The Pearl of Imagination

It was 10:30 last night and Matthew said, “Mom, tell me a story…just a super short story.”  So I finally succumbed and having been exploring how to share the parable of the pearl, I said,  “Heaven is like a beautiful pearl.”  He replied, “Is that it, is that the whole story?  It needs to have at least a ‘Once upon a time’.” So I, realizing, the nothingness of my first “story”, said, “Ok, then… Once upon a time there was a merchant who had many things: clothes and jewelry and a big house and all kinds of wonderful possessions like…….” Matthew interjected, “video games”,   “yes, and video games”.

“and, this merchant sold all of that for a single pearl.”  The pearl represents heaven or the kingdom of God.”

Matthew said, “ So the kingdom of God is worth less than all those things.”  I said, “no, the kingdom of God is worth…..well…. more that all those things.”

And he said, “No, Mom, because you said he sold his things for a pearl so they were of the same value.”

And I left his room frustrated and thought, I told the story wrong…how should I correct it?  And I thought, “ah-ha" and went back to his room and said,

“Actually there were two merchants, one selling pearls and one with many things and the one with many things recognized the specialness and value of the pearl and the one who had the pearl did not.  Matthew, what can you think of that is more valuable than all the things you have?  And you know what he said?  He said, “Imagination”.

And I said, “Wow, that is so true!”  And I thought to myself, imagination is how we connect to God.  And we feel and sense God and “imagine” what the Kingdom is like and try to compare it to our known reality which God did so amazingly well through His creative stories which connect our reality with God’s enormous and unmeasurable spirit.

And those people who find imagination to be a weakness have great difficulty finding God, who is unseeable and immeasurable.  And children, as Jesus points out, know God, because they still have the connection between their brain and their spirit and it comes out in creative wonder and imagination.

And I recalled in “Godly Play” by Jerome Berrymore, the concept of imagination as part of our human nature which enables us to meld the rational world with the spiritual world and to create a new framework for our meaning and purpose.

Symbols, such as the pearl, connect our world to an existential meaning found in our mind.  We access our imagination when we connect the two in such as metaphors and parables and sacred stories and liturgical actions.

Jerome Berrymore points out that Christ stimulates our imagination.  He brings out the image of God through relationships.  There is a critical ‘distance’ between the image created in our imagination and reality of our senses and without balance we are either to factual and scientific or to wondering and psychotic.

Wow!  I love that.