I take a right out of my family’s farmyard, jogging down the hill of the gravel road. Alfalfa perfuming the air on my left, corn leaves jostling each other on my right. Turning east at the corner, I hear the creek gurgle in the ditch, surrounded by thick, short trees and brush, blocking my view in either direction. Yet the setting sun’s rays gently lay upon the leaves, tickled by the breeze. Several gravel-crunching steps farther, the view opens up. I look south. Just beyond another hayfield and more impenetrable brush lies the pasture: tumbling, lolling hills clustered with oaks. The sun’s diminishing light casts its subdued glow.
I stop. There it is again. Beauty’s poignant touch. It fills me, yet leaves me hungry, saddened that something I deeply desire is just out of my reach. I want to run toward the scene, but I know I won’t find it. It’s there, but I’m not.
In the years since, I’ve had that experience during other encounters with beauty--canoeing in Boundary Waters, being surrounded by trusted, loving friends, sitting alone with a cup of coffee and a good view, reading or watching artistic creations. It’s that simultaneous sense of yearning while feeling filled.
A character in a C.S. Lewis novel (Till We Have Faces) summed up the experience. She said, “I want to know where all the beauty comes from.” And that’s just it. I notice the beauty, delight in it, yet the sharp longing suggests there’s something more I cannot grasp just yet, cannot get to now. Something that is wonderfully filling just in the longing for it.
One of the criticisms of Christians is that they so long for heaven that they take no real interest in the world, that they are of no earthly good here; while atheists or others who simply believe in this life alone are the ones who truly love this world because there is no “beyond” to distract them. However, Christians and unbelievers of whom the above descriptions fit are both missing something.
Genuinely loving this world--or anything or anyone for that matter--necessitates a teleological approach, a worldview that affirms purpose; without it, loving it simply devolves into just enjoying it. While enjoying it is not wrong, just enjoying it can become patently self-serving; whereas, enjoying it with an eye to beauty deepens both the joy of enjoyment and longing for something more, something this world is no doubt a part of, yet is fragmented in its expression.
I appreciate G.K. Chesterton’s analogy of this world containing pieces of broken stained glass. We can rejoice in the beauty of each shard, while simultaneously longing for wholeness. While unbelievers may suggest the shards are all there is, that hardly explains the longing of the informed conscience--atheist or not--for wholeness, hardly explains the oft-experienced sadness regarding the brokenness. On the other hand, some Christians can get so caught up noticing and judging the brokenness, they neglect the shard’s beauty and fail to aid in the redemptive journey toward wholeness, and instead wait--in protective uselessness--for “the end.”
The life of Jesus best exemplifies the tension between beauty and brokenness. He was a man of joy and a man of sorrows. His immersive awareness of the love of God enabled him to see beauty in all those the world rejected and even in those doing the rejecting. Yet his awareness of their brokenness broke his heart, ultimately literally. He came from the place where beauty and love come from, but “the world did not recognize him” (John 1:10). We still don’t.
Recognizing beauty and love is vulnerable. If you open your heart to the joy of it, yes there will be the sorrow. The world’s brokenness prevents us have from having it completely. “For now we see in a glass dimly” (I Corinithians 13:12). Still, the reality is there though we cannot see it.
And this, in part, is faith: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance of we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1). It’s not belief without evidence, nor belief without reason. It’s a belief that realities exist beyond my perceptions that evidence themselves based on my openness to them. It’s a trust that what is ultimately real is love and its concomitant beauty.
When Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:6), they are blessed because righteousness does ultimately exist--it is not just an ego construct of purportedly societally-evolved people. When he tells us to pray, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done,” it’s because a kingdom and a will exist worth hungering for because they are actually there. And loving this world means rejoicing when we see that kingdom expressed as well as sorrowing over its lack where brokenness has eroded it. From that sorrow grows the passion to challenge and nourish those fragments.
Why hunger for anything that is not ultimately real? If beauty, love, justice, mercy, grace are only elevated societal constructs of no eternal value beyond this life, then they are just the empty calories for the ego rather than the fueling and enticing nourishment for the soul.
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