Mission Moment

Dear Covenant Families, 

In January of this year, renowned artist and beloved educator Bruce Herman installed in our rhetoric building his seven panel contemplation on the seven liberal arts entitled Mystery and Manners. During our rhetoric school forum, like a good Covenant teacher, I opened with a purposefully reductive and irritating question: “Do you think of yourself as a teacher or an artist?” Professor Herman took exception to this either/or fallacy because, as he explained to our students, “Everyone in this room was an artist.” We were born artists, but something changed. When I was a child, I was not self-aware enough to call myself an artist, but I did take pleasure in using my imagination to create and play. My head was teeming with a new song every moment, often imitating the rhythms and melodies of the world around me. Another imaginative pastime was playing war. I especially loved putting on army fatigues and building pillow forts. At this age, the work of the imagination required little effort, so no one had to force me. And children today are no different. The games and creative activities might change - we did not know the pleasures of water bottle flipping when I was a child - but, the habit of imagining is alive and well. 

Professor Herman went on to note that at some point, we stop. Why we stop is curious, something he did not explain. Maybe we grow embarrassed by our childish imagination. Certainly to some, the imagination seems frivolous, all rainbows and unicorns. To others, the imagination is an extravagance, just for the wealthy or artistically inclined. Whatever the case, as we grow older, we tend to say goodbye to our imagination and provide a great amount of time and attention to reason, duty, and the daily grind of life.

Theologically, we have many reasons to believe in the importance of imagination. Genesis opens with a God who uses both reason and imagination to create something out of nothing, an artistic masterpiece he calls good. Then, he makes us in his own image (Genesis 1:26-27). In Latin, this image of God in which we are made is called the imago Dei.  We are made in God’s image, not to create out of nothing as God did, but to imitate God in our use of imagination. We also get to participate in his creative story by cultivating and caring for this gift as Jesus did.

Jesus’ parables make concrete for us the abstract idea of God’s Kingdom. The Lord’s Prayer provides the disciples not with a long intellectual discourse on prayer but images (father, heaven, kingdom, earth, bread) that suggest more than they tell. Of course, all of the Bible, though divinely inspired, requires great imagination to write and great imagination to read.

So, how do we cultivate the imagination? Many of us were attracted to Covenant’s classical curriculum because we agree with Charlotte Mason that children should be exposed to works of the imagination (stories, painting, songs). Mason believes that not just any nourishment will do. “The imagination grows by what it gets,” she says. Just as a healthy diet requires the right quantity and the right quality of food, so too the imagination needs living ideas found in the great works our students encounter. This need to cultivate the imagination makes sense to many of us. C.S. Lewis tells us that reading George MacDonald’s fairy tales baptized his imagination, and prepared him to accept the truths of the gospel. We have our own experiences of great works that changed us and provided a greater access to the truth.

But, are stories the only place our imagination is cultivated?  We know that God has created a physical world, one that the Psalmist says “reveals his glory.” At Covenant, then, we believe that the imagination is cultivated in our physical, real-world experiences too – whether it's playing on the playground, manipulating bar models in math, or water coloring all the fine details of a leaf. Getting out into God’s creation is just as life giving to our imagination. 

So, if both physical reality and story cultivate the imagination, we need to finally consider what we are feeding on. Yes, we need to be conscious of our child’s imagination. But what are we getting? It is so easy to veg out, on an infinite feed of Instagram/Facebook reels, or YouTube shorts, or get caught up in the next X controversy. It seems that whatever we are doing, it is making our imagination even more restless. Perhaps this is why Bruce Herman reminded students that “we were made by a maker to be makers, and our hearts are restless until we make something.”

Join us this year in learning more about the importance of cultivating the imagination in these four Project Standfast events.

Mark your calendars!

1. Thursday, September 26  – Our Restless Imagination: A Panel Discussion of Haidt’s The Anxious Generation
   • The panel will consist of:
     • Psychologist Dr. Cristina Sevadjian
     • Family physician Dr. Hillary Lewis
     • Grammar Head Laura Mountjoy
     • Logic Head Melissa Hill
     • Rhetoric Head Chris Schmidt
2. Thursday, November 14 - The Great Conversation: A Joyful Celebration of Imagination where we will get to learn more about the great works that cultivate our imagination at Covenant. Join us for dinner at 6:30. 
3. Thursday, January 16 - A World Full of Marvels: Why Ms. Mason Believes We Are All Naturalists with John Muir Laws 
4. Thursday, March 20 - Reading for the Love of Family: How Great Books Feed Our Family’s Imagination with Jessica Hooten Wilson, Ph.D.

Non Nobis,

Brett Tohlen
Academic Dean