Finding Hope in Suffering Through Beautyಮಾದರಿ

Beauty Speaks Truth

We’re born hungry. 

It’s God we want, and the kind of hunger we bear is like passion and tenderness; we want to eat and touch God, drink and breathe him. We want to hold him close and breathe in his loveliness like we would a small child or a beloved spouse. Our suffering and grief only make this worse, for this precious God in all his beauty is the one who made us, the only one who can unmake our pain and restore our joy. 

But what does it mean to know the love of God? How does one feast upon God’s goodness in the desolate field that is the human heart after grief? What does it really mean to “taste and see” that God is good amidst a fallen world? 

Beauty tried hard to teach me. 

For years, in the strange, swift moments I called knowings, I tasted something I thought, with shock and joy, could be called the goodness of God; I knew something true about his nature. The swell of a choral piece as I sat on my bed in loneliness could suddenly stir and astonish me. In its beauty, I could hear the healing of the world. Or a sunset over a Tennessee field after another of my solitary, restless walks when I felt myself sliding toward depression and was stopped by the sight of the sky, washed in a cascade of colors. Standing there, for just an instant, I was whole and unafraid and so loved my skin broke out in goosebumps. Ah, beauty. In a dappled sky, or a folk song, the peak of a mountain, the touch of a friend: beauty set me a feast amidst my sorrow, instants of profound joy that sated my hungry heart. 

But over and over I dismissed beauty as having any real bearing on my spiritual hunger or the larger story of my faith. I had been trained by the culture around me, even that of my church, to dismiss such trivialities as imagination or emotion; art or music or the joy I felt in nature were frivolous things, pleasant in their way but incapable of bearing Truth (with a capital T). “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8 NASB) The last meaning we usually give this verse is a literal one, and it was the last that occurred to me despite the fact that my moments of beauty were the places I had come closest to knowing God’s reality. We don’t even realize the extent to which our view of God and ourselves is shaped by materialism, a belief that the touchable world of science and matter is all there really is. Because of this, we too often view the world with disenchanted eyes. We struggle to see the stuff of earth, the food we eat, the homes we craft, or even the love we make as sacred, caught up in redemption and capable of offering us the continuing goodness of God.

But Augustine called the created world a book written not with ink but the stuff of the cosmos, with everything in it reflecting and revealing the mind of its Creator. For believers, the world means something, beauty communicates: storm and song, starlight and season—these come straight from God’s imagination, and they tell us something vital about his character and heart. As I studied this, I came to an epiphany.

God, I finally realized, is not a thought I must think or a proposition I must know. God is the Lover and Maker, the Friend and Creator, and he makes himself known in the tastable, touchable wonder of his world. We know his healing in the fellowship of his people. His joy is what sings in the wind and spices the best wine and glimmers in the gold of sunset. In the savor of feasts, the cadence of seasons, in apples crunched and friends touched, God is known for the eternal beauty that he is, one to heal and restore us in all our grief.

Where and how and when have you tasted and seen God’s goodness in a tangible way?

How do you understand the relationship between God, creation, and your own physicality?

What beauty have you encountered that told you a true and holy thing?