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USE YOUR IMAGINATION TO SEE MORE CLEARLY
My sister was born early, and this prematurity affected her eyes. She suffered further vision loss from a medical error in the incubator. These realities have impacted her life in ways I can never fully appreciate.
But we all have another way of seeing not dependent on the physical equipment for sight. Some call it intuition or clairvoyance, mystical insight or the third eye. Solomon asked for this gift when he implored God to grant him “an understanding heart.” Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, references this gift in urging us to retrieve the vital “third eye of the imagination” to move forward into a more hopeful future.
Imagination may seem a useless tool in a world of adult responsibilities. Most of us exercised a good deal of imagination as children, making up playmates, stories, songs, and games without prompting. We may have been discouraged from this creative employment of imagination as we grew older. Adulthood, we may have been told, is about realism, perhaps even fatalism, as we learn to accept things that cannot be changed.
Jesus taught his disciples to embrace the third eye of imagination in his parables about the coming Kingdom of God. In the upside down world of God’s reign, nothing is as it appears. Far from frivolous, this playful, hopeful Kingdom vision is an essential component of the spiritual life.
—Alice Camille,
reprinted with permission from TrueQuest Communications
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