Imagining scenes that aren’t just imaginary
Imagine yourself alone with your guardian angel on an open plain, suggests Francis de Sales in his Introduction to the Devout Life (1609).
Then, he says, imagine the angel setting before you paradise, full of delights and joys, and on the other hand hell, with its miseries. Kneeling in imagination before your guardian angel, contemplate both.
The aim is in prayer to choose heaven and reject the things of hell.
This business of imagining a scene is often called “composition of place” and is nothing more than a meditation technique to settle the mind when opening oneself to prayer.
It depends how one assumes the mind or psyche is constructed, but it could be thought of as giving the imagination something to be getting on with while the higher faculties are given over to God.
Often such a composition of place is attempted when contemplating a scene from the
Bible, such as the conversation of
Jesus with the woman of Samaria (a dialogue in which Jesus seems to enjoy the sharpness of his interlocutor’s wits).
Or it might be, at this time of year, a scene from the accounts of the Nativity.
I remember CS Lewis remarked in print that he had never been able to settle down and imagine such a scene, because he would forever be trying to fix upon one detail or other in it. I had thought the same sort of objection ruled it out for me, too. But after all this time, when I’m so much closer to death than to the beginning of my life, I have recently found some value in it.
I know that in part I’m constructing something rather like a Memory Palace, as used by the pre-modern practitioners of the ars memoriae.
That wasn’t my intention. But take the scene of the Annunciation. The Virgin Mary finds herself addressed by an angel telling her astonishing things about becoming the mother of Jesus. She must have been in some place at the time. Perhaps it was under the shade of a vine, or a fig tree, outside the house, at the side of an olive grove. She’d have been doing something, perhaps spinning yarn with a spindle from wool on a distaff. She’d be able to sing or recite poetry by heart while doing it. Of course she’d have known the Psalms and much else.
So there’s a setting for the entry of the angel. But it’s also a setting that can be returned to in imagination. Thoughts and associations become attached to it.
None of this is prayer, but it’s open to the possibility of prayer, just as going outdoors leaves you liable to a soaking from the rain.
This imaginative construct can be revisited when falling asleep, or when waking up in the middle of the night. As people grow older they have to expect midnight vigils which in youth would be swallowed by oblivion. Or so I’ve found. People differ and no doubt plenty endure insomnia in childhood, when they were poorly equipped to deal with it.
I don’t know whether my newfound capacity to let scenes form in my imagination will last. There can be no prescription for methods of prayer, and in any case it is impossible to tell whether an agreeable spell of imaginative interior meditation is “successful” as prayer. The person praying is less like a violinist than like a violin. He can’t hear the tune played.
Yet it’s the whole person that prays. It may be through feelings of pain and an inability to concentrate. It may be with remembered words, with music, or pictures or thoughts about people.
It’s perfectly natural, like going for a walk.