The boy smushed, pulled and tugged at Robin Williams' face, searching with great earnest. Shoving folds of middle-aged flesh back at the man's temples, the boy caught a glimpse of what he was looking for in the unrecognizable visage.
"Oh, there you are, Peter!"
Watching Steven Spielberg's surprisingly enduring 1991 film "Hook" (with Williams as Peter Pan) the other night, the words of that little Lost Boy put a lump in my throat.
Surely we are to put away certain childish things when we get older. But if we lose all of who we were when we were children -- the wonder, unfettered imagination and ease of faith -- we lose sight of our essential selves.
If we dismiss the illogical and fantastic out of hand in deference to what we believe are more appropriate adult pursuits, we risk losing our ability to experience whimsy, which is sacred.
Even as I write these words, I hear Bill Maher's voice in my head. A few years back, when the acerbic comedian and I sat down for a conversation about faith, he compared religious ideas to the belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.
"At a certain point, I just lost patience with the faithful and [with] pretending," Maher ranted, "pretending that this was something that was okay, to retain childish thought patterns into adulthood."
Next to Maher's card in my mental Rolodex is its opposite: Frederick Buechner's. The author and Christian apologist counters Maher's disavowal of faith with a passage from his (some would say appropriately titled) book Wishful Thinking: "If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child."
When I look in the mirror and am able to see past the image staring back at me, I see myself. The real me. And it's not the 40-year-old mother and writer with emerging crows feet. The person I see is a 17-year-old girl in a Joshua Tree tour t-shirt with no makeup on, wide eyes, rosy cheeks and her hair piled into a messy bun on top of her head. She practically trembles with anticipation of what is on the horizon -- a journey to a place she's never seen. A foreign land. The unexpected. Divine surprise.
One of my best friends says when she thinks of herself she's not a peri-menopausal mother of four surfing the waves of a hot flash. She's ten. A little people-pleaser, chocked full of optimism and curiosity. She's a blithe, silly-hearted spirit collecting wild flowers and savoring strawberry sandwiches in the summer sun.
In truth, I suppose, we are both. I am 17 and 40. She is 10 and 43. We are, each of us, all of the ages we've ever been. We don't shed our past selves and leave them by the side of the road as we speed away in our new personas, kicking up gravel while we spin rubber and careen toward the future.
I had faith when I was 10. I had faith when I was 17. I have faith at 40 and I hope still to have faith when I'm 80. Perhaps that makes folks like me spiritual Peter Pans -- "religulous" Lost Boys clinging to the magic of childhood, feasting at imaginary banquets and consorting with pixies.
But faith is supposed to be fantastic.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, my favorite contemporary mystic, puts it this way: "Faith is not something we can arrive at by a careful, step-by-step process. It is not something we can square with our intellect. Faith does not make sense, nor does it feel safe. It is what takes us further after the questions that can be answered logically have been exhausted. To have faith, we must let go. Faith is like swimming the backstroke, reaching above and behind is into an unknown we cannot see. Faith is like driving forward with only the rearview mirror as a guide."
Maybe God is as real or as imaginary as Tinkerbell.
Maybe sacred whimsy is best dismissed or ignored.
It's safer if it's not real.
But what if it's true?
How fantastic, impractical and wondrous if it is.
As in Peter Pan's world, maybe faith is a bit like flying. We all have the ability to fly. When we grow older, we forget that we can.
But if we believe, simply and, yes, childishly, flights -- of fancy and of faith -- are a very real possibility.
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I think that imagination is important.
To those who would say that to have an imagination is to be inferior, I would counter that nothing is ever accomplished without some imagination - religion aside. Would we work to cure any disease, for example, if we just accepted disease for what it was and didn't imagine that we may some day find a cure? Would we have sent men to the moon if the wonders of space didn't spark our imaginations?
I think it takes imagination to believe in God and though I have faith, I'm never one to say that it is logical - but I don't see "illogical" as the insult that many people try to make it out to be. Both logic and imagination are needed for this world, but those anti-theists would do away with the things of spiritual nature should at least acknowledge the value of imagination (even if they think some people's imaginations are bent toward the wrong things). In the end, what I know is that no one will "de-convert" me by telling me to put away my imagination or to "grow up." I just don't care about the values of the "overly adult."
What if it's not faith that's the delusion too many materialists like to claim it is? What if it is materialism that's the mistake?
But first, let me say this: Imagination is a good thing. Imagination is where we find the answers to our problems. It's where we find the inspiration for high achievment. Also, joy is obviously good. but it isn't necessary to find joy in things that are fictitious, or at least unproven. As an atheist, I find joy in the love of my friends and kids. Finally, I agree that materialism is also a mistake. All that we have, in which we can put our faith with absolute certainty, is that which we ourselves control, and that is pretty much just our own attitudes.
Let's assume that we all have kids who are learning to drive. Is there a scenario in which you would tell them to drive forward without looking? With only the rear-view mirror as guid, as the author said? Of course not. Because the results would likely be bad, and quite possibly be tragic. So why is blind faith good?
The author makes her case for the practicality of faith, that is why we should have it, but at the same time, admits that faith is inherently impractical. You know that this makes no sense. Faith is either good because it is proves right; or it is bad because it's wrong.
I maintain my inner child when I wear a cape in public (on my sons request) I don't need to believe in fairytales too.
My commentary was more of a pre-emptive strike on those people who would throw away imagination as worthless altogether. Atheism doesn't preclude imagination, it's just that I find so very few people on this site with the wit and wonder of atheist science fiction and humor authors I've read. Too many people here like to snark about how they "don't read fairy tales" when on topics like this, to which I think "Wow, they must have really boring bookshelves."
Maybe I take imagination a little too far by believing in a God? If so, it's merely taking something that is at its base, good, and being a little overactive with it. To be sure, I don't believe in one that's all sunshine and kittens, but I do have reasons in my own life for why my faith isn't *completely* blind - but it's more in the "plotty" way I see the world than an anything I can take to a science classroom or to a court. Perhaps it is a child's way of thinking, but I'd rather "believe in fairytales" and to hope that "maybe there's more than just this layer to existance," than in "life sucks and then you die." In the end, I'd rather live in my head than anyone else's and... well, I exist, people like me exist - reality even for those who wish we didn't.