There are days when it’s hard for me to remember that I have a soul. I’m a cynical creature sometimes, and in the face of the skeptics and scoffers with all their clever alternatives and simple refutations, it’s hard for me to hold to my internal certainty. I feel like a child insisting that I know, when all I have is a feeling (or worse, just nursery-training telling me so).
On the worst days I make sure to find something beautiful. It’s evidence that’s great for both calming and strengthening me. If we have no soul—if there is nothing more too us than biological impulses and chemical reactions—then what is beauty? How can it be so commonly understood and admired, even with such vastly different experiences through which we see it? When I look out at a gorgeous landscape or see a painting, and I am touched by the beauty of it, I feel confident that I’m a whole person. I have a soul complex enough to want something outside a simple existence.
This world is concrete and focused; I know I need food and shelter and others. But when I take the time to be filled by beauty I’m feeding a need that has nothing to do with survival—and as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with this world at all! So the unseen world is brought to my attention. I feel that there’s much more to me, and to all of this, than just what’s before us day by day.
It also seems to me that it might be an indicator of a code outside of us. In spite of the differences which have shaped our subjective understanding of beauty, we all seem to share a shockingly common notion of what is beautiful. And if most everyone agrees that something is beautiful, doesn’t that indicate that the thing itself might be beautiful? And if a thing can be beautiful, even if no one is looking at it, doesn’t that mean that beauty might be an outside standard by which things are compared?
But admitting that there might be a standard outside of personal perception is dangerous territory, because then there might be other standards; like bad and good, or right and wrong. Somewhere out there might even be the standard of Perfect.
I believe there is a Creator who knows these standards, and his work is good.
The moment of perceiving beauty is like some incredible clash of tiny elements. It’s the culmination of threads that the Lord has woven into our nature and the nature of his Universe. When we relish something that is beautiful we’re filled with a delight that is tribute to the God of Order who gave us our eyes, minds, love of lines and patterns, love of colors or sounds—and he gave us our lives, that day and the very second when we can appreciate it.
Those who don’t know God just reap the pleasure of beauty. But those who do know God ought to praise and thank him for such an awesome gift; a gift that is available, not just once in a while, but everything single day to those who have learned to look.
A gift like that. Every day. That is generosity.
And did he really need to give us this love of beauty? Did we have to relish colors or find bliss in music? For that matter, we didn’t really have to enjoy eating in order to live. What kind of a God—who never had to create—creates a world of such abundant pleasures, and then creates beings capable of celebrating all the joy?
Our God is an awesome God. He is a God of beauty, evidenced by His creation. He is a God of love, to design us to love that beauty, thus sharing the joy.
And don’t get me started on the big-L Love, where he comes down to redeem us. We could be here for days.
So embrace beauty. Seek it out and bring it into your life. Sample the happiness that God shares with us, and let it draw you closer to Him.
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