On Beauty.featured

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to find the place where all beauty came from.” – CS Lewis

The most impactful part of having children for me has been watching their little souls awaken to beauty.

The wide-eyed wonder of an infant experiencing every texture, taste, and sound for the first time. Squealing with sensory overload the first moment their bare feet touch the grass and then, after several timid attempts, demanding to be put down so they can faceplant into it while spreading their hands and feet to absorb every cool, smooth, bumpy inch.

The baby who makes his first mark with a crayon and giggles in delight as he continues to scribble, filling the page and the table and his clothes and sometimes the wall with color after color.

The toddler who months before carried on an hour long conversation in English with a little girl who only spoke Spanish suddenly grasping that the taxi driver is not speaking English and leaning forward in fascination to hear his unfamiliar words.

The little girl sounding out her first words on a trip becoming single-minded in her desire to read for herself who one year later is devouring chapter books and insisting on longer, more challenging works.

In each of these simple moments and in thousands more, I recognize the awakening to beauty in their little souls. Their rejoicing in creation and longing to have every inch of themselves immersed in it is their earliest form of prayer.

Their delight in their own ability to create beauty, their fascination with language and how to communicate with others, and their appreciation for writing and story are all further steps in understanding the astounding beauty of the world and its creator.

As an adult, one of my biggest sources of pride is my unquenchable desire to seek and find beauty in the most unlikely places and circumstances. A childhood immersed in nature and story and music and prayer has given me unvanquished confidence that beauty always exists.

My understanding that began with those first prayers that were simply delight in creation has now matured to knowing that beauty exists because God exists. And not only in treatises and theological works but intimately, in each moment of life.

In the simultaneous toddler tantrums in the midst of making dinner. In going to wash the sheets the baby peed on only to discover that I neglected to move the previous load of clothes to the dryer two days earlier. Every annoyance, when turned into a willing sacrifice instead of a resented trial has the ability to bring beauty to our life.

I have seen intimately in the last several months that beauty also exists in suffering. In uncertainty. In fear. In moments of anguish that the vocation I longed for so deeply may not continue long enough to allow me to see my children mature in their own understanding of God.

Because beauty, while certainly an aesthetic, is not only an aesthetic. It is not only found in moments of peace and happiness. It is always found in the relentless seeking and recognition of love. Love of a creator who made each creature unique and complex and an intrinsic, irreplaceable part of creation as a whole.

Love of those who joyfully sacrifice in the daily mundane of raising families and quietly caring for the needs of those around them. Love of those boldly standing up to hatred. Love of those who put their own lives on the line to enter the darkest, most dangerous places and bring others to safety.

None of these actions are what we would classify as aesthetically beautiful. In fact most of them reflect the ugliest of what the world has to offer. Yet beauty exists because God is never absent.

It is not a coincidence that the towering Renaissance cathedrals with their claims to being the epitome of beauty and art have as their constants the crucifix and the stations of the cross.

Intense suffering, humiliation, torture, betrayal, and the gruesome death of an innocent person are not abstractions to Christianity. They are the core of our identity. They are the source of our redemption. They are the assurance that no matter what we face, our God has willingly gone before us in it and will not abandon us to it.

And perhaps more important than any work of art or literature I share with my children, more impactful than any natural wonder or holy site we visit, more lasting than any tradition we establish or knowledge we pursue is the simple act of living through this trial in way that reminds them and myself that beauty does not diminish in suffering. And as Dostoyevsky said, “beauty will save the world.”