My father was sure that he would find hidden treasure in some form or another. I now smile at the image that so mortified me as a teenager: my father, tall on the sand. He wore khaki shorts and a polo shirt always partially untucked in the back. I don’t know what was worse – the white tube socks pulled up to his knobby knees or the metal detector accompanied by oversized headphones. It was the stuff of great humiliation.
When I was younger, the fabled treasure was in the gem mines of the North Carolina Mountains. Now, this was a treasure hunt that I could get behind. At first, it was a disappointment. I expected to find shining, beveled gems sparkling in the dirt, ready to be fitted into a coronation diadem. However, there was no actual mine, but instead a tourist destination with a cartoonish depiction of Yosemite Sam’s Appalachian cousin holding a bag of gold. We purchased buckets of dirt, which we poured through a sieve, then lowered the sieve into a stream of water. The buckets of dirt were salted with petite rubies and sapphires added for the tourists to “discover”. You had to search carefully, for the uncut gemstones just looked like round rocks, nothing special at all.
Finding beauty does not require a well-equipped hunt. It is just as easy to find the treasure of beauty as it was for my dad to find ways to embarrass his teenage daughter. After my father’s death last year, I became acutely aware of beauty. A dear group of friends sent me a flower arrangement the day after the funeral. It was not the sort of arrangement of white lilies that makes your living room bear an uncanny resemblance to a funeral home. This was an extravagant work of art with cascading spring blooms - hydrangeas, lilies, and roses. I did not want to miss a minute of their splendor. When I wasn’t drinking in the beauty of the blooms indoors, I sat on my back porch and marveled at the way the light shone through the oak leaves.
In addition to the beauty of nature, I found beauty in words. Immediately in the wake of tragedy, Scripture seemed dull and remote. I took solace in the artistry of T. S. Eliot’s poetry and found hope there when the words of God seemed quite void. In grief, I treasured poetry in my heart:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing
The beauty of the eyes and beauty of the mind found completion in beauty in the mouth. I did not only want to see or think of beauty but also taste it, eat, and drink it. I made homemade bread. I savored wine, good wine. I did not want a cheap red wine to relax or forget. I wanted the heavenly, the sublime - wine that tasted of terroir and reflected the complexity of life in which I found myself. In nature, in word, in wine, beauty carried me through the days when the heavens felt like brass. What could have shattered instead strengthened. It gave me a keenness of vision to look for God in a new way.
Excepting perhaps Eucharistic wine, I do not say that God was any of these things. Rather, that beauty points us towards the Godhead by reflecting its nature. Beauty, together with truth and goodness, make up the three transcendentals. Throughout not only Christendom but also Western Civilization these have been regarded as objective realities. So, when speaking of beauty, I do not mean the aesthetic appeal of a piece or style of art or music. I do not mean the attractiveness of a man or woman. And, most of all, I do not mean a state or an emotion that accompanies the apprehension of these. What I mean by beauty is the Trinity, and the extent to which the Trinity is reflected in creation. Thus, finding beauty is a treasure hunt for God and his imprints.
It is challenging to speak of the Trinity without veering into accidental heresy. In his series of poems called A Litany, John Donne refers to the Trinity as the “unnumbered three”. He writes that the Trinity is, “Bones to philosophy, but milk to faith.” The Trinity provides both the structure and the food to our faith. Together, the Godhead provides a pattern of both creation and relationship.
Augustine has much worthwhile to say about the Trinity. When studying The City of God, I found the most helpful extrabiblical description of the Trinity that I have yet encountered. He explains that God the Father is; God the Son knows that He is; God the Spirit rejoices in His being and His knowledge of it. In other words: in the Father is being; in the Son is knowledge; in the Spirit is love.
Augustine expounds on Plato’s idea that God is the author of nature, the bestower of intelligence, and the kindler of love. While they are not the only sources of beauty, it is right that we should find beauty in nature, in words, and in feasting. The natural world, language, and sacrament are all places to find the Trinitarian imprint of beauty. Solomon writes:
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live, also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in his toil – this is God’s gift to man. Ecclesiastes 3:11-13
Much of my Christian life has been spent trying to conjure up the right “spiritual” feelings rather than receiving what has been given. In this, I am sure that I am not alone – trying to unearth transitory emotions, which are worth about as much as the undersized, uncut sapphire in my sieve. What has been given is the beauty of the Trinity emblazoned across creation: in nature, in word, and in feasting. Or, in other words, in wonder, in work, and in worship.
Coming next: Part Two: Beauty or Chaos? Order and the Natural World