Beauty on High

“God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.”

From David Bentley Hart's "The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth"

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Dear Kate,

Let me rewrite Hart's beautiful sentence: creation, you and I included, have something in us that makes God high.

God creates everything, created us, and gave us a gift, an inalienable endowment that if we are to say any word about our Self, a word about this "possession" must be somehow spoken or we are running the peril of misconstruing ourselves and also mocking God for getting high over nothing.

That gift, this endowment, such possession, is beauty.

Now let's slow down, stop, and ponder on this for a moment.

And then let's pray for this moment to last beyond a moment's pondering--in fact beyond pondering to become our living, laughing and loving.

Let's take heart and courage to live into the "first and truest" of who we are (made in the image of God), to live up to what God calls us to be (to reflect His glory, His beauty), and to live for God and what God makes good.

What are the implications of such into, up to and for?  The implications are too many that every thought and every action in our life are implicated.

For example, let's just say I see something ugly, something that I consider distasteful, something, let's just say, very naively, that according to my understanding of what God wills and wants, can legitimately be called a brutalization of His gift of beauty.

Now let's further say I have a big thesaurus in my head and a stockpile of robust expressions in my heart to blast such ugliness into smithereens.

Now tell me, tell me who I am, if I am to choose the most merciless adjectives at my disposal, and instead of a bazooka that would do the job just fine I go for the thermal-nuclear, a thoroughgoing annihilation, and, of course, the "thing" that I am blasting is no "thing" at all but a person, a creature of God, whose "first and truest word concerning all that appears within (his/her) being" is that gift, this endowment, such possession that is beauty?

Who am I who would do something like this, who would make such choices, and what am I saying about myself, the person I am blasting, and the Person that is Jesus seeking to take home in this "ugly being" that I am attempting murder of?

Killing Jesus in the name of Jesus, that's what this person is doing, making those choices.

Now I wonder when you heard this example if you were thinking about a person who has done something like this to you, or about yourself who has done something like this to others, or maybe about the person in the mirror who denies God, frustrates His pleasure-seeking, and undoes His good doings one glance at a time?

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

To be high on beauty is to arise from the ugly.  

Beauty is perhaps most lonesome among the hideous. Two-dimensional beauty in pixel and porn invades our visual field at a price point and a point of reference to pinpoint in poignancy our pointless viewpoint unless purchased power is proven.  Populate beauty in more planes and panels and we get a multi-dimensional platitude of pretty petty pout.  Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?  

In daily passage, beauty is often felt and felled by disappointment.  Dawn spreads as apricot sorbet but it cannot be tasted in haste for work or school.  Vacation on credit or cash is surreal and so are the long hours of labor required to experience the magic in fleeting flesh.  In retirement, pension in pristine preservation becomes accessible while vigor fades in stealth.  Even feasting on pork chops and ribs whittles away incisors and health.  

Yesterday I drove on I-5 through snow and rain.  Slush with dirt began to form on the margins of the freeway, soiling white perfection.  Beyond the slush and high on beauty were the evergreens in wedding gown, a ceremony of cold beauty unveiling over time and space along the periphery.  It was too much of a showing to behold.  Over rolling distance, the slush trailed endlessly as bridal train in singular beauty, pining for home in a ballad. 

Beauty is best recalled from the womb of pain, of grief.  The newborn emerges out of the birth canal, face and body smeared and distorted to be embraced for eternity.  Living tales of beauty and the ugly inscribed on tombstones arise in remembrance among us, beauty on high, beings immortalized.  My hands grapple with earth and snow, every whorl and ridge of a fingerprint speaking high on beauty.  

Yours,

Kate