faculty’ as well, because ‘you have to use it to think yourself into the position of the other’.

Whichever way we use our imagination (though ‘use’ is probably not the best word here), we must do so with clarity and honesty. We need the humility to understand that it, too, can be as fallible as all the rest of our faculties. Imagination is a valuable gift. Let’s not be afraid to let it steer us into less ‘normal’, less orderly, deeper waters.

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