Living in the wasteland is not permanent. While we cut a canyon between the finite and the infinite by sinning against God, Beauty himself, He has bridged that divide through Christ. The reason we can even consider the possibility of crossing the divide between the finite and the infinite is because the Infinite has already crossed the divide and appealed to our imagination by way of both story and the senses. God became a man, He entered His own story, and thereby Beauty stood before us in the form of Christ who was the very image of His Father. “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father,” said Jesus. The distance between us and our Creator was spanned first from the divine side. Now we can spend a life-time crossing the bridge made by God.
A tangible way that we traverse the bridge toward the Beauty found in God is by finding all the metaphors and analogies placed around us in the cosmos. We can only come at Beauty by analogy, by metaphor. God loves to show himself, but only by slant: fire (Moses), wind (Elijah), flesh and blood (Christ). God offers Himself to our spiritual vision by way of metaphor. He has given us many tools, like art and music, by which to access metaphor. Art and music and literature are attempts to make palpable the impalpable, substantial the insubstantial and thereby bring us into communion with the Transcendental[1]. Our spiritual pilgrimage is a perpetual exercise in finding meaning by use of the imagination. We find meaning by discovering and following the footprint left by the wave upon the sand.
God is light: beautiful.
God is a rock: beautiful.
Bread: this is my body, broken for you.
Wine: this is my blood, spilled out for you.
Beauty incarnated.
For these reasons, our view of God and our actions toward others are grounded in Beauty. She is the well-spring, the mouth of the river that leads back to God. Any truth that is not grounded in Beauty first, is no longer true. Any goodness that is not grounded in Beauty first is no longer good and so Beauty remains a category that grounds all other Christian theology.[2]
The imagination can be trained, through practice, to see spiritual significance in the everyday scenery and setting of our life story; to see through the sense perception to the deeper Beauty beyond. Even more than that, the imagination is an instrument of the mind that synthesizes the particulars of life and creates a meaningful story by which we find meaning and purpose during this pilgrim life of ours. You and I have been gifted with an imagination precisely so that we might access the world around us as a coherent arena of divine images. The more we pursue a Beauty above and beyond ourselves, the more our lives become expressions of divine Beauty.
God is lavishly generous toward us, regardless of our moral state. We are born into a strawberry patch of grace. All the world—our lives and neighborhoods included—is charged with beauty. Spring rains, summer sun, fresh snow, fall leaves: lavish beauty. That beauty is given to us on a daily basis without much effort on our part, but imagine the invigorating effect of a life spent pursuing even more Beauty.
Our personalities, our jobs, our relationships, our conversations will all take on another level of fullness and meaning when we pursue Beauty because that is how God wired this life to be. When we stop living for ourselves, we find ourselves. When we start looking above and beyond ourselves, we lose sight of the fears, the entanglements, and the distractions that so pervade our earthbound lives. When we jettison self-worship and the pressing addiction to immaturity, God opens for us a vista of delight. When we climb off the hood of that pretty nice car and walk away from the sandbox of youth culture, the vibrant life begins to bloom around us. A vibrant life, therefore, depends upon not only the health of the imagination, but the trajectory of the imagination. The trajectory of a healthy imagination is toward Beauty.
[1] I borrow this summary of Bonaventure from Steve Turley
[2] I have found no one who says it better than David Bentley Hart when he writes, “Beauty is a category indispensable to Christian thought; all that theology says of the triune life of God, the gratuity of creation, the incarnation of the Word, and the salvation of the world makes room for—indeed depends upon—a thought, and a narrative, of the beautiful…I have learned—as elsewhere I could not have done—that theology begins only in philokalia: the ‘love of beauty’” (David Bentley Hart).
