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Beauty
by Dr. Monte E. Wilson, III

About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner where his insouciant step caught my eye: there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest . The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

--Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp. 7-8

God continually drenches the world with beauty. When Adam stood before Him in the Garden of Eden he was commanded to cultivate this beauty-not ignore it. This involved dressing the garden, naming the animals, mining the minerals and many other tasks. How many of us today, however, actually seek to cultivate the earth's beauty? How many of us "try to be there" when God turns a spotlight on His creation's beauty so that we may catch a glimpse of Him?

Tragically, for the average Christian, the Faith is solely being right and being good. There is little if any comprehension of God's beauty. But isn't the first revelation of God in Scripture that of The Masterful Artist? And what does God think of having packed so much beauty into creation only to have His people ignore it?

The world is continually raining life upon all our senses. We take those senses-sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing-and try to make sense of the world. The senses communicate various bits and pieces of information to our minds that we then collate and analyze with the goal of understanding what has just brushed across one or more of our senses.

Once my mind believes it has enough information gathered from the senses it declares, "That is a bird." Maybe all I saw in my peripheral vision was a streak of something blue. But in less than a second my mind has collated the sound of a bird singing, a streaking wisp of color to say, "Bird."

The fact is our senses are continually being bombarded. So much so, that we unconsciously choose to delete much of what is going on around us. In many cases this is wise.

We are driving in downtown Atlanta. Above us there are planes circling to land at Hartsfield International Airport, there are automobiles driving in the same direction and in the opposite direction. There are people walking down the sidewalk and vendors selling newspapers, flowers and coffee. There are pigeons standing on benches and advertising on the side of buses.

There are smells and sights and sounds that we drive through everyday without experiencing. Why? Because if we tried to take it all in while we were driving we would end up in an accident! Circumstances require that we delete much of what is going on around us.

How do we know what to delete? In the above illustration we delete whatever will keep us from arriving safe and sound at our destination. Are we conscious of having informed our senses to delete certain information?

No, it is automatic. We get in an automobile and just shut some of the radar down. But gratefully it is not involuntary. We can choose to turn our senses back on. But do we?

Ask yourself how often you go through life with your senses turned down or ignored in ways that deprive you of the glory, wonder and magic of creation. How often do you walk through nature with your eyes open but no seeing?

 

In some years, April bursts our hills in one prodigious leap
--and all the stage is filled at once, whole choruses of tulips,
arabesques of forsythia, cadenzas of flowering plum. The
trees grow leaves overnight.

In other years, spring tiptoes in. It pauses, overcome with Shyness, like a grandchild at the door peeping in, ducking out of sight, giggling in the hallway…The dogwood bud pale green, is inlaid with russet markings…The maples…are flowering red, soft as slippers, in tassels like a jester's scepter. The flowering almond is pink, absurdly pink, little girl pink, as pink as peppermint and cream…Wild strawberries! They nestle on the hillside, rubies tumbled from a jeweler's tray.

There is no controlling the honeysuckle; there is no curbing
the trumpet vine. To compensate for their sprawling
profusion, we get tiny things in large abundance…mayapples,
buttercups, bird's-foot violets, a thousand ferns as delicately
fashioned as the eyelashes of a child. The trillium…kneels
as modestly as a spring bride, all in white, beside the alter
of an old oak stump. If you're not familiar with the trillium,
imagine the flower that would come from a flute if a flute
could make a flower. That is a trillium, a work of God from
a theme by Mozart."

(James Kilpatrick, The Foxes' Union,
pp. 121-123)

How often have we seen this symphony of beauty created and directed by God? Or have we sped by enough beauty to send the soul into worshipful ecstasy without so much as a blinking acknowledgment?

Of course, part of the problem is that our senses have not been trained to admire beauty. Furthermore, we forgo such training because "either you have a taste for that sort thing or not." But if beauty-and all good things-comes from God, are we wise to approach the subject in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion? If the Master Artist revealed Himself in nature with a superabundance of beauty, shouldn't we look for Him there? If He gifted people with the ability to create beautiful things, shouldn't we learn to admire these creations?

There is a distinction between admiring something and enjoying it. Because I enjoy a particular piece of art doesn't mean it contains all the necessary qualities that make for "beauty." I can enjoy a child's drawing without them being classified as "beautiful." Conversely, I can admire something such as an opera without enjoying it. The odds are, however, that I will learn to enjoy as I learn to admire.

The problem for most of us is that our senses have not been trained to admire: we do not know how to turn up the senses, make distinctions and appreciate certain qualities. Even if we take the time to watch a free-falling bird or read a sonnet by Shakespeare we are clueless as to what it is we are reflecting on. This is where education comes in.

By education I am not necessarily referring to sitting in a classroom, although sometimes this is desirable. I think the most effective form of education is found in the imitation of others. What I mean is that we can learn from those whose senses are tuned in and turned up. We can do that through reading their books, viewing their videocassettes, or talking to them.

What is it that they do? What is it that they are looking for, or smelling or tasting or listening for? When we meet someone who sees nature in ways that we do not, we should ask them, "How do you do that?" When we encounter people who have learned to hear in ways that make us feel deaf, we should find out how they do what they do.

One of the senses that many of us ignore is smell. I had never really thought about this until reading about Hellen Keller.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands
of miles and all the years we have lived. The odors of fruits
waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in
the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting,
cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered
grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents
that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and
ripening fields far away.

Everyday you breathe about 23,000 times, moving about 438 cubic feet of air. With many of those breath's, we smell something that elicits an immediate emotion. The scent of specific orchids sends me immediately into vivid memories of my grandfather. How often are we transported into thoughts of yesterday without being aware that it was a smell that took us back in time?

God created us with five million olfactory cells and filled the world with the aroma of His beauty. Do we stop to smell the roses? Do we take advantage of how various smells change the ambiance of our lives or homes? And if you do not think smells have a powerful influence on how we feel (and some studies suggest they influence our ability to learn), consider how much emphasis there is on odors and scents within the context of romance in the book, the Song of Solomon. Yes, candles, flowers and perfumes really do make a difference.

When God told us to cultivate the earth He wasn't merely speaking in utilitarian terms. The trees he placed in the garden were not only good for food but were "pleasant to the sight." There were flowers in that Garden that served no other purpose than an aesthetic one. Was Adam allowed to ignore those flowers and not cultivate them? When the Israelites built the Temple, they decorated it with representational art depicting lilies and pomengranates. There were also free standing pillars that served no purpose whatsoever-other than to beautify. Certainly beauty can illumine truth or serve in some utilitarian manner but it also can simply "be there" for our pleasure.

If beauty were unimportant or only of peripheral concern, the Bible would have contained no poetry, only propositions. While we insist on approaching scriptures as an outline of theology with some stories as secondary illustrations of propositions, we utterly miss the beauty, the artistry of how God revealed His Truth. And in doing so, we miss the importance of opening all of our senses to His presence. And in doing this, we miss much of the Truth we confess to holding so sacred.

Some will grant me a nod by saying my point is valid, but only for people who are called to this arena. "We are not all called to be artists." Well, okay. But I would say it this way: We are not all called to be professional artists, but we are all artists. All of us are creating a life. All of us take creation into our hands-into our senses-every day. We then do something with it. The question is what are we doing with it?

Most of you would admit that God holds us all accountable for the gifts He has given us. We are very aware of the parable of the talents that tells us that He expects a return on His investment. Aren't our senses "gifts"? Aren't our senses to be expanded and cultivated so that we can more fully appreciate God and His works?

One of the reasons the world is not attracted to our message is that we messengers can be so one-dimensional. If someone wishes to talk of Jesus or heaven and hell or family planning we will jump right in swinging. If, however, they wish to talk about the world and the common concerns of humanity-concerns that are often expressed in the world's paintings, music, literature, drama, theater and etc.-we are unable to relate. We can handle propositions and concepts but not life.

How many people go through life deleting much of the wonder of God's creation as they pursue "holiness"? How many of us who encourage Christians to "take dominion over the earth" and to obey the "cultural mandate" utterly ignore the personal implications of the mandate? What about cultivating the self? As art historian Hans Rookmaaker wrote in The Creative Gift,

We should remind ourselves that Christ did not come to make us Christians or to save our souls only, but that He came to redeem us that we might be human in the fullest sense of the word.

How many of us are utterly focused on all that is wrong in the world, the precarious nature of the Global Economy and other such subjects, to the point that we have deleted what the Bible tells us to focus upon:

"whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report"?

Is it that we somehow think of ourselves as more serious than others, when we fail to pay attention to what is worth praising? Are we more "realistic" when we delete the reality of beauty from our lives? Are we more attractive to unbelievers or a more faithful representative of The Faith?

The earth is full of God's beauty. For thousands of years He has graced people with the ability to take some of that beauty and help others "sense" it through various media such as painting, literature, music, dance, gardening, cooking, crafting, speaking, and etc. Now this beauty is going to be expressed or performed whether or not we care to see it, hear it, feel it, taste it or smell it.

But who in his right mind would want to miss a reflection of God's beauty, when given the opportunity to "be there"?