A quiet meditation on childlike imagination, longing, and learning to wait for wonder again.

This Advent season I’ve been reflecting on the connection between children’s’ utter belief in Santa Clause and how a lack of imagination can be a block to finding God. Stick with me here…

I suppose we should start at the very beginning here. I was an 8 year old girl who somehow heard talk of a made up Santa Clause. This combined with my keen eyes of noticing how Santa’s wrapping paper is exactly the same as our one, and genuinely how I could just blatantly hear my mother cutting and sellotaping the presents together while she blared Christmas music, ALL led me to realise what had been happening right under my nose all those years.

To say I was angry was an understatement. And even angrier when confronted with my new found “knowledge”, my mother still wouldn’t back down. Eventually she said “It’s as real as you want it to be”… still not denying. But I knew. At least I thought I knew it all, and what good did it do me? The spirit of Christmas died for me that day (bare in mind I was a lapsed Catholic at this point in my life) but I got the better of her!

High and Mighty: When Christmas Felt Hollow

Looking back on that day and thinking of how high and mighty I felt truly saddens me. The following years consisted of half-hearted celebrations where it even got to a stage where I would wrap my own presents because I knew what they were anyway and I did a better job at it than my mother. So void of any joy really, and instead wrapped up in my own sick consumption. I didn’t know it then, but I was waiting — not for gifts, but for wonder to return. But then….

A Spark Returns: The Arrival of a Child

We had the arrival of my baby sister. Granted I was then 20 years old but of course still spent Christmas at home and just being around a young child believing by faith alone lit a spark in me once more. Made me think that maybe Christmas… perhaps…means a little bit more!

The beautiful thing about children is their whole-hearted, blinding, foolhardy belief in pretty much anything you tell them. I say foolhardy not because I think it but by the world standards I suppose.

However, doesn’t Jesus tell us to be like the little children? What do you think he meant by that?

Innocent?

Simple?

Free of Sin?

Sure! Though I’m also starting to believe he meant to have the mind, thereby the imagination of a child.

It’s clear by now that there are many paths to come to know God as many different souls have come to have a relationship with our Lord.

I’d like to share my path as I believe it may tie up what I’m trying to say here.

In 2019, as my then boyfriend undertook a BA in Theology, real questions of God began to emerge for us both. We would spend our evenings contemplating God, in the little ways we could, drawing up generational patterns, seeing how God has brought glory even in tragedies in our lives, in the lives of some of our favourite tv show characters and we both came to the conclusion that it doesn’t mean nothing. None of this is a coincidence.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made and intended.

Even you.

We began to read the Bible, something I’d never seriously considered which is crazy “being a Catholic”. I think I felt a bit threatened by the old language used in it and was afraid that I wouldn’t “get it”. That it would be lost on me, go over my head. How wrong I was.

Imagination: Seeing the World Anew

After reading Genesis, I made a vow to simply start imagining my life as if there was a Father in Heaven who loved me. I walked outside to the park shortly after and I remember gleefully giggling and rubbing my eyes because it was literally like looking at the world through rose tinted glasses. It felt less like discovering something new and more like finally receiving what had been waiting for me all along.

Everything was so much more. The trees were more tree-ey, the sky was more sky-ey, the grass was grassier!! I had been blessed and granted the eyes to see and ears to hear and it was then that I truly started to have a relationship with God in my adult life.

Believing Before Seeing

Now,

to round it all off, if you’ve even made it this far.

I was bold enough to have the childlike imagination to actually start believing, without seeing, that God was beside me, before me, all around me and in me. Without a doubt there are many other major and minor components that had to be in place for me to get to that place, however, that does not take away from the fact that God can be found by taking your role seriously and finally starting to participate in this divine drama as a character who is fearfully and wonderfully made.

It seems my mother was right all along — not because Christmas is something we make up, but because it asks something of us. It asks for imagination, not fantasy, and, the courage to see what is already there. In that sense, it really is as real as YOU are willing to let it be.

Don’t be afraid to be childlike.

Don’t see it to believe it.

Do be still and know that He is God.

I had thought imagination was frivolous, or worse misleading. But in opening my eyes and heart to wonder, I realized it is the very thing that allows us to see God. It is in this space between believing and seeing that we encounter the divine.

IMAGINATION

IMAGE NATION

IMAGINATION and the IMAGO DEI

The Image of God and the Gift of Wonder

For those still seeking God, and indeed for any others interested, I’ve formulated some really helpful findings which break down what it is to imagine and how it can lead one to a spiritual life.

At the crux of it: because humans are created as imago Dei, we possess an image-forming faculty that participates, analogically, in God’s creative Logos.
Imagination, when purified and ordered, is not illusion — it is receptivity to meaning.

Please take the time to read below.

Yes I’ve used ChatGpt for quickness.

1. Latin: Imago → Imagination

🔹 Imago (Latin)

• Meaning: image, likeness, representation
• Central theological term in Genesis 1:26–27 (imago Dei)
• In patristic and medieval theology, imago refers to:
  • Humanity’s participation in God through intellect, will, and memory
  • Not merely visual likeness, but relational resemblance

🔹 Imaginatio

• Derived from imago
• In classical and medieval Latin:
  • Imaginatio is the faculty that holds and forms images
  • Mediates between sense perception and intellect

👉 Key insight:
Imagination is not opposed to reason — it is the inner image-making power by which humans receive, hold, and contemplate reality.

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2. Greek: Image, Participation, and Vision

🔹 Eikōn (εἰκών)

• Greek for image (used in Septuagint & NT)
• Used for:
  • Christ as the perfect Image of God (Col 1:15)
  • Humans as created images

🔹 Phantasia (φαντασία)

• Often translated as imagination
• For Aristotle:
  • A necessary intermediary between perception (aisthēsis) and intellect (nous)
• Later Christian thinkers refine it to avoid fantasy/error while preserving its role

👉 Greek thought emphasizes participation and contemplation, not fabrication.

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3. St. Augustine (4th–5th c.) — The Inner Image

📘 De Trinitate

Augustine links imago Dei to:

• Memory
• Understanding
• Will

Imagination participates indirectly through:

• Memory’s images
• Interior vision (visio interior)

Augustine sees the soul as image-bearing by orientation toward God, not by self-generated fantasy.

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4. St. Thomas Aquinas (13th c.) — Structured Imagination

🔹 Phantasmata

Aquinas teaches:

• The intellect cannot think without phantasms
• Even spiritual understanding is mediated by imagined forms

Key texts:

• Summa Theologiae I, q.84–89
• De Veritate

👉 Imagination is ontologically humble but epistemologically essential
It serves truth — it does not replace it.

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5. Medieval & Mystical Theology

🔹 Bonaventure

• Sees imagination as part of the soul’s ascent to God
• Images can either:
  • Trap the soul
  • Or become ladders to contemplation

🔹 Icons & Sacramentality

Eastern Christianity especially preserves:

• Image as window, not idol
• Imagination purified becomes theophanic

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6. English Tradition: Romantic & Christian Thought

🔹 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Distinguishes:

• Fancy (mechanical recombination)
• Imagination (participatory, living power)

For Coleridge:

Imagination is a finite repetition of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM

This is one of the clearest links between imagination and imago Dei in English.

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🔹 J.R.R. Tolkien

In On Fairy-Stories:

• Humans as “sub-creators”
• Because we are made in the image of a Creator

Imagination is not escapism — it is echoing divine creativity.

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7. Modern Integrative Thinkers

You may find these especially resonant given your interests:

• Hans Urs von Balthasar — theological aesthetics
• Jean-Luc Marion — image vs idol
• Owen Barfield — evolution of consciousness & imagination
• Ian McGilchrist — imagination, hemispheric attention, image-based knowing

Suggested Reading List (Starter Set)

1. St. Augustine – De Trinitate (Books IX–XIV)
2. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologiae I
3. Coleridge – Biographia Literaria
4. Tolkien – On Fairy-Stories
5. Balthasar – The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1
6. Barfield – Saving the Appearances

What was your path to God? Please share below.

Wishing you all a blessed and peaceful Advent!