…For beauty comes to us all in the moments that unravel our cynical surety as our hearts seem to come apart at the touch of some odd slant of light on an evening walk. Or we hear the strained thread of some beloved old music that seems to break the spell of doubt. We read a novel, a story of someone who forgave or fought or hoped, and we feel something stir to life as precious, as fragile, as urgent as a newborn child within us. We are encountered by beauty, and suddenly the story of our grief seems to be the passing thing- that faint, ghostly illusion that one day will melt in the beams of a great, inexorable love.
My deep belief is that beauty has a story to tell, one that was meant by God to speak to us of his character and reality, meant to grip our failing hands with hope. We know God when we behold his beauty, when his goodness invades the secret rooms of our hearts. To believe the truth beauty tells: this is our great struggle from the depths of our grief. To trust the hope it teaches us to hunger toward: this is our fierce battle. To craft the world it helps us to imagine: this is our creative, death-defying work.
Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth, p. 22.
These quotes and others that don’t include a post written by me are categorized under commonplacing – which simply means a collection of inspiring quotes or other material attributed to another writer, artist…
Beautiful! 🥰
Sometimes people who would be unresponsive to a sermon can be powerfully moved by a stunning scene in nature or an artistic masterpiece like a great musical composition. In some sense, they’re connecting to the Source of all Beauty. C.S. Lewis said that the works of Richard Wagner, though not himself a godly man, awakened his imagination to a reality he hadn’t been aware of before. Maybe that’s partly what Dostoevsky meant when he has one of his characters say that “beauty can save the world.”
The poet John Keats penned a famous line: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Though writing from a presumably secular perspective, he captures a certain reality. In fact, he may be expressing more than he knows. Truth is ultimately a Person and Beauty is ultimately a Person just as the Word is ultimately a Person.
Amen Jim!!