Room for the imagination: what's down in the basement?

Christian Century, August 26, 1998 by Elizabeth Andrew

The basement was a room without limits. When my sister and I donned our mother's pinned-up dresses the boundaries of reality--experience, parental rules, even natural laws--gave way. We became beautiful, and wise beyond our years. We could transfer thoughts by touching fingertips. With effort and a few words of magic, we could heal any wound. In the basement my sister and I gave ourselves over to that mysterious process by which children keep alive the realm of possibility. If I could act out the life of a castle troubadour, then my body contained the possibility of poetry and was one step closer to walking with those poems up the stairs, to where things were revealed.

The basement, then, was where I first knew that all things are possible with God. Of course, ever since I've relegated that knowledge to dingy, downstairs closets I don't visit very often. Faith the size of a mustard seed moving mountains? Spit and mud returning sight to blind eyes? Angels speaking in dreams? My imagination is too weak to encompass the honest possibility--the flesh-and-bones likelihood--that the stories are true. I'd rather avoid places of mystery, the way my liberal, Protestant upbringing taught me to do. I'm more comfortable living in the light part of the house where there are no ghosts, where what is on the surface is what's real.

And yet, if it doesn't engage the Unknown, the story I believe in is shallow. Perhaps angels speaking in dreams is just a metaphor, but as a writer I know metaphors work best when both their literal and figurative aspects are trustworthy. If I poohpooh the potential for divine visitation-that it happened, that it might still happen, to me--I damage the otherwise open invitation for God to enter my life. It's as if I say, "Be my foundation, God, but I like it sterile down there, brilliantly lit and with no secrets. None of this hocus-pocus." If I distrust the story of my faith, preferring a clean-cut, intellectualized translation, then all things are not possible with God.

Which is why I need to buy Frank's little bungalow. A house of faith must include room for the imagination--a place where matter and spirit commingle, a foundation solid enough to contain the elusive world of shades and shadows. Who knows? It's conceivable that anything could happen in a haunted basement. If there's space for mystery, then the house limits neither its inhabitants nor its God. It seems to me that doing my laundry by flashlight is a small price to pay.

Elizabeth Andrew is a writer and spiritual director who leads retreats and teaches at the ARC Retreat Center in central Minnesota. She lives in Stanchfield, Minnesota.