“Some of us embrace the Bible with our hearts, which is right to do, and yet we do not bring disciplined minds into the process. Sometimes the reverse is true: we apply first-rate minds to the Bible and yet fail to be sensitive to what the Word is whispering to our hearts. In the end, it is not a heart problem, nor is it a head problem. It is an integration problem. We must ask the Lord to help us bring our whole self to the task of listening to the Bible. How can we begin to reconnect what became disconnected at the Fall? How can the heart and mind become reintegrated?
The imagination is the vital bridge between the heart and the mind. It is the means by which the Spirit begins to reconnect what was disintegrated by the Fall. This explains why the majority of the Bible is seeking to recapture our imaginations, whether it is the poetry of the psalms, the imagery of the prophets, or the luminous parables of Jesus.
Often we are tempted to believe that the commentary or the lecture is an end, the final word. Here are the facts: record, digest, and the work is done… the lecture is only the seed, not the fruit. We are called to move forward on our own, interacting with heart and mind, continually asking what all the facts mean… We are being conformed to His image as we engage our hearts and minds, by means of the imagination, with the Word of God.” - Michael Card, from his commentary on Luke
“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.” - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra:
“What you have made me see,” answered the Lady, “is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than aother has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. But this I had never noticed before–that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished–if it were possible to wish–you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had good. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other. […] And this is the glory and wonder you have made me see; that it is I, I myself, who turn from the good expected to the given good. Out of my own heart I do it. One can conceive of a heart which did not: which clung to the good it had first thought of and turned the good which was given it into no good.”
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
It was the first time he had looked steadily at her, himself unobserved, and she seemed more strange to him than before. There was no category in the terrestrial mind which would fit her. Opposites met in her and were fused in a fashion for which we have no images. One way of putting it would be to say that neither our sacred nor our profane art could make her portrait. Beautiful, naked, shameless, young–she was obviously a goddess: but then the face, the face so calm that it escaped insipidity by the very concentration of its mildness, the face that was like the sudden coldness and stillness of a church when we enter it from a hot street–that made her a Madonna. The alert, inner silence which looked out from those eyes overawed him; yet at any moment she might laugh like a child, or run like Artemis or dance like a Maenad.
I was questioning him on the subject [of his interstellar travel]— which he doesn’t often allow—and had incautiously said, “of course I realise it’s all rather too vague for you to put into words,” when he took me up rather sharply, for such a patient man, by saying, “On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language.”