Wonder, Worship, and the Imagination . . . and Dr. Who

I made a sketchy deal with my good friend Rebbiejaye the other night. I think there might have been whiskey involved on her end, but I have no such excuse--I don't drink and never have. At a friend's birthday party we somehow got on the topic of the wonderfulness of fiction and the imagination and how essential fantasy and science-fiction are to forming one's conception of God, blah, blah, blah, and she looks at me expectantly and says, "That's why we have to agree to write one fiction book for every non-fiction book. Deal?" I opened my mouth and stuck out my hand to seal the deal before my brain caught up to my excitement about the conversation. I ended up hemming and hawing and dithering a bit about how I tend to have extremely long fiction projects and how I didn't know if I could keep up with that production speed. But I found I believed in what she said so much that with a gasped, "with the Lord's help" (I think I was cringing and gritting my teeth at the same time) I sealed the deal. "Deal," I said firmly. "You know what that means, don't you?"

"What does that mean?" she replied.

"It means we'll really be like the Inklings." I say "really" because Rebecca and I have been in love with the life of the "Inklings"--C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others--since we were in undergraduate together. I read the biographical book The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter back in high school and went green with envy at reading about the life of people who spent much of their time in "imaginative academia." I dreamed of cozy philosophical conversations around a fireplace before I had ever studied philosophy and of writing stories that really mattered before I really understood what was important about stories. (One is always learning more about such things.) But it certainly is amusing when life catches up with dreams. In high school I really had no idea what the life of a writer or an academician might look like--PhDs don't exactly run in my family--but something about it fired my imagination.

Fast forward about ten years and I find myself in my last year of a master's of divinity program after having studied philosophy and theology in my undergraduate degree pondering PhD programs and making deals with my friends about writing fiction. How some things do stay the same! One thing that has remained constant in my life is the need I have to retain a sense of wonder about the cosmos in which I find myself living and a sense of how imagination influences my ability to think philosophically and theologically and my ability to relate to God at all.

Mystery is a key concept in Christianity. If you cannot understand mystery--the mystery of God, the mystery of salvation, the mystery of sin, even--you will have no room for the Trinitarian God of Christianity or anything he's up to either in the Scriptures or in your own life. And "mystery" does not mean theologically what it means in common parlance. Usually when modern Westerners use the term "mystery" they mean something that has yet to be explained but that undoubtedly will be explained by someone who is very clever.  People read mystery novels or watch movies or television or even go to dinner plays. But this is not at all what the word means in the context of God, the church, sin, and the world. Here, "mystery" means the ineffable--something that is in fact intelligible, inherently logical or able to be understood, but also inherently incommunicable or incomprehensible to human beings, i.e., possible to be understood, but not by us homo sapiens. Thus theologians will say that God is "intelligible" but incomprehensible and this isn't simple nonsense. One could sum up the book of Job by saying that it is a book devoted to capturing a good man's very real struggle with the mysteries of human life--both the beautiful ones and the ugly ones. Job was found to be more righteous with his friends because he could name the mystery and wasn't afraid to be angry about all the apparent contradictions of human experience. His friends were rebuked because they tried to pretend that the mysterious was comprehensible and easily managed.

Heretics in the early church provide us especially great examples of people who sought to explain too much, to have everything figured out, neatly categorized and easily referenced, to have God in control and nicely inside their philosophical systems--they were people who lost sight of the mystery of God: of God's everlasting capacity to surprise us, to go beyond our imagination, to exceed everything we could ask or imagine. What's more, when humans beings lose the ability to accept and respond to mystery, they lose the ability to be flexible and to cope with the depths of goodness and the depths of tragedy in their own lives and the lives of others.  Wonder, I think, is our response to the presence of the ineffable, the mysterious.  Wonder, I think tends to move in one of two directions: when the thing of mystery is seen as beautiful or good, we respond to mystery with love and adoration and extreme attentiveness.  When the thing of mystery is seen as something bad, we respond with horror or hatred.  In either case, wonder and mystery take us beyond the every-day and the humdrum and into something deeper.

On a more personal note, I wither and die when I lose touch with wonder. I fall out of touch with the world, my calling, my happiness. Things become dull and grey and I can't really function all that well. The petals of my flower come to bits and fall off and I conclude of the universe, "it loves me not." I imagine that many people do not have such a dramatic reaction to losing their sense of wonder, but it is nonetheless a discouraging thing.

But what does one do when the world suddenly contracts into something explainable, predictable and entirely two-dimensional?  How does one recapture a sense of wonder that has flitted away or get back  to seeing what is more than the eye can see?  There are many things one could do or say about this, no doubt. I will relate to you a story of a couple of different ways in which God jump-started my imagination in the past year and dwell for a bit on the second of those encounters.

The first part of my saga began last fall when The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader came out in theaters. There are many things to say about this movie, perhaps, some good, some critical--one could note the insertion of a completely extraneous "video game" style plot, for instance--and spend some time grumbling about how "Jack" would not be pleased. However, the thing that struck me the most, the thing that they got absolutely right was the sense of wonder at being in Narnia, especially seen through the eyes of Lucy Pevensie. The movie is visually stunning like her predecessors and very nicely captures the magic and beauty of life in Narnia--which is fully half the charm of Lewis' stories in the first place. Watching Voyage of the Dawn Treader reminded me that all of life was supposed to be beautiful and mysterious and imaginative and more than meets the eye. It started me questing to recover an attitude of wonder that I had lost.

But the thing that has truly inspired me over the last few months is the unexpected acquisition of another beloved science-fiction show, that is, the long-time British favourite: Dr. Who.

I have to make a few caveats. One, I gave up on science-fiction television after The X-Files went off the air in 2002. Little did I know about what was happening on the Sci-Fi channel--I had no idea about Stargate and I somehow missed Farscape and Firefly. (I also had a grudge against Joss Whedon for many reasons.  I have more or less repented.  Mostly.) It wasn't until I started seminary--ironically--that I picked up Stargate and with it some of the more recent sci-fi shows. Second, I was prejudiced against Dr. Who since high school: one of my friends who had notoriously bad taste in movies and television absolutely adored Dr. Who and I knew that meant I needed to avoid it.

Third caveat: when I saw the pilot of the reboot "Rose" I was not impressed. Evil plastic creatures enlivened by an evil plastic monster bent on enslaving humankind was not conversion material. I was fully prepared to be only "tolerant" of Dr. Who, but I been introduced to it with a group of fellow sci-fi nerds, so we ended up watching the second episode "The End of the World" which in which the principle characters of the show, the Doctor and Rose, are transported 5,000,000,000 years in the future to the day the sun goes nova and destroys the earth.

Just from watching the trailer I knew I was in completely new science-fiction territory. No other show has done this, I said to myself. In fact, no other show would do this. Its too risky--if you do something this dramatic and important and absolutely insane you feel you have to reduplicate your success. With few exceptions (Joss Whedon I now recognize as exceptional in this regard), science-fiction/fantasy shows tend to hoard their creative energy for the grand finale. There is reservation and moderation about the futures or possibilities that writers envision in order to maintain suspension of belief. You don't want to ruin something by doing something completely unbelievable.

But somehow through some magic charm or muse Dr. Who manages to break every single "rule" of the industry and get away with it. Dr. Who is a show whose creative potential seems absolutely limitless--they will tell a story about absolutely anything they can think of and somehow it always seems plausible. Somehow at the beginning of the episode and at the end of the episode I find myself saying, "Why not? Why not? How would I know? Why couldn't that be true?" And then, as the 9th Doctor likes to say, "Fantastic!"

Part of the reason why Dr. Who works so well is because of the attitude of the principle characters--especially the Doctor, but also Rose--in the first couple seasons of the reboot. The characters know the world they live in is absolutely mad and full of every kind of possibility and they are bursting at the seems with excitement that they have a chance to encounter it all. No one pretends like the things that happen aren't insane--they are insane, delightfully and sometimes dangerously so--and that's the whole point of being happy about the adventure in the first place.  And they understand the value of a "relative good".  Aristotle thought that shame was a relatively good thing in a world of people whose behavior was oftentimes blameworthy--feeling shame in certain contexts is better than not feeling shame.  C. S. Lewis once said something similar about "pain"--pain is God's "megaphone to rouse a deaf world" and thus is sometimes good.  I think he would agree that adventure and especially danger share that same status--in this mad world, its absolutely insane to encounter no danger.  Thus the Doctor and Rose are absolutely right to pursue such adventure in the face of many dangers. 

I think this taps into something we are sometimes hesitant to believe about what it means to be human. Being human involves being a part of a world in which absolutely anything could happen at any time. It involves living in a cosmos that we are hardly on the cusp of understanding the least detail of and it involves facing the unknown at every moment. We struggle mightily but labor in vain to form a construct of the universe in which everything is easily understandable and nicely under our control, but deep down inside we know that even if the cosmos is not a chaos, it is certainly not under our control and we really don't know what's going on in most of it. Modern life with all of its industrial abstraction sometimes provides for us an illusion of a life as a contained system capable of mastery . . . but that's really just boring. Life gets really interesting and really beautiful when we see the mystery and the unknown as beautiful and get excited about it.

This is why Dr. Who is such good stuff and such food for the imagination and for the soul. My current favorite set of characters are (cliche, I know) Rose and the 10th Doctor (played by David Tennant). What is absolutely riveting about these two is their mutual joy in seeing what the universe has to offer. They are constantly beset by danger and adventure as they roam about time and relative dimensions in space, but somehow they have a sense that in spite of the danger it is worth it to see what life has to offer. The Doctor is a person who has spent hundreds of years roaming the cosmos and he is still thrilled to death with the newness of it all, and his friendship with Rose consists in the fact that they love it in the same way.

There is one scene that sum up nicely the sort of spirit of adventure that is at the soul of Dr. Who. One is a conversation at the end of the episode, "the Christmas Invasion" between Rose and the Doctor.  Right at the end of the episode Rose, her mother, Mickey, and the Doctor have settled down to eat Christmas Dinner only to discover that its snowing outside.  They all go out to look.


Rose: It's beautiful! What are they, meteors?

The Doctor: It's the spaceship breaking up in the atmosphere. This isn't snow. It's ash.
Rose: Okay, not so beautiful.
The Doctor: This is a brand new planet Earth. No denying the existence of aliens now. Everyone saw it. Everything's new.
Rose: And what about you? What are you going to do next?
The Doctor: Well... back to the TARDIS. Same old life.
Rose: On your own?
The Doctor: Why? Don't you want to come?
Rose: Well yeah.
The Doctor: Do you though?
Rose: Yeah.
The Doctor: Well I just thought... 'cause I changed.
Rose: Yeah, I thought 'cause you changed you might not want me anymore.
The Doctor: Oh I'd love you to come.
Rose: Okay!
Mickey: You're never going to stay, are you?
Rose: There's just so much out there. So much to see. I've got to.
Mickey: Yeah.
Jackie: Well I reckon you're mad, the pair of ya. It's like you go lookin' for trouble.
The Doctor: Trouble's just the bits in between! It's all waiting out there, Jackie. And it's brand new to me. All those planets, creatures and horizons—I haven't seen them yet. Not with these eyes. And it is gonna be... fantastic.**

(Quotations Courtesy of http://www.planetclaire.org/quotes/doctorwho/christmas-specials/christmas-invasion.php)