We need to practice remembering what we have forgotten.

Madeline L’Engle says, “All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations as they grow older.

Remember when you could fly over your neighborhood?

Finley Eversole writes, “In our society, at the age of five, 90 percent of the population measures “high creativity.”

By the age of seven, the figure has dropped to 10 percent. The percentage of adults with high creativity is only two percent!

Our creativity is destroyed not through the use of outside force, but through criticism, innuendo, by the dirty devices of this world.

So we are diminished, and we forget that we are more than we know.

In her must-read book, Walking on Water, L’ Engle tells the story:

“When I was a small child, visiting my grandmother at her beach cottage, I used to go down the winding stairs without touching them.This was a special joy to me. I think I went up the regular way, but I came down without touching. Perhaps it was because I was so used to thinking things over in solitude that it never occurred to me to tell anybody about this marvelous thing, and because I never told it, nobody told me it was impossible.

When I was twelve we went to Europe to live, hoping the ait of the Alps might help my father’s lungs. I was fourteen when I returned, and went to stay with my grandmother at the beach. The first thing i did when I found myself alone was to go to the top of the stairs. and i could no longer go down them without touching. I had forgotten how.”

Remembering the things we have forgotten is one of the reasons for all art.

This remembering is not understood by the church, by seminary trained rational thinkers—nor by our Western culture’s black and white rational thinkers—whose creativity has been spanked out, combed out, churched out and educated out. It is those sort of people who tell us to “grow up for God’s sakes” because of what they have allowed to wither in themselves.

But, if we do not practice remembering, (that is, practice knowing our spiritual minds, knowing contemplation, knowing imagination and our forgotten memories,) we will only survive our allotted days, not LIVE them.

Question: Do you remember when you could fly? What have you forgotten?

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