At this celebratory time of year, when sparks of magic dance on the cold night air, let us wonder about the worlds we want to live in, and give thanks for the miracle of imagination.
Making choices about life depends critically on the ability to imagine possibilities. Speaking as an advocate for liberal education, I believe that the central liberal art—the art that frees us from the shackles of our pasts, our times, our places, our familiar opinions, our inherited prejudices, and the conventions of our day, the art that gives us the freedom to think about the world of possibilities—is the Art of Imagination. We all possess imagination, just as we all possess intellect. But sometimes we suppress it, or we have had it beaten out of us, or we have dulled it by our daily routines. To see what our lives might become, we need to awaken the imagination and give it room to roam. We need to be able to wonder at the possibilities that are open to us. Both imagination and wonder can be nurtured by stories from our childhood, by fairy tales, by books, dramas, and musical performances—in short, by exposure to the great and the beautiful in any form. Photographs, works of fine art, and movies provide powerful stimulants to the imagination, and seem to be able to show us wonderful things we might not encounter in our everyday lives.
Every year around the holiday season I am reminded of this when I watch the delightful 1947 George Seaton film Miracle on 34th Street. We all remember the drama of the trial of Santa Claus, in which a young lawyer, Mr. Gailey, fends off the state’s attempt to commit to psychiatric care a man named Kris Kringle, who claims to be Santa Claus, by proving that there is a Santa Claus and that Kris is he. Now that is already a tall tale of the imagination.
But the arc of the story is broader and deeper. It is about the suppression and eventual recovery of the imagination in a woman and in her six-year-old daughter Susie, who has been raised by a mother whose dream of a happy life was shattered by a disastrous love affair. Mother has organized the Macy’s parade with floats depicting giants, fantastical scenes, and a lovable old Santa played by Kris Kringle himself. Susie is invited by her neighbor, Mr. Gailey, to watch the parade from his window in the hope that Susie will later introduce him to her beautiful mother.
Gailey asks Susie about the giants and then about Santa. But Susie doesn’t believe in either. She’s never heard of Jack-in-the-Beanstalk, and knows that her mother hired Santa off the street. She doesn’t know any fairy tales: “My mother thinks they’re silly.” No myths. No legends. Mother stands for reality. Christmas is about commerce. Santa is for selling toys. Mother wants to protect Susie from the harmful effects of believing in fantasies.
While rooming with Gailey, Kris Kringle works as Macy’s Santa in an attempt to win Mother over to his side, to help her see the world as it could be rather than as it is. He starts with Susie, who has never learned how to play make-believe or relate to imaginative children of her own age. Kringle says to her:
“Of course, in order to play, you’ve got to have an imagination. Do you know what the imagination is?… The imagination is a place all by itself, a separate country. You’ve heard of the British nation and the French nation. Now this is the Imagination. It’s a wonderful place. How would you like to be able to make snowballs in the summertime? Or drive a great big bus right down Fifth Avenue? How would you like to have a ship all to yourself that makes daily trips to China and Australia? How would you like to make a Statue of Liberty in the morning and in the afternoon fly south with a flock of geese? It’s really simple. Of course, it takes practice.”
And he starts right away, having Susie practice at pretending she is a monkey. Well, Kringle is eventually hauled off to the psychiatric ward, and Gailey defends him from commitment. Mother, seeing how this lovely old man is suffering and how her newfound love, Mr. Gailey, has been ostracized by his law firm, recovers her belief in the possibilities and small miracles of life, and declares her belief in Kris Kringle. She confesses to her daughter that she was wrong when she told her there was no Santa: “You must believe in Kris. You must have faith. Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to. You’ve got to believe in people.” Susie eventually follows, in Hollywood fashion.
Mother’s compassion and fellow-feeling for Kris Kringle allowed her to recover her humanity along with her hopes and dreams for a new future—one that will include both Susie and Gailey. We know this new family will live happily ever after because they have developed the capacity for imagining their happy future, and have resolved to make it a reality. Susie gets her fondest wish: the home of her dreams with a swing in the back yard and a complete family to occupy it.
Compassion, fellow-feeling, and a formidable imagination make a potent potion for creativity. Northrop Frye, in his brilliant little book The Educated Imagination, says that “the fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life…is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.” What more proper use could liberal education serve than to train the imagination to continually create better visions of the world we want to live in?
At this celebratory time of year, when sparks of magic dance on the cold night air, let us wonder about the worlds we want to live in, and give thanks for the miracle of imagination.
This originally appeared on Huffington Post College and is republished by the permission of the author.
This essay was first published here in March 2014.
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Walt Disney made a whole theology of “imagination,” and not a very orthodox one at that. And Santa Claus is a false god, Jesus reimagined by the democratic heresy. That said, we do need to recapture the imagination; as the Mormon Steven Covey said, everything that is created twice.
First, the worst unimaginative school book, which this Danish commenter studied, was, Environment, Sex, and Health, which, alas, convinced me, when aged 15, and so these three became my fake science idols, as they still are, to unimaginative people in world fear. But when my elder brother, then aged 26, had become disappointed with university biology, he went to popular high school (Folkehøjskole), for liberal arts, and during his stay, he met with a congenial former medical student who had given up university, because of the textbook, The Human Being as Machine. And even better, there he met his wife, and they went to study theology, together, and now they have one son, aged 19, who recently got top grade in social science, with topic, The Individual in the Late Modern Society, and one daughter, aged 13, who learns three languages, Danish, English, and German, as well as Japanese, from those imaginative manga cartoons, which she draws. Imagination is alien to every machine, but even plants have it, with the Aristotelian vegetative soul, confer with the faith of the mustard seed, and animals have it, with the Aristotelian soul of motion and emotion, confer the white dove, which carried an olive twig, or plain song birds. And with the human being, the Aristotelian soul of reason is capable of, analogia entis, the parable of the uncreated and creative Word, who elevates the human organism to Himself. Imagination, then, is gift of reason, which bond human beings in community, with one another, and with angels, ancestors, and natural ghosts, in the communion of saints, for all creation is sacred and sanctified by the Word incarnated. Then, Santa Claus is an imaginative character and an office, which can be held by great men. On the other hand, abuses of imagination, by worldly ideologies of fake science, or mammon, or transhumanism, can easily be dismissed, by everybody who knows only tiny bits of true myth, good ethics, and beautiful reason. Of course, the Trinitarian God is pure imagination. Whom we worship, because in Him we live, we breathe, and we are. Homo sapiens is spiritual, and imagination is private gift, to be unleashed. Whatever is praiseworthy, as the apostle says. On the other hand, knowledge of good and evil, which is original sin, seeks to replace real magic in unfathomable creation with peer reviewed science, and its slippery slope to fake science, peer reviewed only by unimaginative elites. Bless every imaginative being of great creation, in which we and our artistic creation is also gift. And save us, we most humbly pray, from our own machines, especially from rule by so called artificial intelligence algorithms on computers.
There as many benefits of imagination as one chooses to imagine. Certainly imagining a world one wishes to live is an important one. But imagination can benefit us in the world we *do* live in as well. New parents, planning their first evening out without the baby, imagine all sorts of things that may go wrong. Thus, they leave the sitter with a list of phone numbers a mile long, among other things.
“What if?” scenarios require imagination. And applying it liberally can lead to greater reliance on the self, family, and community as opposed to an amorphous government. How many who suffered last week would have fared better had they wondered, “What if the power goes out and the pipes freeze?” And having imagined, had imagined solutions and had then taken action ahead of time.
To return to the sort of imagination Nelson speaks of, Andrew Lang’s Introduction to The Blue Fairy Tale Book (1889) I think speaks to the point:
THE taste of the world, which has veered so often, is constant
enough to fairy tales. The children to whom and for
whom they are told represent the young age of man. They
are true to his early loves, they have his unblunted edge
of belief, and his fresh appetite for marvels.
One more point about MIRACLE ON 34th STREET, one of my favorite films. The event that precipitates Kringle’s being committed to the asylum is his thumping Mr. Sawyer, Macy’s vicious would-be Freudian psychoanalyst, on the head with an umbrella. Kringle is angry at Sawyer because Sawyer has been corrupting a young teenage Macy’s employee, Alfred, by telling him that his kindly impulse of impersonating Santa Claus at Christmastime and giving gifts to children is nothing but the symptom of a “guilt complex.” The need for imagination, and the danger of its being destroyed by cynicism and false science, is played out on many levels in the film.
For children, the healthiest thing you can do is leave them alone with nothing but their imagination. We are robbing our children when we fill in every thought with computer ” games”.