Creativity activates imagination, and imagination is one of our most valuable spiritual faculties. Every aspect of the spiritual life requires some imagination. When you make a leap of faith, you are imagining as real whatever faith declares as true. When you find wisdom through reading a book or hearing a story or attending a workshop, you must employ imagination in order to visualize how that wisdom can be applied to your own circumstances. When you love another person through forgiveness or a listening ear or helping hand, you must first empathize, which requires the ability to put yourself in that person’s place. When you pray, you imagine the help that you need. When you make plans for the future, you construct a vision of what that future might be. When you must finally forgive yourself and move on, you can do so only by imagining a love that is bigger and more powerful than the normal sort of love of which you are capable.
You might think of the spiritual as intangible reality and of creativity as the means by which the intangible is made concrete so that you can experience it. However you think of spirituality and creativity, practice visualizing them as eternally linked.
– from “The Soul Tells a Story: Engaging Creativity with Spirituality in the Writing Life” by Vinita Hampton Wright Loyola Press
