On Beauty

All beauty is fleeting. When you happen across something that is beautiful, there is a desire to capture it, to hold onto that feeling—the feeling of being a part of something sublime, something transcendent. We chase beauty, but in trying to hold onto it, the beauty itself becomes lessened, perhaps because the pursuit of beauty or the attempt to solidify and reify beauty makes it somehow less beautiful.

And the same could be said for joy, or pleasure, or any truly good experience. They all are extraordinarily transient, and yet we try to hold onto them until they shrivel in our hands, and we are left holding dead flowers. The moment that you try to take beauty with you is the moment that beauty begins to die. You can try to sustain it, put the bouquet of roses in a vase and sprinkle some of that magic powder in the water, but in the end, you’ll be left with a vase full of dead roses.

And maybe that is why we like sunsets so much. They are the ultimate beautiful and transient thing. You sit down by the shore as the sun starts its descent into the ocean, lighting up the sky in burnt reds, shades of pink that fade into green. And as you watch, all of nature around you becomes more and more beautiful, until you can almost feel heaven colliding with earth, and then it all dims and fades to black.

“For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.” Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gatherings, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”

There is a beauty that you see, out of the corner of your eye, like the shadow at night that aren’t sure if you really saw.  The beauty of God is something like the beauty we behold and try to capture, but it is far more wild, far firmer and more real. All of our lives, we have desired to hold beauty, but when we see the face of Jesus, beauty will hold us. And in that awful moment, your awe will either transform into abject terror as the Beauty whom you rejected says, “Depart from me,” or it will bend your knees in wonder, and with the Creatures, you will say, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD of host; the whole earth is full of his glory!”