On Un-Abandoned Beauty

Iris Storm. Photos taken Spring 2018.

     Perhaps, like me, you wake up certain moments enough to find yourself thirsting for more from your personal experience of religion. Sharpening the awareness that spiritual nurturance is missing and is needed usually depends on cutting off distractions: electronic devices, absorption in work, sports, politics, and any other substitute imposed by the ego/nafs. And if we don’t tend the soul, sometimes it shouts “Pay Attention!” through an “accident,” illness, or other life crises that offer a glimpse or a hard view of what really matters. Wouldn’t we rather remind ourselves in a gentle way?

     I’ve very thankful to have reached retirement as I feel it offers increased opportunity to read material that’s beginning to mark well-springs that attend to this longing. I want an authentic spiritual path that offers divine tasting, “joie de vivre,” most every day.  For example, a month ago, 

I quoted a passage that flowed with the water of life. John O’Donohue pointed to a source previously unknown to me: Hans Urs von Balthasar on “theological aesthetics.” Having located a reasonably-priced copy of Volume 1, “Seeing the Form,” in his series: “The Glory of the Lord,” I’ve loved reading about the essential reconnection of beauty with truth and goodness. Although Balthasar does not focus on the art forms I love (particularly horsemanship/dressage and photography), his articulation of biases against beauty increases my sense of the importance of engaging with the aesthetic and in appreciating the connection with the divine.

     Photography has long been an important link for me with beauty. 

It’s helped me to look more closely for a composition that has balance, 

sometimes taking me down on my knees

  

or whisper-close to a dew-wet inner bloom. 

Probably more than anything, I’ve increased appreciation for the quality of light.  

          And what other term is so frequently and so significantly used in trying to articulate the spiritual dimension? For example, Balthasar quotes Matthias Scheeben: “Theology is ‘the dawn of the light of contemplation’” (p. 107). Radiance and illumination signal the pathway to the divine, often more so than our fine analytical reasoning.

     In reading Balthasar, I’m able to affirm the spiritual value of spending time with photography, and I see how I’ve been disconnected from this appreciation. Balthasar explains in detail how religious groups recognized misuse of beauty (e.g., “the ‘exchange’ [Rom I.23,25] of God’s incorruptible splendour and glory for the blasphemous image of the idols,” p. 46). He points out the way religious authority overreacted by expelling all art from the church. 

     This  mistaken “cleansing” simply leaves the allure of beauty for the devil to use, with results all too obvious in today’s commercialization of skin-deep “beauty.” The fatal error involves failing to realize that Beauty at the divine level demands dedicated development in the same manner required by the higher reaches of Power and Knowledge. To our tragic loss, all of these names of God have been left much too abandoned in our education and religion.

     Incredible teaching is available. I can scarcely believe that I’m just finding Balthasar who guides us beyond the superficial misuse of beauty toward a divine understanding. For example, referencing Karl Barth, he points out that “God’s beauty embraces death as well as life, fear as well as joy, what we call ‘ugly’ as well as what we call ‘beautiful’” (p. 56). In our recent trip to the southwest, we saw something of this in the art of Georgia O’Keefe. 

     Balthasar’s teaching also includes terms familiar from phenomenology:

“The quality of ‘being-in-itself’ which belongs to the beautiful, the demand the beautiful itself makes to be allowed to be what it is, the demand, therefore, that we renounce our attempts to control and manipulate it, in order truly to be able to be happy by enjoying it: all of this is, in the natural realm, the foundation and foreshadowing of what in the realm of revelation and grace will be the attitude of faith” (p. 153).

     The urgency of reclaiming our divine gift of Beauty is shown in the continuation of the passage quoted by O’Donohue. Balthasar elaborates:

“We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she [Beauty] were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love… The world, formerly penetrated by God’s light, now becomes but an appearance and a dream…But where the cloud disperses, naked matter remains as an indigestible symbol of fear and anguish. Since nothing else remains, and yet something must be embraced, twentieth-century man is urged to enter this impossible marriage with matter, a union which finally spoils all man’s taste for love. But man cannot bear to live with the object of his impotence, that which remains permanently unmastered. He must either deny it or conceal it in the silence of death.” (pp. 18-19).

     Instead of abandoning Beauty, I’m in favor of growing toward and surrendering into the embrace of divine Love that guides us in the way of a vision holding fast the union of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness (and Peace, Justice, Love, Power, Knowledge…).

Beauty of Great Questions

Sunday here flows in subtle tones, like love on the edge off remembering.

“…troubled by the ultimate questions. No-one else’s answer can satisfy the hunger in your heart.” John O’Donohue concludes the meditations with the “beauty of the great questions”: 

[it’s] “how they dwell differently in each mind. How they root deeper than all the surface chatter and image, how they continually disturb. Your deep questions grow quickly restless in the artificial clay of received opinion or stagnant thought. . . The presence of the contemplative and the artist in a culture is ultimately an invitation to awaken and engage one’s neglected gifts, to enter more fully into the dream of the eternal that has brought us here to earth.” p. 247

         The passage referencing the Big Questions takes me back to the final years of teaching, especially in the I-Series program and the capstone course of my career, “Good Stories: Teaching Narratives for Peace and Justice.” If I had absorbed and articulated more of the understanding of Beauty that O’Donohue lays out, the title might have included “for Beauty” or perhaps “Stories on Beauty.” We did explore the frontiers of beauty as well as goodness and truth. The terrain of narrative offers spaces to mine into personal identity and the connection with the divine.

   When the youngest sister leaves home and enters the darkest center of the forest, she meets with the threshold question each of is invited to open, to circle around, to listen into: "Who are you?" And, of course, the companion questions: "Where do you come from and where are you going?" "What are you doing here?" Her answer allows us to reflect on our divine heritage: “I am the child of the ruler and I’m searching for my brothers as long as the sun may rise…”

          William Stafford asked it this way: “Who are you really, wanderer?” And the response as I remember it, allowing myself to reconstruct, as each of us might do, instead of looking up “the artificial clay”: “And the answer you have to give/ no matter how dark and lonely,/ I am the child of the king.”

"God is Beauty"

Looking north, Friday, June 15, ~5:30A

“God is Beauty” titles the final chapter of O’Donohue’s Beauty. It’s only one of the infinite ninety-nine names but perhaps among the most under-attended while most available. Sometimes the face of beauty just requires getting up at 5:30A and looking out the window. Other times the display depends on devotion to tending the gardens, both in the ground around us and in the inner reaches of the soul. Perhaps like all the names of God, beauty reveals the mystery as one travels deeper and deeper into the layers, by grace and by dedication. The gifts include interpenetration with other names of God and this opens vistas that have been veiled until their connection is realized.

“Thomas Aquinas and the medieval thinkers wisely recognized that beauty was at the heart of reality; it was where truth, unity, goodness and presence came together. Without beauty they would be separated and inclined towards destructive conflict with each other. Accompanied by beauty, truth gains graciousness and compassion. Beauty holds harmony at the heart of unity and prevents its collapse into the most haunted chaos. In the presence of beauty, goodness attracts desire and beauty makes presence luminous and evokes its mystery. There is a profound equality at the heart of beauty; a graciousness which recognizes and encourages the call of individuality but invites it to serve the dream and creative vision of community. Without beauty the Eros of growth and creativity would dry up. As Simone Weil says: “Desire contains something of the absolute and if it fails…the absolute is transferred to the obstacle.’” John O’Donohue, Beauty, pp. 222-3.