The Beauty of God
There was a time in my own life when questioning the existence of God seemed strange. Now, a questioner of some things thought important and many which are probably not, this statement seems strange, indeed. But there was a time when diving into the existence of God was not a thought I often attempted, and it was probably good that no one presented me the chance to discover whether there actually was a God or whether we were all environmentally manufactured flesh, placed upon earth by something totally ungodly and uncaring. Being young, it’s hard to really question anything. You may question certain random episodes of life, but we don’t do so to debate, rather; we do so to discover necessary truths. Not only are we unafraid, we are totally trusting. The childhood existence is defined by absorption; you’re a sponge dropped into the ocean, attempting to soak up every drop till you reach the sandy floor. Your entire existence wrapped up in linear alphabet, snack time and getting lost in the grocery store. The youthful brain only has time to absorb and feel the world around it. And by brain I mean heart. And by heart I mean that portion of me which was unafraid and willing to love at all costs. This part of the brain, the heart, the soul, slowly dissipated and dimmed with age, but, never the less, it existed; dormant though it may have been for some time.
As a child you don’t want to believe there’s a God. But you don’t want to believe there isn’t a God, either. We just took in what the world around us was saying. Opinions and beliefs come with experience. Youth notice things such as flowers and how the color of the sky morphs and comes alive just as the sun goes to sleep under the horizon. They notice patterns in the eyes of their friends; the colors on the skins of people; and the texture of the people in their skin. They cheer on spiders as they summit thin blades of grass and spend time in thick weeds hunting down snakes and lightning bugs. When they color, draw or paint, they create masterpieces of rhythm and ordered chaos not confined to a page or outline. Sweat is a natural by-product of fun; dirt its counterpart. It seems as though children see God in the world around them—in people, texture and beauty—and it was good that I had heard of God as a youth because then I could slightly begin to understand what I was looking at. The beauty around me had a foundation, something from which it sprang. The beauty of the woods and the smell of the air after a mid-summer rain had value and purpose. It wasn’t useless or vague; beauty had roots which grew forth vision to allow beholders amazement and enlightenment. Beauty was my childhood path to God, and I was happy God had reason for existing through it.
As an ever aging man, genuine beauty lost its grip upon my heart. Either that or my heart lost its grip upon genuine beauty. Regardless, I grew accustomed to mountains and butterflies and lilies. I saw them on TV more often than in reality. Inundated with beauty, so overwhelmed by its presence, I was no longer capable of absorbing that which I will never understand. And beauty tends to exist between the spaces of that which we cannot comprehend. I deceived myself into thinking that I had figured out beauty. I knew how to reproduce it and make it better; manufacture it and sell it to the masses. I live in a Photoshopped world rampant with Hollywood and pornography; airbrushed magazine stars, cable TV, and the constantly accessible Internet. Beauty became what beauty was never meant to be. Beauty, in our world of waste, was transformed into something which it is not, constructed and rearranged to entangle and entice our fleeting brains. I mean hearts. I mean the parts of us which long for something true.
The difficulty in seeing God through beauty, as in childhood, is that what we consider beautiful is full of man made pixels, lines and shades of gray, and not God. We see colors from high resolution screens instead of rainbows. We witness green in dollar bills not blades of grass. We see blue in the eyes of refurbished actresses instead of the skies upon sunrise. Through it all we lost our view of God; the beauty set before us to help us experience and know of his potential existence; complex and difficult to understand in much the same way as the beauty of the universe itself.
The beauty of God is that he must be impossible to fully comprehend, grasp or settle upon. The moon became less beautiful once we climbed aboard and punched a flag through her dusty crust; its mere existence now thought of through the lens of scientific exploration and not bewildered wonderment. God wouldn’t be nearly as beautiful if we could climb atop, punch our mark into him and claim him conquered in the name of our own brains. Much like true beauty, God cannot be explained in a textbook or documentary. God, like beauty, must be experienced. We can view all existing pictures of the Grand Canyon, but until we have seen it with our own eyes, hiked through it with our own two lungs, and gazed into it with our own hearts, we cannot fully experience its beauty or begin to grasp its bewildering expanse. God must be experienced in some way. We can read books about God, listen to professors, pastors, and gurus try to explain him, but if we never personally experience him, how can we ever begin the process of standing in awe of his innate beauty and love?
Our lives—I mean our brains. I mean our hearts— I mean that part of us that used to wonder in awe at the movement of a hand, the curvature of lips, the ability to run and jump higher and higher, is dying to experience beauty. And somewhere inside of us, just maybe it’s dying to experience God, as well.
