Making Maps

and the Sanctified Imagination

Thank you for joining me as a ruminate on making maps and the imagination. This time I’ve included an audio recording of the whole essay, read by me, for those of you who prefer to give your eyes a rest. Reading aloud has become a favourite activity for me and it is such a joy to read to my children, especially now that we are regularly reading novels (we still love picture books!). If you do listen instead of read, please note that there are images and links I refer to which you may want to look up. I have linked them in the text and in the footnotes.

Most mornings, I send my kids outside after we have breakfast and morning time. They need to get their energy out before we continue our studies. The trampoline is the easiest place to send them, but as it’s spring, the temperature goes up and down every day and this particular morning felt cooler than previous days. They came in after 2 minutes and declared that it was too cold. So I sent them out on an mission.  One of the first flowers to come up in the spring is coltsfoot. Its flowers grow long before its leaves. So I sent my kids to go out to find some in the front field that surrounds our house. I knew wasn’t a complicated mission, because they do grow all over our yard, but they are low to the ground and weren’t quite open yet that morning since the sun hadn’t unfurled them. They had to look and adjust their eyes and minds to find them.

This is the idea of a scavenger hunt, a common activity for children (and adults!). We can have a map of the area we are searching in, but that’s not the point. The idea is to look for something on a list, something we may not have thought was there, but when we look more closely, we see what we didn’t expect or had never noticed before.

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If you asked me two years ago if I could see myself homeschooling my children I would’ve said I wasn’t prepared or fit to do so. But I found people, books, and communities along the way that encouraged me. And a unifying element was story. In her essay, “Women, Work, and ‘Women’s Work,’” Ashely Hales similarly expresses that “what has come naturally has always been story.” Whenever I have doubts about whether I am doing enough for my kids as I teach them, I am reassured when I saturate them with stories that have a potent affect in forming our lives and imaginations.

For our daily “morning time” my kids and I create space around our kitchen table to lounge with cups of tea and hot chocolate and a mess of paper, crayons, pencils and markers at the ready to write and draw when we feel inspired. We read so many stories — the Bible, fairy tales, stories from the imaginations of many others and we take them in, drawing images of what resonates with each of us.

We are making a map together. We are marking what we have learned, where we have been. The stories become a part of the map in our imaginations.

We just finished reading the whole of the series of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. In the same vein, an equally loved book series we have been reading together is the Wingfeather Saga, by Andrew Peterson. My kids like to say how every single chapter ends with a cliffhanger and makes them want more. I would tell you that every book leaves me with a feeling of a deep ache for more, it leaves men feeling tender and softened to the story of who I truly am. I can feel that the author himself has felt the story deeply. And then it makes me want to write and create too.

In watching an interview with author and songwriter Andrew Peterson, he described how he had the idea for the series of books he wanted to write, but he wasn’t able to write it until he made a map of his fictional world. Then the story came together in his mind. This stuck with me. As I am writing and creating more and have so many ideas and wonder where to start, what to focus on — how am I making a map?

I feel it is a gift for me to linger at my table with my children and I would spend hours there if I could, but we do need to get up and exercise and get fresh air, but then we’re right back at the table bringing back all of our experiences and synthesizing together. This is repeated again in the evening when my husband comes home from work and the importance of family dinner. We share food with friends too, and this is an important site of meaning making and integrating with our communities.

We are training our minds and hearts and eyes to be more keen to see truth in a world where it has been obscured. We choose carefully what stories we bring into our lives.

I am especially mindful of maps as we prepare as a family to go on a 3-month road trip later this year. My husband bought us physical paper maps — a huge Rand McNally Atlas with extra images of all the National Parks throughout the USA. It is significantly different to look at the whole scope of the map and to see the many different routes to one location, rather than just putting in a destination into a digital device and choosing the quickest way there. Most often we use our GPS and only listen to directions without knowing where we really are.

Sometimes it’s hard to see where I’m going. Sometimes it feels as though I’m circling the same ideas and life lessons over and over again. I have a map in my hands, but it doesn’t feel like much use. I’m learning that what I create along the way is the map to my heart and my relationship with God. If I pay attention, I realize that each time I circle back around, I am coming to a deeper understanding. There are a lot of layers.

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The kids and I have been studying the story of King David, and part of this involved studying the statue of David, carved into marble by Michelangelo. A unique aspect of Michelangelo’s choice of pose was that he captured David in the moment before he killed Goliath rather than after Goliath’s defeat. We all know how the story goes — that David hit Goliath with a stone from his sling right between the eyes. But if you go back a bit in David’s story, you begin to understand more about his heart: “For the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7b). After meeting all of David’s brothers, God told Samuel that it was none of them who were to be the next King, so they waited for David to come in from the field and God told Samuel, “‘Arise, anoint him, for this is he’ Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward” (1 Samuel 16:12-13). David was chosen because God saw his heart.

The spirit of the Lord rushed on David. He was changed. It was a significant moment in his life, but he still had menial responsibilities, he still had to go out and tend his sheep. He wasn’t immediately going out to conquer Goliath. He lived quietly for a while, and King Saul didn’t know who he was right away. God was preparing him for more. He was giving him space in the field to let it settle, out with the sheep. His imagination was being formed poem by poem, song by song. I imagine him singing to his sheep, composing his songs, working out his frustrations, fears, joys, and longings. And how that day, after God’s spirit rushed upon him, how he’d have this deep sense of being made for more, but knowing he needed to be with his sheep. He saw what was in front of him and he loved them and cared for them.

The Psalms he wrote are a map of his heart.

Desert father Abba Poemen advised to “teach your mouth to say that which you have in your heart.”¹ It can be a very hard thing to do. It requires vulnerability and weakness, to admit what we want and what we actually are, don’t line up.

How can we say what is on our heart? Practice with the words of one who has walked the path.

So often we don’t say what is on our hearts because it puts us at too much at risk. It is hard because there is so much emotion behind. That emotion is the sehensucht — that longing for more, for wholeness, the joy. How does this point to what is true? In our culture we are encouraged to speak our own truth and we applaud each other for the courage it takes. What happens when we hear the words of others who have walked the path? Who have done the work? Those who don’t take short cuts with words, but live what they say?

I recently discovered a song that communicates this. It is called “Blue Flower”² by The Gray Havens. The songwriter, Dave Radford, was reading C.S. Lewis’s memoir, Surprised by Joy, when it jumped out to him that Lewis described a memory from his childhood where he called himself a “votary (admirer) of the blue flower.”³ Wondering what this meant, he looked it up and found that the blue flower was commonly used in German literature to symbolize a unsatisfied desire or longing that is just beyond reach. Lewis goes on to describe how joy is an “unsatisfied desire, more desirable than any satisfaction.” In composition, Radford describes how the song, Blue Flower, came together quickly, and during the writing process there was a point when the song changed, when the melody for a new hook came to him. He describes how the song began to say, “ok, let’s go.” Like the leader of the band taking everyone along. Or for me, as a listener, it feels like a sending out. I have to go and do something…make something.

What do we do with this ache we can feel? Like that feeling we get in a powerful scene of a movie, a song that brings a well of emotion, or a story we just can’t stop reading. It can be put aside, but what if we let it send us out into the world in a new way? This requires work. It’s an invitation to something more, but we need to accept it.

I had never read The Chronicles of Narnia until this past year with my children. The stories affected me deeply and in reading them aloud to my children it surprised me when it was hard to read certain sections. Jonthan Rogers recounts a story of a boy who wrote Lewis that he was worried that he loved the character of Aslan too much and that he loved him more than God. Lewis reassured him that in loving Aslan, he was loving God.⁴

I wanted to make something tangible to mark the end of our reading the Narnia series together. I’m sure I will read the stories again (we have already listened to the audio drama version of almost all of them as well), but this first time was significant. When I was perusing through the book section at Winners, I discovered a book of lacy paper cutouts designed by an artist and prepared for me to cut out on my own. There was a beautiful image of a lion and I knew I had to do it. But I knew I would need to practice before I came to it. All those detailed knife cuts require a deft hand, and I needed to become more familiar with the scalpel before I could do it well. So I began with a few other images and flowers and experimented with my own designs until I felt ready to trace Aslan’s floral mane.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was my favourite book in the series and in it there is a quote from Aslan, where he says “This was the very reason you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you will know me better there.”

It is hard to come back and remember. It is hard to have the spirit of God rush upon us and then arrive back in the day to day and remember all that glory and beauty.

We are inspired by those around us to continue to create. These moments are significant.“The flame-descending moments of inspiration are worthy and good, but they are not thing thing in itself to chase, the shiny new object of my latest affections,” cites Ashley Hales.⁵ There is work, a descent that happens when we create or take in these moments of revelation. The creating, whether it be with our own lives, or creating a physical piece of art, requires work and entering into and confronting painful aspects of our lives.

Aslan shows up in unexpected places at unexpected times. Sometimes only Lucy sees him, but she points the others to him. The map is not necessarily about showing us the way. It is about the journey and the seeking.

***

I don’t think my kids noticed the coltsfoot was blooming yet, but I wanted to direct them to it to find it for themselves. I could’ve told them exactly where it was, but rather, I said, “go find the little yellow flower growing everywhere.”

In going out to find the emblematic blue flower we may not find it, but we do bring something back with us, if not the blue flower. We are transformed in the looking for it.

And this seeking happens in community and around the family table. In my work of writing and creating I am learning that once I send my work and words out into the world, they are no longer mine. They become a part of my community and they take their transformation in the lives of others. It is an act of love as we all seek together.

1. Richardson, Jan L., In the Sanctuary of Women: A Companion for Reflection and Prayer, p. 130, 2010

2.

3. Dave Radford created a series of podcasts discussing the background of each of the songs on the album “Blue Flower” the title track which is of the same name.

4. Rogers, Jonathan, The World According to Narnia: Christian Meaning, in C. S. Lewis’ Beloved Chronicles, p. xi, 2005

5. Women, Work, and 'Women's Work'