Our Father’s Eyes: Imago Dei, Moral Imagination and Compassion
Written by Ashley Schumacher, LAPC
The words image and imagination share a common Latin root: imago. An image is something we behold; imagination is the remarkable human capacity to hold, contemplate, and work with images within the mind.
That linguistic connection has often made me wonder if there is something more than etymology here, something that points toward a deeper theological truth about what it means to be human. What if it is one of the gifts through which God invites us to grow into the very Image in which we were created?
Scripture tells us that we are created in the Imago Dei the Image of God. (Genesis 1:26–27) Before we ever drew breath, we were not accidents waiting to happen or afterthoughts in the mind of God. We were eternally known, perfectly loved, and freely willed into existence by the One who is Love itself. God did not discover us. He did not stumble upon us. From all eternity, He knew us completely and loved us perfectly. God does not imagine as we do He does not form images, deliberate between possibilities, or come to knowledge through images or sequences of thought. His knowing is eternal, simple, and complete. Yet in creating us in His image, He entrusted us with the extraordinary gift of imagination, a faculty capable of contemplating truth, beauty, goodness, and love in ways that draw us beyond ourselves and toward Him.
Children naturally inhabit the world through wonder, play, imagination, and trust. As they mature, they necessarily develop reason, abstraction, and critical thinking. Those are good and necessary developments. But somewhere along the way, many adults don't merely outgrow childishness they lose childlikeness. Trauma, cynicism, efficiency, productivity, and even certain forms of education can disconnect us from the imaginative faculty that once enabled us to experience beauty, mystery, and relationships so naturally.
Children enter the world with an astonishing capacity for wonder. Through play, they imaginatively explore relationships, possibilities, beauty, and belonging. As we grow, reason rightly develops, but many of us also become separated from that imaginative way of knowing not simply because we mature, but because wounds, disappointments, shame, and the demands of adulthood teach us to become guarded. We often mistake this narrowing of perception for wisdom. Yet perhaps grace invites us into something quite different. Not a return to childishness, but a return to childlikeness. A redeemed imagination that once again becomes capable of wonder, compassion, contemplation, and purified love.
Theologically, Christian maturity is not a regression to childhood but a transfiguration of childlikeness. Innocence is lost, but through grace a deeper innocence, a redeemed innocence is possible. Tradition sometimes speaks of this as moving from the innocence of Eden, through the wounds of the Fall, toward the holiness of the saints. The end is not a return to naïveté but the fulfillment of what innocence was always meant to become.
What if the great irony is that the very faculty we often dismiss as childish was never meant to be outgrown at all? What if imagination was not a temporary bridge to adulthood but a lifelong gift, one that when purified by truth and grace allows us to participate more deeply and most accurately in reality rather than escape from it?
When formed by truth, ordered by reason, and opened by grace, imagination becomes one of the ways we come to know and love God more deeply. It allows us to enter Scripture not only as observers but as participants. It lets parables become encounters, and divine promises become something we can envision before they are fully realized. In this way, imagination is not opposed to truth; it can become its steward.
This is why I have become increasingly drawn to the idea of moral imagination.
Moral imagination, as I have come to understand it, is the grace-shaped capacity to perceive ourselves, others, and even our understanding of God through increasingly truthful images. It is not the invention of reality but capacity to creatively live within it, the gradual healing of perception so that what we see corresponds more closely to what IS, through the I AM.
We all carry interior images. Some are life-giving, others are distorted by fear, shame, trauma, or sin. Perhaps even our wounds testify to the gift of imagination. There are moments when the heart cannot bear what reality presents. In mercy, the mind finds ways of creating distance until what is unbearable can one day be faced (dissociation, depersonalization, and derealization). Trauma doesn't create a new faculty, rather it repurposes an existing one. What once helped us survive, however, is not where God desires or intends us to remain.
Beyond these physiological and cognitive trauma adaptations, relationally we may imagine God as distant, disappointed, or perpetually withholding. We may imagine ourselves as defined by our wounds, our failures, or what has been done to us. We may imagine others through reduction—labels, diagnoses, first impressions, or the worst thing they have ever done.
Over time, these images do not remain abstract. They shape how we relate, how we love, how we suffer, how we perceive suffering, and whether we see it as a devastating end of itself or something with possibility beyond it (post traumatic growth, redemption, and where possible, reconciliation).
Grace, through imagination, radically begins to heal what we see not by erasing or altering visual reality like a kaleidoscope, but by restoring our truest, clearest vision.
Little by little, we begin to recognize that our identity is not exhausted by our history, and neither are the histories of others. We experientially rediscover that we are held in being by God’s unchanging love, and that we bear within ourselves an irreplicable reflection of Imago Dei. We begin to see that other people, too, carry this same indelible dignity even when it is obscured by pain, confusion, or harm. In this way, moral imagination becomes inseparable from compassion.
Compassion literally means “to suffer with,” but we cannot suffer with someone we do not first perceive let alone perceive truthfully. Compassion begins not with action, but with vision. It begins when our way of seeing another person is enlarged beyond fear, judgment, reduction, or even allowing the wrong they have committed to become the whole of who they are. It does not ask us to deny injustice or excuse sin. Rather, it invites us to hold justice and mercy together by seeing, even beneath disfigurement, the irreducible dignity of a person created in the Imago Dei. Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus embodies this kind of vision. He sees what others do not. He sees dignity beneath disgrace, faith beneath fear, longing beneath hostility, and belovedness beneath betrayal. His compassion is never detached from His perception; it flows directly from it. Compassion is born when we begin to see others not merely through the lens of what they have done or what has been done to them, but through the eyes of Christ, who never ceased to behold the person in the enduring dignity of their Imago Dei even while confronting the sin in its distortion.
As I have reflected on this, I find myself thinking of a song that I have long loved. In Amy Grant’s Her Father’s Eyes, there is a simple but profound longing embedded in the refrain. At first hearing, it can sound like a song about resemblance. But over time, it reveals itself as something deeper: a desire to see as another sees to perceive the world through the eyes of love, mercy, and attentiveness that recognize what others might miss. It is to desire a way of seeing that is not governed by fear, self-protection, or self-preservation, but by an openness to Love in all His expression in reality.
This longing ultimately points beyond any earthly father to the Father revealed in Christ. Isn’t this, in many ways, the very heart of the Christian life? Not only to believe differently or to act differently, but to see differently.
Perhaps this is one of the deepest purposes of the imagination itself, not to create alternate realities, but to participate in the healing of perception so that reality may be seen more truthfully. As imagination is formed by grace, it becomes less a faculty of escape and more a faculty of the truest encounter.
We start to see, however imperfectly, with a kind of borrowed vision. Perhaps holiness is, in part, the lifelong process of receiving new eyes. And perhaps moral imagination is one of the ways grace gently teaches us to see through them
It feels fitting, then, to end with a gentle nod and salute to The Spiritual MFT's own morally imaginative logo, a concrete and visual embodiment of moral imagination enacted.
My prayer for you and for myself, dear reader, "the one wish for which I pray" is that, by grace and with self compassion, we may learn to see ever more with our Father's eyes: to behold God more truthfully, ourselves more mercifully, and every person we encounter more compassionately, recognizing in each the enduring beauty and dignity of the Imago Dei.
