We grew up without a television. As an adult looking back, I am grateful. There were seasons of television here and there, depending on where we lived, how much money we had, and various other factors. Overall, television was a minuscule part of my childhood.
I wasn’t surprised, then, to find out that my friends would watch all sorts of shows and movies I was unfamiliar with. I didn’t recognize their movie quotes or reenacted scenes. The first time I heard the song “Fat Guy in Little Coat” from “Tommy Boy” with Chris Farley was an audio recording. I thought it was an actual song somebody wrote. I didn’t even know it came from a movie until about 10 years later.
In a sense, I was left out, but in actuality, I never felt left out. My siblings and I shared this experience of a television-less childhood among ourselves. Like most families with more than a few kids, we shared our own unique culture.
So, instead of quoting movies, we made things up. Instead of laughing at jokes written by famous actors, we made up our own comedy and developed our own sense of humor. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life as I did when I was a kid.
We entertained ourselves with real things, being outside, going on adventures, getting into trouble, and using our imaginations.
As I’ve grown up, I’ve ‘caught up’, you might say, with everyone else with regard to movies seen. I probably didn’t see most of the Disney cartoons or teeny-bop shows that many of my friends watched during their adolescence, but overall, I’m as well-watched as the next guy.
A startling reality has become clear to me, as the years have drifted slowly by. My imagination has dwindled immensely. I struggle to envision projects, ideas, characters, or stories like I used to. My inner ability to visualize and simulate things with my brain has taken on a more Hollywood influence. Part of this may simply be because I am growing up. To some degree, we all lose our childlike imagination as we age. We lose our ability to envision, to fantasize, and to dream. I cherish that ability and I always have, so the perceived loss of this imaginative ability, to me, felt as detrimental as the loss of a limb.
My adult years have spanned, more or less, from 2008 until now, and a lot has happened in our world since ‘08. One thing is the skyrocketing production of movies and television shows, YouTube videos, and the endless amount of new entertainment coming from streaming services. The amount of content produced in our modern world is astronomical.
Our Imaginations Are Shrinking
As this all-consuming pastime of shows, movies, and other screen-oriented forms of leisure continues to grow, our imaginations continue to shrink.
Mind you, I may have an unusually vivid imagination. I recall as a teenager and young adult that when I would read a book, my brain would come up with different voices for each character in the book; accents and all. Reading a book for me was like listening to the best audio drama ever created. My imagination just did this automatically. I don’t know how. But it’s not there now.
As my childhood faded and my teenage years began to bud, my favorite books like The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, and Into the Wild by John Krakauer suddenly became movies, and not just movies, but enterprises of global proportions. The producers took the plots, simplified them, rearranged the order in which things happened, took shortcuts, removed characters, re-wrote the scripts to fit the screen, and hired big-name Hollywood actors and actresses to try and do justice to our beloved literary characters.
I recall watching Harry Potter for the first time, and thoroughly I enjoyed it, but I was disappointed in his character. He didn’t look like how I imagined him. He seemed soft, like a kid who wasn’t sure about himself, an unconfident youth, soft and cute, cuddled and raised by loving parents. He wasn’t the heroic, rebellious, almost villainous orphan that J.K. Rowling had provoked in my imagination, who only knew neglect, injustice, and abuse. In short, the main character in the film was Daniel Radcliffe, not Harry Potter. The sad thing though, is that Daniel Radcliffe actually replaced Harry Potter in my imagination after reading the books. I could no longer think of Harry Potter as a purely literary figure of my imagination anymore. The actor and the character had been permanently fused. This same thing happened with Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings (although I like Elijah Wood much more than I like Daniel Radcliffe). Frodo is now Elijah Wood, and Elijah is Frodo. The detailed hobbit character that I could imagine so vividly is gone.
In a way, this is inevitable, isn’t it? When we watch a movie, the actor becomes the character. That’s their job. Unfortunately, the character also becomes the actor, at least in movies based on literature. The book form of the story is inescapably eclipsed by the highly stimulating audio-visual phenomenon called the cinema. Watching a movie is like having highly concentrated entertainment, boiled down to its most captivating moments, poured into the mind like a sugary milkshake. Instead of a narrator’s extensive and slow description of scenes or situations that you must piece together in your own imagination, you are simply shown those scenes or situations on the screen.
What bothers me is that when we watch movies, we are watching someone else’s imagination, or at least whatever they are able to convey through the art medium of film, which, thanks to CGI and other technologies, excludes almost nothing.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this. It’s fun to share our imaginations with others, and vice versa; it’s part of being human. But when it replaces our own creative world, rather than inspires it, there’s something very good that goes missing.
The next time I read Harry Potter, my imagined version of the whole story was replaced by images and people from the film. While reading the book again, I couldn’t remember my own version of the characters. Hogwarts was no longer the endless, explorable caverns of my own creative mind; it was simply replaced by memories from the movie. The experience of reading itself was depreciated by simply having seen the movie.
As it turns out, the movie didn’t spark my imagination; it replaced it. Where there was once a fertile field of creative and personal expression, there is now a product, a good product at that, but a product nonetheless. Unfortunately, the mind quickly grabs onto images it can use for an imaginative scene. The human brain is wired to make things more efficient. It’s like figuring out how to navigate a big city without a map, and then being shown a map. Suddenly, the whole city is simplified, and everything you had driven on suddenly makes sense. It’s easier, certainly, but the sense of adventure is lost.
All of my favorite books that were lucky (or unlucky) enough to have been made into movies, are now tainted. Some books, frankly, make better movies than books anyway, in my opinion, but it doesn’t change the fact that as a culture, we are moving away from the imagination. We are killing it. Or, at best, we are letting it be killed.
Now, in the grand scheme of things, it might not be that big of a deal that our imagined versions of stories and books are being replaced by products made in Hollywood. I certainly consider it a tragedy; the slow death of the imagination is as bad to me as the slow death of charity or innocence. But, when it comes to movies and books or entertainment, it might not be that big of a deal.
But here’s where it might be a huge deal… in prayer.
Imagination And Faith
See, the imagination is the eye of the mind. When Jesus tells parables, He wants us to use our imaginations to receive His message. What is the story of the Prodigal Son when it is not imagined? How do we pray with the reality of the Father’s love in our hearts without imagining it?
What better way to experience and know God’s love than through imaginatively praying through the Gospels and parables, and allowing stories of saints, angels, and Church history to inspire us to sainthood. The imagination is indispensable in the life of faith.
This tradition of bringing imagination and faith together has been going on throughout Church history. Rome is the fount of art in our world. It is, in many ways, the most imaginative city in the world. The architecture, the paintings, and the statues are all products of the imagination. They are the result of someone who protected and developed their imagination to lead people to God.
Using and developing the imagination has been and still ought to be an intentional interior process for all artists, especially those who try to depict Jesus Himself.
The imagination is a gift from God, just like our bodies, minds, and souls. To use it to try and communicate our own relationship with Jesus to the world is a great and holy act. The artist has to ask themselves, “What did Jesus look like?” They then have to take the time to capture that mental image.
The pursuit of God in prayer only benefits a well-developed, pure imagination, like a child. This is why children are great at praying, incredibly creative, and have great imaginations. We are called to use our imaginations to grow in faith. This is what everyone, not just children or artists, is called to do because our desire for God is fanned into flame when we can imagine heaven, paradise, and a painless, sinless world.
Our imaginations are to each of us our own little world, and are beautiful and unique to all of us. God uses it to connect with us and to grow closer to us. God gives us images in prayer, words, stories, or songs.
Our imaginations reflect our personalities, our hearts, our desires, and our creativity. They reveal the things we think about regularly, what we daydream about, and what we worry about.
Our imaginations signal to us the movements of our souls. In prayer, if we can be attentive, our imaginations can help us navigate our own wounds, subconscious thoughts, and deepest feelings.
Our most intense fears are revealed to us through our imaginations, as well as our most lofty desires, and our guiltiest pleasures. Our imaginations are a sacred part of the human person, mysterious and unique. In many ways, our imaginations are what make us most like God, our creator, because they are the seedbed of all creativity. Imagination is where inspiration takes root and pushes us to create and to share. The things that spark our imaginations, like God’s creation, stories, and art, can bring us closer to Him. This communion is precisely the goal of life: to land in God’s arms at the moment of our death, and to grow closer to Him throughout our lives.
Learn To Develop The Imagination
It’s crucial that we nurture, purify, develop, and protect our imaginations from anything that might weaken, corrupt, or harm them, especially when it comes to our faith life.
Just like my imagined Harry Potter was replaced by Daniel Radcliffe, and my imagined Frodo Baggins was replaced by Elijah Wood, so too has my imagined Jesus been replaced by Jim Caviezel and, more recently, by Jonathan Roumie. I have nothing against these actors as men. Their personalities are irrelevant to what I am trying to say. There is always the possibility that highly saturated, highly entertaining artwork, like the productions that they were cast in, can replace the imagination rather than inspire it, which is something that we must be cautious of as Christians.
We need to take the time to discern whether something good, like our imagination, is going missing or not. When it comes to engaging with a production like The Chosen, for example, it’s our Christian duty to make sure that we’re not neglecting our actual faith or prayer life by spending hours watching the most recent episodes. It’s easy to justify it, because it is so good. And not just good quality-wise, but good morally as well. The concern ought to be for the good things that can go missing rather than the good things that are present. These shows are clearly spiritually fruitful. That is good. These shows are clearly well-made. That is good. But I see a good that is progressively becoming more absent: spiritual imagination.
The solution is not to cancel The Chosen or to never make a sequel to The Passion of Christ. No. We, the viewers, are responsible for ourselves. We must ensure that if we use these art forms to deepen our faith life, we are not inadvertently replacing the God-given gift of our imaginations in the process. If watching The Chosen or something similar inspires your faith, activates and fills your imagination, encourages prayer (away from the screen), and leads you deeper into the unique relationship with God that you are destined to have, then by all means, go deeper. But if you find yourself spending more and more time watching these shows, less time praying without them, less time with other devotions, less time reading scripture or spending time with other faith-filled allies, or if you find yourself praying with Jonathan Roumie’s face in adoration rather than with the love that the God-man who Jonathan is humbly trying to portray… just be aware of it. Be aware, and don’t let the good things of your faith life go missing. They are precious.
There are infinite ways to grow in faith; exercise the imagination by praying more contemplatively with Scriptures and envisioning oneself in the scene; going on retreats or Poustinias, and practicing the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises; or take the time to read about the saints; let the stories of Joan of Arc and Francis Xavier come alive in our minds. The imagination is what makes us original. No one imagines things like you do. With the loss of imagination comes an inevitable loss of originality.
Rather than relying on the next hit TV series from a Christian production studio, let God speak to you through your imagination. Instead of spending hours staring at a screen at great actors acting out biblical scenes, spend hours in adoration forming your own original relationship with God.
When we make the space and time for God within us in that way, He will bless us with a gift greater than anything we could get from a show or a movie; He will bless us with a unique, personal, and transformative encounter that is real and eternal. No subscription needed.
