Further Up, Further In!

The Baptism of My Imagination

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!”

With those words, so simple on the surface, but filled with such depth, C. S. Lewis captured my imagination, and I have never been able to free it since.

In Surprised By Joy, the spiritual autobiography of C. S. Lewis, he talks about how he picked up Phantastes, by George MacDonald, and how this caused the 'baptism of his imagination.' This 'baptism' was one of the stepping stones that led to Lewis' eventual conversion to Christianity. While this quote didn't lead to my salvation, it instead sat with me, even though I didn't know why.

the horizon calls…

"Come further up, come further in!"

I’ll return to the the depth of that statement later on, but right now, I want to sit on the idea of baptizing our imaginations. Baptism, in the religious sense, is symbolic of dying with Christ and being raised to life again. So, "baptism" means that our imaginations, which were dead or dormant, have been resurrected - they're alive and active now.

The imagination is a marvelous thing, and I've always had a pretty active one. I remember coming inside several times and my dad asking me, "Out there protecting the farm from the bad guys?"

Of course, in my mind's eye, it wasn't the farm that I was protecting. It was a world far, far away. Probably Mossflower Wood, from the Redwall books. Another day, it might be Narnia. On another, it could be one I invented myself.

This is different from C. S. Lewis' experience. For him, he had a lack of imagination. So, his baptism was one of death to life, while mine was instead a re-purposing, realigning it to something beyond myself. It's difficult to describe the feeling I experienced after reading that quote, but I will try.

It's the desire to go to a place that you've heard of, but haven't seen.

It's the feeling of anticipation when you're standing in line to board a plane, having never flown before.

It's moment before you dive into pool on a summer's day.

It's the realization that your friendship may be something much deeper.

It tells you that there's more to life than what you know or what you can see.

And yet, I think all of these fall short when it comes to the feeling I was left with. The only explanation I can give is that this statement had a deep spiritual meaning. More than a desire to jump into the pages and live, but to find what inspired the words. Therefore, it left me with a spiritual longing that I couldn't understand. It's the longing that C. S. Lewis references when he says,

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing."

I have fallen in love with the way Lewis writes about the Platonic forms - that the things we see and love are only shadows of what they could be, or are. I couldn’t know, when I read those words for the first time, that Lewis himself was pointing to something greater and more beautiful than his prose. Here, further along in my journey, I can look back and see how those words shaped my stories and my mind.

"Come further up, come further in!"

Even still, looking ahead, I can feel this tugging at my heart, calling me to write something that reflects more than the heartache and pain of the ‘real world.’ I write, not to escape, but to reflect the true world, one where peace reigns and justice prevails. And I hope, that if nothing else, what I write leaves others with the same longing. Not for the worlds of my imagination, but for the one above them all, the one that even our own reflects.

For, as far as my imagination can take use into a fantasy world of make-believe and wonder, true depth and meaning do not reside there. Nor does our perceived reality here encapsulate all of existence. How sweet are the moments when we taste the true reality of the great beyond, when the space between Heaven and Earth draws thin and we get a glimpse of what it means to be real.

I long for those moments. And I hope, through my writing, to provide moments. For my writing, like Lewis’, to capture the imagination of a reader - to baptize it, even if they do not know what that means yet.

In the interim, I look forward and hope. My journey is not finished, and my story has not ended.

Would you like to wander with me?