The Joy of Fantasy

Check out the great fantasy blog Spot of Mummery. Reading it has inspired me to use picrew.me to make my own fantasy character. I think I’ll call him Eliseo, the Spanish form of the Old Testament prophet Elisha. I want to imagine him as a great miracle worker like Elisha, traveling the world and spreading the Gospel of the Risen Christ.

But like Elisha’s master Elijah had, I imagine that Eliseo in his travels would come to compete against the prophets of demons. Imagine for a moment a gathering in a city center, where Eliseo is pitted against a whole school of satan’s followers. The false prophets are dressed in bright colors of flowing fabric to attract attention, in colors like yellow and red and white. It’s as though they’ve embraced fire as their emblem.

Eliseo decides to show them what real fire from heaven is like. He calls loudly on the name of the Lord and the city trembles to its foundations. But instead of having called down flames to consume the satanists, Eliseo performs miracles that prove to them the Deity of Christ. He heals them of their diseases, from blindness to lameness, showing the satanists the true power of Christ.

The false prophets turn from their errors, trust in the name of Christ, and receive now the flames of the Holy Spirit upon their heads, just like at Pentecost. Eliseo is pleased to welcome his new brethren to the Church.

How did I come up Eliseo’s story there? I’m not especially creative, but I love to fantasize. God made me that way. God made you that way, too.

Created to Create

We were made in God’s image, you see, so He gave us a measure of many of his attributes. God is imaginative, logical, artful, impressive, powerful—in short, creative. So I believe we have been given the power to create, and fantasy is one way to do so. When we do create or fantasize, I believe we are fulfilling part of our purpose as humans. That’s why we feel the joy.

Now God can call into being what doesn’t exist. We can do something similar in our imaginations. But God did not confine our imaginations only to our minds. Think of all the grand works throughout history that began as puffs of thought that we nonetheless gave a sort of life when we put them on paper, screen, or canvas. Many we even sculpted, acted out, or sung. We have created instruments out of the metals in the ground, so that when air passes through them music bursts forth. We have gathered together mud and straw to make bricks, upon which our civilization was first built, to make stages to perform those instruments. We’ve even created ways of recording those performances for later generations yet to live.

Fantasy is a Gift from God

It was once considered fantasy that we’d one day fly through the skies. It was fantasy that we’d build up to those skies and scrape them. It was surely fantasy that we’d break through those skies to the blackness above to where the stars dwell. Isn’t it fantasy today that we’d ever reach those stars?

Yet since we were created, we’ve been reaching for those stars, grasping physically and in imagination. When the fantasy becomes reality, there is joy indeed. When it doesn’t, there can admittedly be mourning. But it’s in making the fantasy that there can be so much joy. The first musical instrument no doubt took trial and error. So did the first space flight. So I encourage you to not see fantasy as childish, but as part of our humanity. We were created by God to fantasize and to create. It’s a way we can be like Him.