Often, we think of beauty as something extra, something luxurious. It is often the first thing to be ousted in times of stress or chaos. Lighting that candle or hanging that painting or cutting those flowers seems so frivolous in the face of grief or even in the context of trying to survive a long day of work and family life. There is sometimes just no room for beauty.
In a 2002 address to the Communion and Liberation community, the late Pope Benedict XVI, then known as Cardinal Ratzinger, spoke of beauty as being absolutely necessary. Of course he was not talking about purely aesthetic beauty but rather of beauty as a response of the heart. He said beauty is a form of knowledge without which we would be “impoverished” and our faith and theology would “eventually dry up.”
“We must rediscover this form of knowledge. It is a pressing need of our time,” he said.
This may all seem a little melodramatic to our ears. Aren’t there more important things to do than taking the time to prepare a beautiful tablescape or linger over sunsets? The reason for that little sarcastic voice inside is because beauty, like many other signs that point to the supernatural, has been cheapened and has been the subject of counterfeit so many times that we have become weary of giving beauty the attention it is due. We have so much access to beauty, after all. The world of advertising sees that we are over-saturated in unattainable, staged attempts at beauty.
The trouble is that we struggle to receive this gift of God and let it change us to be more like God. Instead, our immediate response to God’s gift of beauty is to try to possess it, to control it and to manipulate it for our own purposes.
Pope Benedict XVI, though, reminded us of Plato’s meditations on beauty when he explained that beauty produces an emotional shock which focuses the senses on its pursuit. The result of an experience of beauty is a sense of longing and nostalgia. Plato wrote that beauty actually causes us to suffer from longing.
In our effort to avoid suffering and longing, we have endeavoured to harness beauty in our homes and control its manifestations in our lives. Beauty causes yearning and we don’t know how to wait for the good things of God.
We want flowers to bloom on the right day. We want our weddings scripted. We want to control the birth story and the death story. We want to draft contracts before relationships get too serious or perhaps avoid commitment altogether for fear that things will not go as we hope. To truly appreciate beauty, we need to be friends of fasting, accustomed to waiting with hope and expectation. To speak and understand beauty fluently, we need to have hearts that know how to wait on the bridegroom.
Sometimes the pain of something beautiful, especially in the wake of loss and grief, is so great that we think it will kill us. This is an experience of the power of God. This is an experience of our being not-yet-home. Especially in profound sadness, we see that beauty is a tremendously effective compass. If we sit with the pain of the nostalgia and see it through, we will see ourselves travel through it and be changed once we get to the other side. If we mute it, however, or we try to stifle its effects on us by drowning it out or by distraction, we will see the pain remain and be unproductive, perhaps even cruel.
Beauty is an icon that speaks of eternity in the moments when that message is needed. An icon is a physical, visual reality which points us to the spiritual. When experienced purely and received with open hands, beauty transcends the material realm and takes us into the heart of God where we see and understand that beauty’s full flowering is Christ on the cross.
In a Pints with Aquinas podcast, Byzantine nun Mother Natalia encouraged us to not flee from the intensity of the longing or from what she calls the wound of love. The desire to be lost in beauty is the desire to be lost in God.
“Beauty leaves us with a longing for more. The beauty of a sunset… beauty of the friend that we end the zoom call with … these leave us with an ache for more,” said Mother Natalia.
“Don’t be afraid of that longing, that ache. When ordered correctly towards Christ, that longing will get you to heaven. That longing will give you the courage to make the sacrifices necessary to get to heaven … to the place where the longing will be fulfilled.”
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