i have heard a lot about this whole beauty thing lately. Sometime recently i heard someone say that mankind's appreciation of beauty is proof of the divine spark within us. Honestly i didn't get it at first. But the more i think about it the more sense it makes to me. i love nature, love to be in it, surrounded by it, far from civilization. How many times have i hiked a ridge on the Appalachian mountains and stopped at a clearing just to take in the view? The majesty, the glory, the enormousness of the world we live in mesmerizing me. Stop at a scenic overview sometime and observe the other people taking in the view. Often the are silent, stricken by the panorama stretched out before them. As much intelligence and emotion as i have always attributed to my K-9 companions i have never noticed one of them staring in awe across a landscape with me. As many deer as i have walked quietly upon in the wilderness of the Old Dominion, i have never caught a single one of them enraptured by the aesthetics of nature. Maybe those folks who claim our acknowledgment of beauty is what separates man from beast are on to something. Maybe it is proof of the divine seed placed within us.
i have the indescribable privilege of working with an autistic boy here in our community. He has become hands down one of my favorite people in the world. Over time i have developed an appreciation of his attraction to the beauty of the world around him. The simplest things become objects of loveliness. A pack of normal markers, linked together, end to end, to become a long tube of smooth glossy plastic. Watching as he passes them across the bridge of his nose, watching the procession of markers pass like a bullet train in slow motion, close to his eyes. i didn't get it at first, so one day at home i dug out some markers and hooked them together, i tried it out. You know what, it really is a mesmerizingly beautiful thing to watch, simple yet spell-binding. The way textures fascinate him. Water, clay, a crumpled paper towel, construction paper, mud, sand, a blade of grass. For most of us it has been a long time since we were really aware of the feel of the things that pass through our hands on a daily basis. We just pick things up, put them down, stuff them in our pockets or throw them into a waste basket. But there is something wonderful about our sense of touch. He has helped me to reclaim a little of the wonder for ordinary things. Lay in the grass and really look, the world beneath our feet is alive, crawling, bustling with life. There is a beauty in the everyday things of life that we miss in our business, our rush, our "adult-hood".
Beauty is all around us. It is invasive. It finds its way into the ugliest of situations. At the landfill - the swirling mass of white that undulates like a giant ameba, the mass of seagulls gathered there for a feast, their feathers the purest white even though they live in a sea of refuse. A parking lot - an ocean of black pavement, a scab on the planet, and yet there, by the buggy coral, a crack in the armor of modern convenience and a flower pushing its way up for the sun, little yellow petals made more beautiful by the tar saturated backdrop. Yet we tend to associate beauty with those of the opposite sex. We scan a room, see someone, neuro-chemical reactions take place, our pupils dilate, our attention focuses in, "He-lo!" we think. But really isn't beauty more that that? Beauty is much more than a biological reaction to an attractive person. Beauty is bigger than that, more complicated, mysterious.
i think our love of things beautiful is somehow connected to our desire for the divine. We long for something transcendent, something glorious. There is an element in beauty that is indescribable, unexplainable, incomprehensible. In so many ways the divine that fits that same bill. i think that mysterious desire is why we are drawn to art, to paintings, to photos, to movies, to music. Those things move us on a level we were designed to be moved on. They move something deep inside us. That is what sets us apart from every other living breathing thing on the planet, and i am convinced that it is the result of the divine nature placed within each and every person.
i think our love of things beautiful is somehow connected to our desire for the divine. We long for something transcendent, something glorious. There is an element in beauty that is indescribable, unexplainable, incomprehensible. In so many ways the divine that fits that same bill. i think that mysterious desire is why we are drawn to art, to paintings, to photos, to movies, to music. Those things move us on a level we were designed to be moved on. They move something deep inside us. That is what sets us apart from every other living breathing thing on the planet, and i am convinced that it is the result of the divine nature placed within each and every person.
Romans 1:20
From the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly observed in what he made. As a result, people have no excuse.
