Fragrance of Beauty
The fragrance of beauty, with all it’s traces as it passed by led us to seek to find that beauty; chasing after the traces of it’s scent that it left impressed on our souls with the most sublime simplicity.
O woods and thickets, planted by the hand of my Beloved! O green meadow, coated, bright, with flowers, tell me, has he passed you?
Pouring forth a thousand graces, he passed these groves in haste; and having looked at them, with his image alone, clothed them in beauty.
-Saint John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle
We lead with beauty because it leads us. We lead with beauty because it is the most human. It is what we always encounter first. We always begin with the sense, leading us to a deep way of seeing and understanding. For example, when you gaze into the eyes of a beloved, we know, though we are in love with the beauty radiating from without, in the glimmer emerging from the hidden depths of their eyes, that there is so much more to them to discover, to know, to love. This is no different with God, and yet because God is Beauty itself, there is an infinite depth of love we can fall into. I believe this is what two lovers feel. In the eyes of one another, not only do they feel complete, bound up in God who is love through one another, but they can fall into love eternally through their gaze of love, falling into the infinite depths of Gods love. It is not the other person alone who makes them complete, but God who is between them, bringing them together, residing in the empty space between. That intimate empty space that is made for them to come together and become one. In the empty space of two lovers together, God reigns and brings them together–making them one. God entered into the empty space of Marys womb, he entered into the empty space of the manger, he entered into the empty space of the cross, reconciling in Himself all things, and he entered into the empty space of the tomb. He enters into empty space and fills it with his presence and love so as to lighten even the most abandoned and darkened parts of life, making it radiant, alive, transfigured, beautiful.
Beauty converts us without saying anything. When we see something beautiful, it often leaves us speechless. Why is this so? I think it is because beauty leads us to Beauty, which is God, and truly God is silencing because he speaks silently to us through his most sacred language of silence. That language that is best heard in the most simple moments of life when we encounter the truly beautiful.
The first language of God is silence
St. John of the Cross
Beauty speaks to us with this language silently, even when it uses the means of sound there is a certain hidden silence that underpins it, piercing the deepest depths of our heart most intimately. It speaks to us personally, without others understanding. When we watch someone brought to tears gazing at a beautiful sunset or meadow, we see the expression but we don’t know what the Silent One has said to them. I am reminded of what the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote in regards to this idea; that the lily of the field and the bird of the air, by being what they are, are silent. Something might make noise, but if it is what it is before God, then it is silent.
This is what Saint Bonaventure speaks about in his “Journey of the mind to God”. Bonaventure says:
Taking perceptible things as a mirror, we see God through them—through his traces so to speak; but we also see Him in them, as he is there by his essence, power, and presence.
Further, Bonventure goes on to say:
From all this it follows that ‘since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen… Being understood through the things that are made’; and so those that pay no heed to this and fail to recognize, praise, and love God in all these things, are without excuse, for they refuse to be brought out of the darkness into the marvelous light of God. ‘Thanks be to God… Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who has called us out of darkness into his marvelous light’, when through these lights external given we are led to re-enter the mirror of our mind in which divine realities are reflected.
External beauty has a way of making us sink into our hearts where God dwells silently.
In todays world, we have the tendency to fall into a banal functionalism. It is our call as Christians not only to preach truth and goodness, but to do so with beauty. If we leave out beauty, we will not complete our endeavour of proclaiming the gospel. The gospel is first of all beautiful and as such it is good and true. The proclamation that God became a man. That God clothed upon His shoulders human flesh. That he became “touchable, seeable, tangible” as Saint John proclaims in his letter. To preach with beauty, all one use do is be themselves. For God became human, and as such, he shines through you.
In the resurrection, the tomb is empty, but we are told there are also two angels on either side. There are two angels, hinting to us the image of the tabernacle built by Moses; an empty space between two wings of the cherubim. Like the tomb, in the empty space of our hearts, Christ reigns, God is present.
In what seems so ordinary and mundane, we are invited to see God present and active in our lives, gazing at us with a most sublime love and simplicity. if we are to inspire a world that is always moving and doing and speaking, to slow down and be silent–then we must show this world the beauty of the ordinary, everyday, present moment where the beauty of God shines on them. In turn, we can invite them into the deeper depths of our hope and our faith. For if we can find the beauty of God in ordinary things, then how much more beautiful when they encounter Christ fully present in the ordinary form of bread and wine in the holy sacrifice of the mass.
What we have is an invitation that encompasses all of reality. God is not far off, he is with us.
Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gate she speaks.
Proverbs 1: 20-21
Thomas Merton said: “We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time.”
Lord make yourself known to us, enlighten the darkness of our hearts with your most simple, sublime beauty.