Beauty and God’s Delight

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Psalm 8:1 (ESV)

Dear Friends in Christ,

What experience of beauty takes your breath away? What sight or sound or smell leaves you speechless and awestruck and full of delight all at the same time? What if we could remember that sense of awe and delight in our daily lives? What if we could sense the presence of the author of all that beauty in our daily lives?

In our reading of “Liturgy of the Ordinary” this week, the author writes about finding God’s presence in the small moments of beauty and delight in our ordinary day. A cup of tea, the smell of bread baking, watching a child play or sleep, listening to the wind in the trees. All these are glimpses of God’s delight that we take for granted far too often.

In our modern culture, we are immersed in a kind of mercenary materialism, obsessed with productivity and accomplishment. Or our post-modern culture shifts us into consumption of immediate pleasures focused on intense dopamine drives. But we have lost an appetite for beauty and contentment, of wonder and awe and delight in a simple sense of timelessness powerful enough that we forget ourselves, our achievements or desires, and simply soak-in the experience.

C.S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters that humility is not thinking about one’s self in excessively negative terms (as opposed to the opposite in pride), but rather humility is self-forgetfulness. Lewis writes about how humility has the effect that one can take as much delight in one’s self “as in his neighbour’s talents, or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.” The author of all this delight and beauty is God himself.

My son, Alex, the Roman Catholic seminarian, was required in his studies to take courses in Aesthetics. Not because they expect him to arrange flowers or pluck eyebrows, but because faithfulness to God involves an understanding of the full meaning of beauty—beauty that flows from God and that points us back to God.

Do you take time to look for and notice the beauty of God around you? Do you let that beauty point beyond itself and toward the God we worship and to whom we pray? The next time you sit to enjoy that cup of coffee or that sunset, open yourself to the joy and delight of the one who gave you such beautiful gifts. And remember that he has the same delight in you—the crown of his creation, still full of the beauty he gave you.

Yours in Christ,

-Tom