Beauty

Beauty

I’ve been seeking beauty lately, thinking about it, writing about it, appreciating it and longing for more of it. Winter has grown dull. Fall’s tawny golden grasses and rich browns are faded, dull and washed out. The landscape is drab. Fortunately, all this outside monotony has been has been interrupted by unexpected surprises —fire red sunsets, golden dawns and shining trees wrapped in translucent ice. Heavy mists and fogs have come to blend the stark views into gentleness. On cloudless nights, the stars are bright and the moon clear. Inside, on a deep window sill, crimson amaryllis opened and pink cyclamen began to bloom. In little pots on the dining table, delicate green grass-like shoots of Norway Spruce and Rocky Mountain Bristle Cone Pines are sprouting from seed to soak up sunshine. Candlelight suppers soften the stainless steel in a utilitarian kitchen.

This desire for beauty seems to be universal, hardwired into human beings. The barest poorest homes are usually brightened by a spot of beauty—a bit of shining glass, a feather or a flower and perhaps a curtain, rug or colorful bedcovering.

Beauty (and the need for it) has an objective reality far beyond our personal tastes. Countering the idea that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” opinion surveys asking “What is beautiful?” consistently show (despite wide cultural and individual variations) that most of us agree about what’s beautiful and what isn’t.

Physicists and mathematicians recognize an objective reality and verifiable truth in beauty. They are led to accurate equations and factual truth by the elegance, simplicity and beauty in their theories and solutions. (See Thomas DuBay, The Evidential Truth of Beauty, 1999, Ignatius Press)

In our daily lives, beauty softens us; it opens us up to relationships. It speaks to us on many levels. Men give flowers and lovely jewels to the women they care for. When friends die, we send flowers and beautiful sympathy cards to comfort their bereaved families and say that we care. Beauty touches our deeper emotions and says things we can’t put into words.

John Dryden linked an earthy love with beauty, when he wrote

When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind. (Cymon and Iphigenia).

More likely St. Augustine was associating beauty with a higher love in writing that

Beauty grows in us to the extent that love grows,because love is the soul’s beauty.

Perhaps my current hunger for beauty isn’t a dissatisfaction with winter but a hunger for love, a discontent with too much of me, myself and I. I’ve missed seeing friends and family through the covid-19 precautions. Bottom line though, I know that it must be a hunger for more of God, a longing for more of the beauty of His loving presence. The kind of love that was in David’s heart when he wrote,

One thing I have desired of the Lord,
That will I seek after:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord
All the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord,
And to inquire in His temple. Psalm 27:4 NKJV

Finding the beauty of the Lord isn’t automatic; David sought it. He focused on it. He said “One thing have I desired of the Lord.”  His pursuit of the Lord was single-hearted. Sadly, as I write this, I realize that my own focus is often scattered. I often want more from the Lord than beholding His beauty. I want Him to fix this, change that and bless so-and-so — all good things—and most requests He is pleased to answer. But my scattered desires are not the single cry of David’s heart or the purity of Jesus Who kept His eyes fixed on His Heavenly Father and wanted His heart and mind above all else.

Although I’m delighted and satisfied by the beauty I can see and hear—the land and sky outside my window, the music from my CD’s and the flowers blooming in my kitchen, they’re not the beauty of Jesus. All remind me of His love, His nearness and His beauty, but too much emphasis on them can divert me from seeking the beauty of Jesus,  When I recall Jesus word’s that

The Kingdom of God is within you. Luke 17:21

and when I focus on His love in moment by moment surrender to His indwelling Holy Spirit, His gifts of earthly beauty are not lessened, they’re heightened; we share them together. But, to be balanced about it, as Scripture says, first the naturals, then the spirituals.

The spiritual, however, was not first, but the natural, and then the spiritual.
1 Corinthinans 15:46

We all must start with externals. Augustine did.  He wrote,

Late have I loved thee, Beauty so old and so new; late have I loved thee. Lo, you were within, but I was outside, seeking there for you, and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong — I, misshapen. You were with me, but I was not with you. They held me back far from you, those things which would have no being, were they not in you.
— Augustine, The Confessions

Like Augustine, my first awareness of beauty came through my senses—in the beauty of my mother’s smile, the graceful form of birds in flight or my earliest memories of towering panoramic landscapes —vistas seen while sitting on my mother’s lap and looking out the car window as my father drove us through the Pennsylvania Alleghenies. Such beauty, like the loveliness of a lullaby or a ballad, of a sunset, a flower or a child’s smile is sensory; we hear it with our ears and see it with our eyes.

Some never see too far beyond outward beauty. Once, my mother asked me what my new friend, Peggy, looked like. I said, “She’s beautiful.” When my mother met Peggy, she said, “Why, she’s not beautiful at all; she’s not even pretty. Her mouth is too big, the skin on her cheeks is rough; her nose is a steeper ski-hill than Bob Hope’s.” My mother didn’t see the light in Peggy’s eyes, the genuine joyful smiles that filled her face—they did almost stretch from ear to ear. I thought my friend was radiant. Her face was aglow with an intangible higher kind of beauty in human form.

That’s the kind of beauty St. Augustine meant by “love is the soul’s beauty.” It’s invisible to the outward-judgmental eye.

In seeking to behold the beauty of the Lord, David was longing for a beauty higher and more beautiful than Peggy’s radiance. As another Psalmist wrote,

Splendor and majesty are before Him;
strength and beauty fill His sanctuary.  Psalm 96:6 BSB

God’s beauty must be spiritually perceived, but earth’s beauty surrounds us. What dulls our eyes, what keeps us from seeing all the beauty of the earth? What hinders us from understanding the meaning of beauty, from seeing how both natural beauty and artistically crafted beauty from work of men’s hands, must point to the beauty of God?  When I began journaling the following very personal Reflections on Beauty, my eyes were slowly opened to see that I was being shortchanged. I was looking at beauty through strongholds that dimmed my sight. My thoughts about it had been built up and buttressed by a life-time of personal experiences, culture, education, opinions and judgments. And God wanted to clear my eyes and take the vision-dulling strongholds down.

Reflections on Beauty

Beauty comforts me, sustains me and reminds me of eternal truths. It quiets my soul. On hearing a beautiful strain of music or seeing a lovely sight, I’ll often say “Oh, Lord, that’s beautiful. Thank you, Father.” For me, beauty is far more than recognizing its immanent form, color, movement, texture, line, sound and all that. Beauty has a higher, transcendent source and meaning. I didn’t always know this. Initially I knew beauty in stuff.

I don’t recall when I first saw a difference between the beautiful and the ugly, but as a child of four, I saw beauty everywhere. As I grew, the open wonder of childhood faded and I saw less beauty. Today, at the age of eighty-two, I’m seeing more beauty again. It didn’t happen automatically. It took choice, pain and letting go of old thought patterns.

When I was four years old, the rays of morning sun through our basement window turned the dusty black coal bin that my mother called dirty into a room full of glistening beauty. The dirty ice my mother wouldn’t let me eat until she chipped off a piece and ran it under the faucet was wonderful to look at. It was a glass mirror filled with shining reflections and clouds; it was a clear sky streaked with tiny sparkling white lines. On warm summer days, when the iceman reached his great tongs into the back of his truck to hoist up a huge block of ice, sling it on his back and carry it up the back stairs to our second floor flat, I followed behind, fascinated to watch the ice shining in the sun as melting drops of water made wet trails before my feet.

Food was beautiful, especially sugar bread treats, I liked looking at the grains of sugar, twinkling like the tiny diamonds in my Mommy’s wedding ring. I’d sit at the table looking at the sparkles on rich yellow butter until Mommy would say, “Well don’t you want it? Aren’t you going to eat it?” Cement was beautiful too. I never tired of looking down to compare the tiny stones embedded in the city sidewalks—so smooth, each one a different shape and color. Those walkways of my childhood weren’t like today’s concrete. Ours were brightened by eye-catching flakes of mica that reflected the light from one angle but not from another. Looking for the pebbles and glints made every step a delight. I could go on and on—lilies of the valley, the sawtooth edges of American Elm leaves, the strange green on Daddy’s old Nash, Burl Ives on the radio, my red rubber boots, my mommy’s skin . . . .  all were beautiful.

Nothing was ugly then. I think even the dog doo that was left on city sidewalks and lawns (in the 1940’s no one cleaned up after their pet animals) might have been interestingly lovely if I hadn’t been pulled away from it and told that it was foul—icky-poo-poo. Once in a while I’d see a newly fascinating shade of yellow on the ground.

I knew the difference between pain and comfort, but don’t remember ugly as a real-life discrete category (outside of one dark storybook with ogres, hags and boogey men my parents reassured me were pretend) until a boy in school called me names. His tone of voice was ugly. Suddenly, this classmate, who never before looked either handsome or ugly but always looked just like himself, just the way he was supposed to look, because his face was his very own, this Robert looked ugly. Suddenly, his face was too thin, his nose too big, his eyes mean and his mouth was crooked and turned down on one side when he sneered at me.

On streets my parents said were slums, I saw debris, and clutter; I saw dirt instead of grass. Occasionally I saw unpainted houses and broken fences and windows. But nothing was ugly, it all just was.

Initially, as a child, visual ugliness was always the result of insult, violation, shame or other personally hurtful incidents. Looking back, I recall linking ugliness (and hearing unpleasant discordant sounds) to discomfort and pain, self-protection and judgments. A friends’ elderly mother was always, if not movie-star beautiful, at least fascinatingly pleasant to look at. She looked old, not ugly, just wrinkled and tired—older than everyone. Until one afternoon, in a bad mood, she angrily berated me without cause. She said things I didn’t understand—thoughts not meant for a child’s ears. Suddenly, she turned ugly.  And she stayed that way.

Between the ages of eight and ten, my ability to see beauty flattened and became intermittent. About the same time my depth perception changed too. (Perhaps because of trauma; our family life was turned upside down, disrupted by my mother’s critical illness.) I didn’t know my physical vision had changed until one Friday afternoon art class at school. Miss Werle, our teacher, taped big pieces of manila paper on the blackboards. We set our jars of tempera paint in the eraser tray and worked standing up at the board. My painting, of a family visit to Garfield Park Conservatory, was flat. That was okay. Most third graders couldn’t draw perspective. But two boys in the class, John Reese and Harry Blair, were more talented than the rest of us. Both painted circus scenes with perspective. Looking at the depth in their paintings, I knew the real world had depth too, a depth that I’d once lived in and wasn’t seeing any more.

Memories from those years are generally flat, only a very few are ugly, but almost all are flat. One exception, about four years later, is unforgettable. It was the night I asked Jesus into my heart. Walking home from church that summer evening, the world momentarily exploded into depth and beauty once again. Did I see the world through Jesus’ eyes?  Or, did He, now living in me, look out at the world through mine? Or did His loving acceptance momentarily override my fears, my judgments, my habitual lonely perspective? That summer evening, all I saw was intensely lovely. Familiar realities of a walk that I’d made four times a day, five days a week for seven years wrapped around me with wonder. My steps moved me through deep space. My ears were alive in a world filled with bird songs and distant yet friendly, familiar street sounds. The trees and grass were densely green, the sky clearer than clear. The beautiful clarity of that night was short-lived, and although Jesus never left my heart, most of my world quickly became flat again.

In hindsight, it seems that whatever traumas dulled my vision as a child, the change just happened. I didn’t cause it; I didn’t choose it; I couldn’t change it. I was bound, like addicts are bound to their addictions and sinners are bound by their sins. My vision and perceptions of beauty changed as naturally as protective scabs form over wounds. Decades later, after years of seeking the Lord and learning to forgive and let go of judgments, I saw that I could choose how to look at the world. [Note: I am not studied in the relationships between hearing, listening, voice and vision but for me, listening training at The Listening Centre in Toronto, Canada led to a major breakthrough in my awareness of depth perception and visual choices.]

As childhood traumas and entanglements were resolved, I could see that choosing flatter view, like that of a Japanese painting, was a reactive choice. Since flatness felt safer, not as ugly, it became a habit. While not at all indifferent to beauty, I’d shut down and steeled myself against enjoying it too deeply as a kind of self-protection against a world full of visual ugliness and auditory harshness. (I tuned out being lectured to by grown-ups just like the boys and girls in Charlie Brown movies.) Today, I take the yellow stripes down the center of our black asphalt roads for granted, but once they were too discordant, too artificial, too ugly to bear without pain. I’d been wounded and needed healing—and no one, including myself, knew it. Ah— but God— God knew.

God knows us, He knows all of our needs. He knows the unique ways that each of us need to be loved.  

O LORD, You have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
You understand my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down;
You are aware of all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
You know all about it, O LORD.
You hem me in behind and before;
You have laid Your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain. Psalm 139:1-6 BSB

God knows His children and loves us far more than we know and love ourselves. He has repeatedly given me beauty—as if to say, “I’m here.” For over eighty years now, His gifts of beauty have comforted me, sustained me and reminded me of realities outside myself. So often, I just happen to be driving on an ordinary road on an ordinary day at the very moment a magnificent cloud formation builds across the horizon to humble me with its grandeur.

Beauty has surrounded and intensified many difficult moments in my life. Golden leaves were gently falling all around me and covering the sidewalk beneath my feet on the painful day I tearfully walked out of a college classroom where the professor’s viewpoint turned me from untested faith to years of agnosticism. Years later, facing a mental breakdown after a dark encounter, a beautiful beam of white light, more radiant than any diamond, more powerful than any bolt of lightning, poured through the external darkness of the atmosphere and into the darkness in my brain to return my mind to soundness and faith. I knew it was Jesus.

I also recall, from so long ago, the high hedges of lilacs in full bloom along the river in Iowa City in 1961. My husband picked me a huge bouquet, even as I struggled alone over the growing distance between us from his insecurity about finishing his degree as a Dad (I was pregnant and we were both in grad school) and the unloving violence of his addiction to alcohol. Years later, as I journaled about the betrayal of our best friends, I was comforted by the beauty of morning mists rising off the Indiana uplands. Just last Christmas, while missing our traditional family gatherings, a friend sent a box of Harry and David pears. The skins were blemished by the wind, but cutting into the juicy, fragrant perfect white fruit was not only an aesthetic experience, it was a spiritual one too. I thanked God for friendship and the pears. Not long ago, stunned and feeling quite alone after a set of cruel, untrue and unwarranted attacks, dear friends said, “You’re not alone. We’re with you.” Then, they sent roses, richly scented roses, not ordinary grocery store roses but garden fresh, blush pink perfect rose buds that I could watch open before my eyes. When the roses came, I knew for sure that I was not alone.

At some point I realized that beauty is an essential characteristic of God. Like the sun that shines on the just and the unjust, beauty is God’s gift to all of us. Years ago, at a conference, I heard Mahesh Chavda talk about an experience that illustrates Jesus’ beauty.  (Note: Beauty was not the point of Mahesh’s story; I’m skipping his main point to illustrate my own. Also, my memory might be slightly off; it was decades ago.)

Mahesh was visiting someone who lived near an airport. Each night, at the same time, he was awakened by the loud, raucous, discordant sound of a jet roaring over the house. On the final night of his visit, before the jet flew over, he was awakened by Jesus. The Lord had come to speak with him about the needs and prayers of his hostess. As Mahesh listened to the Lord, he heard worshipful music, more beautiful than any he’d heard or imagined in his life. He did not know where the glorious sound came from. Then he realized it was the jet. He explained it by saying that nothing inharmonious or discordant can exist or touch the presence of the Lord. Upon meeting Jesus’ presence, the very soundwaves had been bent — changed and rearranged to worship and adore the Lord of all.  Of course, Mahesh told of his experience more tellingly than I can, for He lived it. He heard the beauty of Jesus’ glory; we must imagine it. But you get the idea.

Beauty, like all that is precious and valuable, inspires counterfeits. We reproduce paintings and sculptures, fake jewels and counterfeit money. Spin-offs on designer clothes eventually end up in the bargain basements and on amazon.com. Because beauty is so compelling, satisfying and alluring, valuing beauty without discerning its source, motive and meaning has led to the current cultural mix up between beauty and goodness and reenforced our cultural tendency to identify  all beauty with truth and goodness. I suppose Keats can get some of the credit, or blame if you will, for etching that lie into the modern mind. I’ve heard intelligent people quote the final lines from his poem, Ode to a Grecian Urn

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, 
—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.  John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn

like it’s got the authority of Scripture. Whoa! Beauty is not truth. People and things can be outwardly beautiful, but inwardly corrupt, evil and harmful. Foxglove is one of the most beautiful flowers in my garden; it’s also poisonous. Beauty itself is not goodness. God alone is good. I knew a beautiful child who tried to bite people—hard. External beauty can beguile us; it can deceitfully tempt us to ignore, overlook, and excuse realities. Jezebel was most likely gorgeous. King Solomon’s wives, surely beautiful women, led him to compromise his faith and worship false Gods.  Lucifer was beautiful, but corrupted by pride.

Thine heart [Lucifer’s] was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee. Ezekiel 28:17

Discernment is needed. Whether we recognize it or not, God is the originator, the source of all that is truly beautiful. Just as God is love and God is good, God is also beauty. He created us to respond to beauty and to share it with Him.

The Heaven’s declare the glory of God.
The skies proclaim the work of His hands. Psalm 19:1 PSB

It challenges Christians and all thinking to distinguish between the beauty of God,  in the humility of Jesus Christ and the beauty of Satan, a disguise for egotistical pride and desire for worship. When we’re allured by beauty, it’s easy to forget that worshipping  beauty for its own sake is almost like worshipping the devil? Once, long ago, at a Monet exhibit, mesmerized before a huge painting of waterlilies, the thought actually crossed my mind, ‘I can see someone selling their soul to own that.’  Think about it. This urgent need to discern beauty’s source, motive, meaning and purpose may have been in Dostoevsky’s thought when one of his characters said,

Beauty itself is the battlefield
where God and Satan contend with each other for the hearts of men.   

Whose beauty are we seeking?  The Egyptians built tombs filled with beautiful objects of gold to worship their dead. Moses built a tabernacle and covered the walls and furniture with gold to worship God, the source of all life. The same stuff of earth— pure and shining gold— us used by skilled craftsmen with vastly different motives for vastly different purposes.

Will we choose to seek the beauty of the Lord (and find Him in the beauty of His creation) or will we choose deceptive beauty? And how will we know the difference? I think the ability to discern depends totally on how much we love God and are willing to surrender to Him.

Satan’s counterfeits are often truly beautiful. The apple offered to the woman in the Garden of Eden was “good to look at.” She wanted it— she wanted it so much that she doubted and mistrusted God. Momentarily, the apple, the desire for knowledge, her desire to be like God, was important than loving her Creator. It looked good. That’s the temptation, the battlefield of beauty.

Whenever beauty looks so good to us that we romanticize it as an end in itself (like idolizing art for art’s sake), we lose the ability to discern between good and evil. We separate beauty from morality and truth. It becomes a law unto itself. We diminish our perceptions of beauty to feelings, a personal psychological experience, a sentiment rather than a revelation of truth. And we’re blinded to the mystery of God behind all beauty and all creative artistic craftsmanship.

When beauty is viewed in dependence upon God and His love and is received as a gift, we can discern whether or not its purpose is good or evil. We can refuse the allurement of seductive beauty and enjoy God’s gifts of beauty in humble, worshipful, gratitude. Our eyes are open to see the fullness, the significance, the meaning of the beauty around us; we glimpse the true splendor of God.

Humility is key to discernment. On my quest to behold the beauty of the Lord, in Himself as well as in the world around me, I’m continually learning. Just recently I saw once again how judgments, bias and even personal taste will blind my eyes to beauty. It was a very practical and down to earth lesson. I disliked my dark kitchen cupboards. I like a light kitchen—soft yellows, creams, whites, unstained maples or birch. When I wanted to redo the kitchen, friends, family and a decorator objected so strongly that I paused. They all liked the cabinets. I thought it was matter of their personal taste and preference against mine. I didn’t understand until I asked the Holy Spirit to let me see those dark cabinets through a child’s eyes. He did. I got goosebumps. They are lovely; near as my untrained eye can tell, they are a fine-grained quarter sawn walnut. The colors are rich and warm, ranging from the lighter highlights to the darker depths found in figured wood.  When I let go of my bias, my critical judgments, I was taken back by the beauty of the wood. My physical vision changed too. My whole being moved from sitting at the kitchen counter in my head to living in a multi-dimensional space. I heard more sounds around me, both my heart beat and time seemed to slow down. I was awake, aware, yet at rest. I knew God was nearby.

That experience begs the question— How many judgments, how many of our own thoughts, how much of our cultural baggage keeps us from living, moving and having our being in Him? How many splinters in our eyes blind us to the beauty of creation? To the beauty of Jesus? Lord, open our eyes!

Only in Your light do we see Your beauty. We know, Lord, that just as You are love, truth, justice, righteousness, mercy and faithfulness— You are also perfect beauty.

Will you help us all to seek Your glorious Presence? Your beauty? Will you open our hearts and eyes? May we, like David, seek to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple.

What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived- the things God has prepared for those who love him. 1 Corinthians 2:9