Beauty as God’s glory…

This morning, I’d like to talk about beauty.

There are many crazy things going on in the world at the moment, and I’m finding the negatively charged news feeds a bit overwhelming. My intention is not to ignore these things, but to breathe in concurrent and positive realities. We are constantly immersed in contradictions—yet life is still, on balance, beautiful and a gift. Providing a space to reflect on these things is important.

But there is a second reason I thought it worthwhile to explore a more positive theme. As my faith has become more expansive, the very idea of God has become harder to comprehend. The immanence of the God of Abraham seems far less reasonable and an artefact of the past. That is, in part, because I do not share that experience. God is not a conversation partner, nor, despite what some have tried to tell me, someone I can tell a joke to. If God is omniscient, then God already knows the punchline.

I found a great deal of inspiration in the theology of mid-twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich, where any talk of God is symbolic and potentially idolatrous if the symbol is given more weight than it deserves. We need to worship and consider the God beyond god—the God beyond our experience and comprehension. That God is the mystery but also the ground of all being. We are put in our cosmic place when we accept this. God is unknowable—yet has revealed aspects of Godself through scripture and Christ.

I loved this because God was released from the shackles of limited thinking, reductive definition, and coercive rhetoric. For a while, it meant I could focus on Jesus the Christ as the best revelation we have of God. I still hold these thoughts dear, but there has been a cost to this.

What I did not sense over the years was how making God beyond reach diminished God’s importance in day-to-day living. If I could not reasonably articulate anything about God for fear of idolatry, I became less certain of who I was talking about and how this mystery was immanently involved in my life.

One thing became certain: as my understanding of what faith is about increased, it became harder and harder to know what my faith was actually in. God became too abstract.

Of course, I always returned to Jesus and the life-changing wonder and depth in the gospels. There is so much life to be found there, and I continue with that because I believe Christ’s way is really good—there’s no doubt about it. Christ’s modelling and unleashing of human goodness is life-giving.

However, when I was walking on the Camino a couple of years ago, I felt I had no access to God. God was such a mystery that God had been abstracted into the ether of ideas. In that sense, to love God made no sense. I had so many questions; the scale of the universe was so absurd. When I finally realised that I could not work it out, that I was unable to make it make sense, I was faced with a choice: stay or go?

My choice was to stay—to believe in God, to remain within my Christian tradition, and to keep going deeper. In that depth is richness, value, life, hope, goodness, inspiration. And I am glad I did.

Recently, though, I have discovered that I am missing the anchoring of God’s presence in this world, the anchoring that many people of faith know all too well. Many find this in nature, in the mountains or sunsets. But these have lost their voice to me because I have come to accept them as “just is” rather than as products of God’s creative expression. Their “just isness” does not stop them being amazing, but I am no longer stirred by witnessing them.

Something was out of balance with my spirituality.

To whom would my words express worship? What words can I even use to pray? The great words—redemption, salvation, divinity, and glory—all had squirmy footnotes attached that abstracted them away from human experience.

For example, to talk of God’s perfect love is a bit absurd to take literally. We all know what an imperfect love looks like, but since perfection is so far beyond our grasp, it becomes virtually meaningless to talk usefully about it. I do not know what it means to speak of Perfect Love. It does not seem to me that perfection can include messy and ill-defined.

However, I am relieved that when I hear that I am God’s beloved, something stirs within me and is lifted. And as I have often looked around and repeated, “You are God’s beloved,” I know it is uplifting and a sacred act.

This expression of God’s love is life-giving, and that in itself is enough for my faith to seek more. Because there is a story that goes with this belovedness. A story that supports some sense of meaning for life, some reconciliation of the problem of evil, where redemption is possible and repentance leads to goodness. Where there is hope and mechanisms to keep pursuing it. Where even I can be part of making this world a bit better for those I encounter.

All of this—and yet I have found that it is possible to hold all of this big stuff and still miss the immanence of God. A God who responds to us and intervenes in history. A God whose presence, when engaged with, alleviates us from the onslaught of the worst excesses of the human condition.

This morning, I want to share some light that has been shed on this for me. I share this not because I think you need it or will be changed by it, but simply because it is a reflection on something positive and meaningful—even if you have already sorted it out.

I have been reading David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, and he exposed this lack, this gap in my worldview. In his first chapter on Beauty, he offers six aspects to consider. I will not go into all of them, but as a philosopher, he first seeks to provide an understanding of what beauty is. One of his primary premises is that beauty inhabits the spaces between—which might sound odd at first.

Beauty crosses boundaries:

Beauty has always been the most restless upon its exalted perch; the idea of the beautiful can never really be separated from the beauty that lies near at hand. Beauty traverses ‘being’, oblivious of the boundaries that divide ideal from real, transcendent from immanent, supernatural from natural, pleasing from profound—even, perhaps, nature from grace. “Crossing these boundaries so forgetfully,” remarks Balthasar, “belongs to the essence of the beautiful and of aesthetics almost as a necessity.”

Contrary to the popular saying, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Bentley Hart proposes that beauty is objective rather than subjective. It transcends the boundary of personal prejudice or predilection. Just because I say something is not beautiful does not make it so. Beauty is always there, even if I do not see it.

In the distance between us and an object, an acceptance of difference takes place, and beauty is in that process. It transcends difference, calls out uniformity for uniformity’s sake, allows for variation, expansion, or reduction. Beauty provides value in difference and transcends it.

When we begin to understand beauty as intrinsic to all being-ness, rather than a matter of perception, then all of creation is alive. As Bentley Hart describes it:

Beauty defies our distinctions, calls them into question, and manifests what shows itself despite them: God’s glory.

To apprehend beauty is to apprehend God’s glory. To apprehend God’s glory is to experience God’s presence in this world.

This is simply a teaser to an answer to the problem of an over-abstracted God. A teaser on the theme of Beauty, where it becomes a touchstone for the divine. That God’s immanence may again be appreciated. There is more to come in the weeks ahead.