Why our culture is so bland and what to do about it

It seems to me that our modern society suffers from a lack of imagination. Movies are all sequels to franchises that are decades old. Pop music all sounds the same. The literary arts are stagnating and best-sellers are ghost-written rehashes of the same old stories. Even in the Church, new parish buildings are bland and unequal to the splendor of what sacred architecture used to be. Students are, allegedly, using AI to write their papers and professors are, allegedly, using AI to grade them. Everyone stares at their phones. And is it just me or is everything from cars to furniture and wall-color now just a shade of blue and gray? Where did all the color and pattern go? Imaginative creativity is a shadow of what it used to be.

How can we recover it? The source of imagination isn’t, perhaps, located where people think it is. It isn’t the special gift of a few, eccentric creative-types with exotic theories they learned in art school. All of us have imaginative faculties, and the imagination is not only vital to our happiness but it arises from making a deep, spiritual connection with God. If we want to recover our cultural imagination, it will require returning to spiritual faith.

One great example of this is Pope St. Gregory the Great, whose feast day is this week. In the 6th century during his pontificate, he realized the Church needed a liturgical reform. At that time, Holy Mass as it was celebrated from place to place had quite a few variable prayers and liturgical practices. When it comes to prayer, there’s a delicate balance between local variation and clutter. St. Gregory thought that the pendulum had swung too far in the direction of clutter. Too many ideas and concepts were jostling for liturgical space, had become confusing, and tacked-on local customs were becoming distractions from the main purpose of the Mass, which is the Eucharistic sacrifice.

In simplifying the liturgy, St. Gregory brought unity and clarity to the prayers. It was almost like he’d found a gemstone which he then cut and polished so it would shine more brightly. The form of the Mass he gave to the Church with his reforms didn’t actually add or change anything that was already there. He achieved addition by subtraction.

I find the Gregorian reform fascinating because it wasn’t about adding more intellectual content to the liturgy. It didn’t make the prayers more contemporary or layer on any intellectual explanations. Instead, it focused in on the central mystery of the Eucharist. St. Gregory wanted the beauty of the Mass to achieve imaginative power. He wanted the ancient symbolism of the liturgy to grip all those who participated and bring them into the very life of God.

Essentially, he sought a reform of the imagination.

The imagination is a wondrous quality. Through it, we mentally contemplate images that straddle two worlds. The images are first formed in our minds through our senses. We see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the real world around us. The images begin in physical reality and form pictures in our mind – a lamb, a flame, wine, bread – and those pictures enter our imaginations where they’re transformed. The lamb becomes an innocent sacrifice, the flame a consuming love, the bread the very Body of Christ to be consumed, and so on. That which exists in time enters into the timeless. We remember the past, dream about the future, and make connections from individual, real things with universal concepts.

The human imagination, from the very beginning, has been active. For instance, there are ancient drawings inside of caves, before cities were settled or writing was invented, of bulls and deer. Ancient men had seen those animals in the wild and, in their imagination, the animals came to symbolize strength, speed, and beauty. The animals had become sacred.

Through the imagination, the individual creatures reflected eternal qualities. This divine reflection is exactly what St. Gregory sought to protect in his liturgical reform. He knew that God is not an intellectual concept but is the Source of Personhood and Beauty. This means that, in addition to knowing about God intellectually, we come to know him also through the imagination. In fact, St. Gregory goes so far as to write, “We make Idols of our concepts, but Wisdom is born of wonder.”

In other words, intellectual concepts only get us so far. A sunset, a mountaintop view, a beautiful liturgy, a child playing, a garden, a full moon, these are sensible experiences that create wonder. The more we wonder, the more our imagination does its work. It makes connections to the Truth. All that we experience is a symbol of a higher order.

This has always been my experience. The more attentive I am to imaginative wonder, the better my relationship with God becomes.

Ultimately, St. Gregory understood the source of imagination is the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, the imaginative symbol imparts perfect knowledge of love. It’s transformative, bringing us as individuals into the universal love of Christ.

If we want to recover our imaginative creativity, if you, like me, are confused about why our culture has become so shallow, the answer is the return to the Holy Mass in all its mysterious, symbolic beauty. We don’t need to explain it, intellectualize, or make it more contemporary. Instead, we ought to focus in, crystal clear, on the poetic, sacred heart of it.

The image of Christ makes sacred all other images and enables a burst of creativity and beauty. This is why the Church built magnificent cathedrals, wrote hauntingly gorgeous music, invented universities, put up telescopes to examine the moon, and produced great painting and sculpture. This is how recovering the sacred imagination can save our culture.