This month of December, my daughter and I, along with her dog, Fiona, drove from Chicago to Anchorage, Alaska, where Elizabeth has been called to pastor a church. At Dawson Creek, in the upper part of British Columbia, we were at mile zero of the Alaskan highway—ahead of us, 1580 miles of mostly snow-packed roads and mountainous terrain of astonishing beauty. We started our days, of increasingly shorter daylight, before sunrise and ended them after sunset. We experienced the beauty of snowy mountains, some of which reached 19,000 feet, in various kinds of light, blue sky, and clouds. We lived in awe of the beauty that surrounded and enveloped us.
God has been referred to as Being itself, Life itself, Love itself. Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth century American pastor and theologian in a time of great awakening, referred to God as Beauty itself. We meet God in the beauty around us and within us, large and small, magnificent and lowly.
Beauty meets us in the grandeur of mountains and the delicacy of a beetle. I meet beauty in my backyard. I encounter it in the chickadee that grabs a sunflower seed at my bird feeder and, unlike the sparrows, does not linger, but flies away to a solitary place to enjoy it. I meet beauty in the sunflowers that the birds plant in my garden and the butterflies that visit them.
Beauty meets us in the human body and the human mind, in form and thought, in sound, sense, and creativity; art, music, and dance. I am taken in by the beauty of Chicago’s cityscape lit up at night and viewed across the water of Lake Michigan, and by the canyons and cliffs of its skyscrapers during the day—and the peregrine falcons that nest there. The city itself is an expression of nature, of human nature and therefore of the divine nature and of Beauty itself. The sin and evil that reside in the city (and in its making) and in the world cannot overcome the beauty. It shines in the darkness.
And God is in it. Beauty itself draws us. The awe we experience is our drawing near. We are invited to come nearer, to enter in and to receive and be changed.