Children, Imagination, and the Recovery of the Image of God

By Lanie Anderson

For most of our marriage, my husband and I lived in Oxford, Mississippi, a lovely literary town and home to the University of Mississippi where we met. You can imagine my excitement when I found a large, framed print of Oxford’s town square in our local thrift store—for only ten dollars.

I couldn’t believe people had overlooked this gem. I took it home, cleaned its frame and glass, repainted its mustard mat, and hung it up. I snapped a picture and shared my find with Facebook friends, many of whom I know because of our time in Oxford. I knew they’d understand my excitement.

I didn’t recognize the artist’s name scribbled on the bottom right corner, but a Facebook friend commented, “That’s my mom’s print! She’ll be so excited to know someone is still enjoying it!” The woman who commented is an artist in her own right, one I had interviewed in Oxford while I was a journalist for a local magazine.

Within a few minutes, she messaged me a photo of her mom working on this piece that now hangs in our home. She’s sitting in a chair in the town square, sketching the scene before her of the town’s inaugural Double Decker Arts Festival in 1997. Her daughters are on either side. One is lost in a huge lollipop and the other, in her mother’s work.

Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood

Without even knowing the artist in this photo, I’m confident her margin to create must have been thin. This is what strikes me most about the photo as a mom of two very young children. When I became a mom almost six years ago, writing was pushed to the margin, and I didn’t know if I’d ever find it again. When I did find a crack in time to write, my ability to put coherent phrases and sentences together on a page seemed almost impossible; all of my mental energies had gone to less exciting but necessary endeavors like getting more sleep with a newborn or adjusting to life during a pandemic.

However, as our first child got older, my creativity exploded. I learned how to flip and paint furniture (although I’m still an amateur). I ventured into new skillsets like copywriting and design. I began to see the potential in thrifted items (like my print of Oxford’s town square). I recovered my childhood love for making jewelry after I bought my daughter her first beads and string. And I started—slowly—to write again.

At first, this was a mystery to me. Why did I have so much less margin yet so much more imagination? While reading books on motherhood, I discovered other moms who had uncovered—or recovered—this fresh creativity within the margins of time that motherhood allowed.

In her book To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma, Molly Millwood shares about how she was born into a family of musicians and took piano lessons for eight years herself. However, Millwood writes, “The thought of [being on a stage the way my family members were] terrified me… I always considered myself just a quiet but deeply enthusiastic observer of the music other people were making.”¹

Seven years into motherhood, Millwood would walk into a recording studio and record two songs she’d written herself. How did such a transformation take place? Millwood credits her children. While rocking both of her sons as babies, she sang to them “without inhibition,” and her husband soon encouraged her to share her gift of singing with others outside these private, tender moments.² She writes,

I know now that the desire to sing and make music has always been in me. Some of my happiest memories from adolescence are of singing my heart out to Carole King and Aretha Franklin with my friends, all of us piled into my little 1976 Honda Civic hatchback that we’d named Tangerine after the Led Zeppelin song…

Gradually a part of me that had long ago gone underground was beginning to surface… I was immersed in a process of self-discovery or, perhaps more accurately, recovery. I was (and still am, years later) recovering a dimension of myself I had denied. Buried. Lost. Until, in motherhood, it was found.”³

Imagination and the Imago Dei

As a mother, I resonate with so much of Millwood’s maternal recovery of creativity. But as a Christian, I’ve wondered if something beyond self-discovery is at play in these testimonies from mothers I’ve read about how their creativity spiked once they had children. Then a missing link emerged while reading The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers in preparation for this year’s reading retreat for The Society for Women of Letters.

What does it mean that man is made “in the image of God”? In her book, Sayers asks, “Is it his immortal soul, his rationality, his self-consciousness, his free will, or what that gives him a claim to this rather startling distinction?”⁴ Sayers believes a case can be made for all of this, but she presses the question of what commonality the writer of Genesis wants us to find between God and man. “The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.”⁵

However, we cannot create ex nihilo like God; Sayers writes, “We can only rearrange the unalterable and indestructible units of matter in the universe and build them up into new forms.”⁶ She argues that the closest humanity comes to to creating “like God” does not actually occur in the rearrangement of matter but in the imagination of minds, and that’s best exhibited by the artist:

It is the artist who, more than other men, is able to create something out of nothing… The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to “creation out of nothing,” and we conceive of the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist. Thus Berdyaev is able to say: “God created the world by imagination.”⁷

Sayers’ argument gets to the heart of my own thesis. Children are born with an imagination unimpeded by the materialistic assumptions of our society. In a child’s mind, God’s world is pregnant with possibilities for imagining and, by extension, creating. If we surrender to it, this imagination is just as contagious as the foreign germs and viruses Mom and Dad might catch in the early months of a child’s exposure to others. This is why I think so many mothers are writing about their experiences of explosive creativity in the early years of motherhood: the more we enter the minds of children, the more we recover something essential about the imago Dei in us.

“Our Father Is Younger Than We”

My daughter is what G.K. Chesterton calls an “ocular athlete.”⁸ When she first saw me using a highlighter, she said, “Mom, you’re lighting up the words!” When we flip the light switch on in her bedroom, we’re not “turning on the lights” but “lighting up the dark.” One day, she saw me crying, and I explained that my heart was hurting but would be okay with time. She ran to her room and got her toy stethoscope, ready to treat my ailments. She listened to my heart and said, “Mom, your heart is beating sad.”

Children have a sensitivity to God’s world that makes imagination not only possible but nearly infinite. As we age, our imagination shrinks, whether because of life experiences, philosophical commitments, or even daily habits. As Chesterton puts it, “It may be that [God] has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”⁹ But what if this uninhibited imagination of children is a ministry to our adult souls, a gift of God’s grace to see the world as ripe with possibility like we did when we ourselves were children?

If it is true that imagination is the closest we come to imitating the mind of our Maker, then, Sayers argues, “it is the creative artists that we should naturally turn for an exposition of what is meant by those credal formulae which deal with the nature of the Creative Mind.”¹⁰ She continues,

Actually, we seldom seem to consult them in the matter. Poets have, indeed, often communicated in their own mode of expression truths identical with the theologians’ truths; but just because of the difference in the modes of expression, we often fail to see the identity of the statements. The artist does not recognize that the phrases of the creeds pilot to be observations of fact about the creative mind as such, including his own immediate apprehension of truth.¹¹

The artist and theologian need one another, but I would take Sayers’ argument one step further and say that both need to consult the children from time to time.

Essayist Leslie Jamison explains why, unexpectedly, child rearing has a sensitizing effect:

Being with my baby every hour of every day demanded close attention, not just to her… but also to everything else, because the alternative to paying attention was growing bored out of my mind. My hunger for stimulation meant my gaze was sensitized, the way your eyes can see more after you’ve spent a few minutes in the dark.¹²

To be sure, a commitment to children is a surrender to limitations (of things like time, energy, sleep, and money!), but it is also an invitation to see God’s world through sensitized, childlike eyes. In a society that increasingly sees children only in terms of their limitations on self-actualization, may the Church see them as an embodiment of Genesis not only to “be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it,” but also to bear God’s image through imagination.

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—Lanie Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of Shadowlands Dispatch and a member of The Society for Women of Letters Leadership Council. She earned her MDiv with a specialization in Christian Apologetics from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and also holds a BA in English from the University of Mississippi. Lanie has written for Christianity Today and The Center for Faith and Culture. She currently stays home with her two children and works as a creative contractor.

1. Molly Millwood, To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2019), 227.

2. Ibid, 228.

3. Ibid., 228-29.

4. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1987), 22.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., 27.

7. Ibid., 29.

8. G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles, in The G.K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books] (Totowa, NJ: Catholic Way Publishing, 2014), 2646, Kindle.

9. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, in The G.K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books], 282, Kindle.

10. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 30.

11. Ibid.

12. Leslie Jamison, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020, quoted in Catherine Ricketts, The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitations, and Creativity (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2024), 103.