How Beauty Transforms Suffering

In the blog post I haven’t written yet, I talk about three ways I believe we are given to navigate suffering. Note here that I am not talking about answers to suffering, but about ways we are given to press in and through it.

 The first is that which God has given us through prayer – specifically the prayers of lament and protest – a language that reflects both our trust and faith in God and our struggle to understand why there is suffering in the world. We see lament in so much of the Old Testament. The people of Israel knew their God and had little problem expressing their pain and protest. “When we voice protest over the suffering and evil we encounter in life, we do more than just vent our rage. We engage in an ancient and profound form of prayer, an appeal to the honor of God” (Tom Long, What shall we say). (More on that later!)

 The second way is what Thomas Aquinas and others call the virtue of longanimity. Paul calls it long-suffering (in the list of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22)). More on that later!

 The third way we are given to press into the goodness of God and how to reconcile that with suffering in the world is beauty. What an odd couple – beauty and suffering – what on earth could be the connection? Suffering of any kind is chaotic, disordered and anarchic. We know it as something born of sin and brokenness. Beauty, in great contrast, speaks of wholeness, and truth, ordered and steadfast.

 By beauty here, I am not primarily referring to physical beauty – but to a beauty that reflects truth, single-mindedness and eternal rightness.  God in his creation of the world lavished Eden with a perfection of beauty that remained as long as its inhabitants worshipped God. But with the first bite of the apple the perfect beauty God intended for His creation drained away…

I remember a movie from many years ago, Pleasantville, that began in black and white as two teenagers are transported from the 1990’s to the 1950’s to a suburban town steeped in “repression.” As long as its inhabitants did the “good” thing they remained in black and white. But when the rules began to be broken so that people could be “themselves,” color came to town. The theme as I read it was -the world is only beautiful when everyone asserts their own way. That grieves me – and how that must grieve the heart of God.

True beauty calls one to go higher up and further in… It soothes – it compels, it ennobles. And that beauty is never limited to the physical beauty so desired by the culture of the world… True beauty is both moral and spiritual. From the center of that beauty emanates a radiance that could only have originated in the divine. “Josef Pieper noted that in its original sense beauty is “the glow of the true and good irradiating from every ordered state of being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal.” Quoted in Thomas Dubay – The Evidential Power of Beauty (p. 35).

Beauty is incarnational. To know any created beauty, to really see it, we must know that we are looking into the very nature of God.  

The Son is the radiance of [the Father’s] glory and the representation of his essence.

Hebrews 1:3

 Nothing is more radiant than the Son, and so all that God created in the garden was beautiful and radiant. If a flower is beautiful how much more beautiful is its Creator. If we find the sunrise over the ocean glorious, how much more glorious is the One who made it? Moses in his encounters with God would come down the mountain, returning to his people, with a face that shone. He carried with him, on his face, the very radiance of God’s presence. And it was beautiful. How sad was it that the beauty faded the more time he spent with his people?

 Beauty, like integrity is simple – whole, undivided in its very nature…  The end of time – the final crescendo is the story of the city of Jerusalem – “coming down from heaven” bearing the glory of God – radiant like a most rare jewel” (Rev 21:10-11).  The end of time- the beginning of eternity … tells a story of beauty. We are not bodiless souls who sit on clouds – or even in houses made for us by God. (I think Jesus was describing a metaphor in John 17 – although I wouldn’t mind a mansion of my own choosing!)

There is a river, there is a street made of gold, and there is a tree with leaves that bring the healing that ends for all eternity the pain of grief, of sorrow, of migraines and of all manner of sickness.

And every time we look up and out from the ash heap of our pain – we are invited to see God – to truly see beauty. Many years ago, I prayed for a woman who would drive to Toledo from Cleveland every six weeks or so. She had experienced so much trauma – her body and her soul wracked with the pain of abuse. I remember feeling inadequate, woefully so, but I would listen, and we would pray. And God revealed Himself to us as we did so. One time, I asked her to do a bit of homework before her next visit. I think I had been reading Clyde Kilby’s ten resolutions (included on the site as a page). In one of those resolutions, he would tell his students – “every day, go outside, and look… Look at a flower, a cloud, a bird… and give thanks for what it is- something made by God for the sheer joy of creating something beautiful…” (paraphrased by me here). She came back the next month and I asked her how it went for her. She talked about how hard it was, but that she had determined to do it. She spoke of seeing a bird one day and being amazed at its intricate beauty. In that moment – she was able to turn her attention away from the darkness in her soul – to gaze at something so ordinary, but so simple, so undivided in its nature, something beautiful, something totally other than her pain. 

Beauty invites us into a story – the story of a good and faithful God – but a very unlikely story. We are not met by a knight riding his beautiful steed into our suffering to sweep us off our feet with instant healing. In the end, at the end, our salvation will mean that we were not ultimately “healed by Jesus’ miracles, but by his wounds.” (Tom Long, What Shall We Say). Of course, we have seen Christ’s kingdom come – not in its fullness but in ways that bring us solace and hope and freedom. We should never cease praying for suffering to end! God meets us there and sometimes delivers us, and sometimes He doesn’t. But He always remains with us, and in us, to give us what we need to remain steadfast and true.  The cry of our hearts in season and out of season, remains, “Maranatha – Come Lord Jesus” – make all things good and beautiful!”

 Fyodor Dostoyevsky in one of his novels said – “Beauty will save the world”. (The Idiot). He was not, of course, speaking of eternal salvation, but of the power of beauty to reveal the good, the beautiful, the true nature of all created things. That beauty also reveals God in His glory. I have a picture of one of my grandchildren, Eisley, who at the time the picture was taken was about 18 months old. It is a picture of her face – and it captured not only her personality, but the beauty of her “otherness” – in this sense it was the childlike femininity that exuded from her face. The photo inadequate as it was, nevertheless captured the transcendent beauty there portrayed.

Once, at a Pastoral Care Ministries school Leanne Payne, speaking from the stage, held up a poster with the inset image of an angel’s face from a Leonardo Da Vinci painting, “The Virgin on the Rocks.” Our registrar that week had made a way for a man to attend who had been homeless, and who had struggled with mental illness most of his life. When Leanne held up the poster, he left his seat and went up onto the stage to get a better look at the angel’s face. Leanne was pointing out the eternal quality of true femininity Da Vinci had painted in her face and this man was simply drawn up out of his seat to see what she saw. He (like us all) was captured by the transcendent beauty Da Vinci had painted. He wanted to get close, not simply to see what Leanne had seen, but to be immersed in that eternal quality of the true feminine.

 We say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder – while I think there is more to it than that, this idea does capture the idea that what is loved is beautiful. Looking at the hands of a beloved grandmother and calling them beautiful is seeing all that those hands have done. Every child held, bathed, clothed, every meal prepared, every bandage applied was done with love- all of our beloved’s life is seen in the raised veins, the delicate purple tint and the age spots – and these are all beautiful because of love.

This love is also the love the Father poured out in the sacrifice of His Son on the Cross. In a most ironic way then, we could say that the Father’s love made the crucifixion of Jesus beautiful.

“The cross shows us the true beauty of love. Dear young friends, the beauty of Christ crucified is the great paradox of our faith. It is the beauty of a love that gives itself completely to you and me, to each and every one of us. It is the beauty of a love that bears the marks of our wounds. It is the beauty of a boundless love, yet a love utterly concrete and thus credible, which brings us to our knees, moves us deeply, brings tears to our eyes and leads us to pray from the depths of our heart: “Lord, as I contemplate your terrible sufferings, I find myself able to believe in love” (Primo Mazzolari, Un volto da contemplare, Milan 2001, 86) (Pope Francis).

How great is his goodness and how great is his beauty!

Zechariah 9:17

 “To love the good, the beautiful, the just, the true, is mysteriously, to be drawn up into them – or to use another image, to become incarnate of them, to participate in them. To love God, for example, is to be drawn up and out of ourselves (the hell of the self-in-separation) and into Him. In loving Him, I become incarnate of Him. The imagery here is of ascending and descending. God descends into us, and we are drawn into Him. This is a profound thing to think on, for it is the way we get in touch with all that is real. If I come to know and understand justice by loving it, I receive it into myself. If I rejoice in the beauty of another’s face, I become more beautiful.” (Leanne Payne, The Healing Presence)

 In saying this, Leanne is writing not only about the power of beauty, but also about how our love of it is transformative.  She continues: “This is precisely why the capital sin of envy is so deadly a destroyer. By envying what we feel to be more beautiful, just, good, true, etc., or trying to possessively hold it for ourselves through jealousy, one of the dread daughters of envy, we cut ourselves off from becoming. To envy is to hate.” (ibid)

In the Apostle John’s first letter to the early church, he tells his readers that “everything in the world – the lust (concupiscence) of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life comes not from the Father, but from the world.” Concupiscence (a sinful longing for sensual experience) is the unholy desire to possess, to take over, even to destroy (and so it is another way of talking about envy). It stands in stark contrast to the desire to “behold” beauty. Pornography is but one act of this lust of the eyes. Josef Pieper says, “concupiscence of the eyes” does not aim to perceive reality but to enjoy “seeing” (The Four Cardinal Virtues). To behold beauty is to rest our eyes on the object of that beauty and see the eternal truth and goodness represented there as well as the beauty. But “lust of the eyes,” like envy seeks to consume and then destroy.

To love the beauty in my granddaughter’s face is as Leanne says, to be drawn up into it. And this is the very thing that can save us from the destructiveness of suffering.  My advice to my friend from Cleveland helped her to look up and out. In no way did this dismiss her trauma or her pain; instead, it gave her a rest and a respite from the weariness of her pain.

 Eternal beauty awaits us, friends. Not merely in the physical beauty of the city of God described in Revelation 21, but the spiritual beauty of the full reign of God.

 I see the landscape of my pain – the dry parched places, the rocks, the cliffs of despair, of fatigue, of intractable migraines, and yet I can look up and also see that my destination is the place described by John in Revelation 21-22. “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of light, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit each month (wouldn’t that be a cool gift of the month subscription?). The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations… They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads…” 

 Our home at the end of the journey is a city – a holy city descending from heaven when Jesus comes to be our dwelling place. A city, where there will be no loneliness, for God himself will be with us as our God. A city, where there will be no more tears, no more death.  A city described by John with an incredible attention to detail – every measurement of every rod and detail given; every jewel set perfectly in its place. Look at verse 15 of chapter 21 – “And the one who spoke with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and its wall.” – Is that not beautiful? Perhaps in our pain, or in our suffering, it would do us well to go to these two chapters at the end of the Scriptures and meditate on the beauty that will become our eternal home.

 Years ago, I was staying at a guesthouse with other friends and colleagues in the ministry. We were in England (but I can’t remember where). I walked outside one morning and felt the chill of an early Spring day. The gravel crunched beneath my feet as I walked across the driveway. I went out to a low stone wall at the edge of the house and looked at the view before me. I saw the mist rising from the hills, and the earth still covered in dew – and I saw newly prepared fields for farming laid out before me, marked by the same low wall I was standing by. Those stone walls had been there for centuries! And I felt this quickening in my soul. It was a moment both of longing and of joy. In some odd way I felt at home. There is an old English hymn, the lyrics of which were written by the poet William Blake. Its title is “Jerusalem”, and it stands in a sense as an unofficial national anthem. Here are some of the lyrics:

And did those feet in ancient time
walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
on England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
among those dark Satanic Mills?

The reference to the dark satanic mills is to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution.  The hymn sings of the loveliness of England and how because of the beauty, it must have been a place of Christ’s visitation (It wasn’t).

Beauty awakens in us the longing for something more than what we see and experience here on this earth.

I’ll end here with a beloved quote from one of the Narnia books:

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from—my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” (C.S. Lewis – The Last Battle)