Our thoughts are always present to God… God searches hearts and minds Psalm 7:10…. The Lord knows the thoughts of men Psalm 94:11…. From afar you know my thoughts Psalm 139:2…. That he may take care to avoid sinful thoughts, the virtuous brother must always say to himself: I shall be blameless in his sight if I guard myself from my own wickedness Psalm 18:24. (Rule of St. Benedict 7.14-18)
Invite the Holy Spirit into the house of your mind Romans 12:2 ; Revelation 3:20. The dark and horrible corridors hold no terror for him. Hand him the keys, and you will find that the doors you tried so hard to keep locked will soon be propped open. A ray of light will penetrate even fearful corners. A breath of air will stir in stagnant places. The Holy Spirit will not demolish your imagination: he will inhabit it.
Your imagination is not the part of yourself that you must overcome. Rather, your imagination is the organ God endows you with to help do the overcoming. Just as he designed the human body with a liver that filters out toxins and aids in digestion, he designed the human mind with imagination. If you were never exposed to toxins, you wouldn’t need the liver to be the heaviest organ in your body. If you were living in the Garden of Eden, an impure thought would never enter your mind. But even if you lived in a pristine environment, you wouldn’t necessarily do the right thing in it. Adam and Eve certainly didn’t. Conversely, history shows that the holiest people have often been exposed to terrible things. Removal from contamination does not guarantee righteousness. Proximity to evil does not produce sin.
It’s true that moral toxins can overwhelm the imagination, just as alcohol abuse can overwhelm the liver. You shouldn’t expose yourself deliberately to poisonous influences. But day after day, a functioning imagination helps us process the moral challenges to which a fallen world exposes us.
For example, there are occasions when the task that duty calls you to is onerous, boring or repellent. When you’re cleaning up vomit off the floor, should you fully engage in the moment with all of your faculties? Because the sight and smell of vomit can induce such nausea that you’ll be unable to complete the task. In such a situation, the imagination offers a way to distance yourself–to redirect your attention–so that you can complete the task without quite focusing on it. At the end of the day, right action remains the standard of right living. If your weird fantasy helped you do your duty, then you’re in better shape than the people who ran away from responsibility because they couldn’t enjoy the moment.
The imagination also serves as an aid to right living when we rehearse various options for behavior. When we’re angry, we may imagine any number of phrases we could say to the person who has offended us, or vengeful actions we could take. But what do we actually say and do? The imagination gives us a way to consider the consequences of wrong behaviors without actually living them out. Sometimes it’s only through the process of imagining a wrong behavior that we come to feel that it is wrong. The important question is whether, after imagining our options, we reject the wrong and choose the right.
A third way that imagination helps us is by entering into evil, not to embrace it, but to combat it. If you want to vanquish evil, you must gain an understanding of how it works. Not all thinking about evil things is sinful, not anymore than working with a deadly virus is sinful, if your goal is to find a vaccine. However, you must take precautions. Don’t underestimate the thing you’re called to combat.
Your imagination also provides a place to escape to, when you’re too weary to cope with reality. Sometimes your fantasy reveals a specific stressor that you need to address. In constrained situations, the escape into fantasy may be the best alternative available. We live in a culture with fewer physical challenges than ever before in human history, but with overwhelming mental challenges that produce chronic psychological exhaustion.
God knows all of this. Even in our most intimate, most embarrassing, most bizarre moments, we can always turn to God and ask for grace to grow into habitable dwellings for the Holy Spirit. When we feel ourselves inclined to evil, we should admit it and ask for strength to behave rightly. Entrust your thoughts to God, and keep dreaming.