When I started working as director of communication for Mission India in 1982, it was felt that for my writing I needed to experience India as soon as possible; so by mid-autumn that year, I found myself in that fascinating land for two weeks.  I know it’s a cliché to say the trip was “life-changing,” but that’s the best way to describe it.  It was an adventure from beginning to end, and since I was also the photographer/videographer, what I saw and experienced is vivid in my memory.

Being the cameraman, I sat in the front of the bus with the driver and got to ask him all sorts of questions: Q: “Why do taxis have lemons hanging  from their front bumpers and shoes hanging from rear bumpers?”  A: “Those are religious symbols for good luck.”  Q: “Why are there swastikas on vendor carts and booths?”  A: “It’s an old Sanskrit symbol asking the gods for financial success.”  So the questioning went—for the whole trip.  And our Sikh driver seemed to enjoy educating me on the religious significance of everything we saw.

When we got to the city of Agra, of Taj Mahal fame, and were approaching the famous structure, I saw that several hawking vendors had spray-painted their donkeys: crimson, purple, lime green, fuchsia—a whole palette of eye-catching neon colors.  So, of course, I had to ask him what the religious significance was of that. A: “It’s not religious; what a man loves he decorates.”

“What a man loves he decorates”!  It struck me then and strikes me now that such would be an awesome theme for a coffee-table book.  And from that time on during our trip, my eyes kept catching loved things made lovely: children in the churches we visited dressed in beautiful, frilly, white dresses, wives and mothers in stunning silk saris (some even with gold thread), trucks with gaudy designs and Christmas-like ornaments strung from front to back, multi-colored chalk designs artfully sifted into intricate patterns on newly swept, hard-packed dirt in front of primitive homes and temples, and the very icon of India: the breathtaking Taj Mahal—perhaps the world’s best-known, most lavishly decorated monument to love.

The bus driver’s comment explained a lot of things I saw in India—and lots of things I see in creation.  In the last post I commented on how the Bible tells us that the creation fresh from the hand of God was not only good, but also pleasing to the eye: it was beautiful.  In so many ways it remains beautiful.  Every time you see a beautiful butterfly, a bird with stunning plumage (or even a sparrow), a regal tree, a blazing sunrise, a spectacular mountain range, flaming flowers, towering clouds illuminated by raw electricity, or a newborn baby with “skin so soft,” remember also that what our Creator loves He decorates.

KEY SCRIPTURE:
LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made. All your works praise you, LORD; your faithful people extol you. They tell of the glory of your kingdom and speak of your might (Psalm 145:9-11).

Some time ago one of my WOC posts ended up in the nether world of cyberspace where it got bounced around by some art lovers who rankled at my statement that “if I saw a Picasso in nature, I would know it was not from the hand of God.”  As George MacDonald emphasized, God’s creative hand, wherever it does its work, produces beauty.  My conclusion was considered by these aficionados to be that of an art ignoramus.  And I do have to confess that there is a lot I don’t know about modern art.   [See Picasso article and image source here]

Nonetheless, I subsequently ran across a 1914 essay by Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev on his first encounter with the work of Pablo Picasso.  Here is his first sentence:  “When one enters into the Picasso room in the gallery of S. I. Schukin, one is seized with a feeling of subtle terror.”  He had entered the Picasso room from the room featuring the idyllic and dreamy world of Gauguin.  Berdyaev goes on: “After this golden dream one is roused wide awake in the room of Picasso. Cold, gloomy, frightful. The delight of an embodied and sun-bright life has vanished. A wintry cosmic wind has torn away veil after veil; all the blossoms have faded, all the leaves, the skin of things is stripped away, all the coverings, all the flesh, manifest in forms of imperishable beauty, has fallen away.”      [Picasso postcard source]

Berdyaev’s revulsion at the work of Picasso is a lot deeper and classier than mine!  I more or less think most of it is ugly.  It is true, though, that Picasso was a talented craftsman with the brush and other art media.  Berdyaev confesses: “Picasso is a remarkable painter, profoundly agitating, but in him there is no attainment of beauty. He is all transitional—all crisis.”  Beauty is important to Berdyaev—so important that in another essay he said, “Beauty will save the world.”

I still have a lot more pondering to do to grasp the whole philosophical meaning of that statement, but the first thing that strikes me is the place of beauty in works of God.  In Genesis 2 we discover that the first thing said about the trees of the Garden in Eden is that they were “pleasing to the eye”—they were beautiful.  That statement comes after we learn that God’s creation is good.  Goodness is beautiful. Beauty is good.

KEY SCRIPTURE:
Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:8-9).

I think that’s why few things anger me more than seeing God’s creation defaced.  For instance, industrial forestry that leaves mere destruction in its wake raises both my ire and blood pressure.  I understand the importance of speed and efficiency to the making of profit, and I even understand that there may be some ecological benefits to clearcutting if done carefully.  But to leave a once majestic forest ripped and bleeding its soil is the epitome of ugliness.  If there is no provision to restore its health and beauty as quickly as possible, such “industry” becomes a beast reminiscent of Tolkein’s Mordor. [Image source].

Berdyaev felt that much of Picasso’s painting is a vision of deconstruction and destruction that offer no hope of the recovery of beauty: “Picasso is not the new creativity. He is the end of the old.”  As a Christian, Nicolai Berdyaev looked forward to the coming of Christ and the Kingdom and the restoration of a new beauty that would surpass even the old beauty reflected by the art of Leonardo DaVinci and other classical artists.  My assumption is that that understanding comes close to the meaning of “beauty will save the world.”

Followers of Christ would emulate the Creator in being beauty savers, beauty lovers, and beauty dreamers—taking our inspiration from the wonder of creation (which includes people) and looking forward to the coming of the Source of goodness and beauty when all once again becomes  “pleasing to the eye.”

["Mount Washington painting by John Frederick Kensett  "Information reproduced from the Web site White Mountain Art & Artists authored by John J. Henderson and Roger E. Belson.  Visit their Web site at http://whitemountainart.com/."  ]

At the age of 37 I entered a three-year “dark night of the soul” called mid-life crisis.  No, I didn’t buy a red sports car, abandon my family, and become a beach bum.  Mostly I cried a lot.  Sometimes at night I would go outside, look up at the stars, and ask, “God, where are you?” and weep again because the heavens were brass.  One day I fell crying into my wife’s lap—telling her that I needed God to step out of heaven and tell me that everything will be all right.  Her answer was Spirit-inspired: “God is not going to step out of heaven and tell you that, but I’m here and I’m telling you that everything is going to be all right!”  Marge and my friends became the voice and heart of Jesus during that bleak time.  They took my hand and carried the Light for me throughout the night until morning came again.

Among the many lessons I learned at that time is when your soul is in anguish, the wonder of creation loses its capacity to create joy.  I even wrote a psalm about it—my mid-life crisis psalm.  The sum of my psalm was that I bewailed the loss of joy in my vocation as a Christian school administrator, in my wife and children, and in the natural world.  Living in Northern California at the time, I had access to some of the world’s most amazing natural wonders: Big Sur, the redwood forest, the Sierra Nevada, Point Reyes, and typically awe-inspiring Yosemite.  Yet they became incapable of giving me joy.  I was heartsick and only God and His people could heal me—which they eventually did.  And I learned the lesson that C. S. Lewis taught in Screwtape Letters:

Sooner or later [God] withdraws, if not in fact, at least from [the believer’s] conscious experience, all. . . supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. [Chapter 8]

The creation by itself never satisfies the soul—a fact learned when one is heartsick.  It’s the existence, love, and care of our Creator/Savior and His people that makes joy in anything possible.  If the soul of someone in your sphere of influence is struggling in the night, stay with them and carry the Light; and keep reminding them that joy—and growth—will come again with the morning.

KEY SCRIPTURE:
His anger is but for a moment, and His favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Psalm 30:5

 [This is a repost from January 2010 with photos I took in Yosemite this past summer.  God gave me back my joy!]

Today’s post, by WOC associate J. R. Hudberg appears on the Ambling page.  J. R. reflects on the joy of fishing and delighting in the wonderful varieties of creatures that share God’s world with us.  You can can go directly to the post by clicking on this link: Ambling.

One of my solitary enjoyments is to plop down in my sway-backed recliner with a good, old book—following C. S. Lewis’ advice “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”  On appreciating the wonder of creation, I don’t think anyone has written more celebratory nature books than John Muir.  A good assortment of his thoughts is The Wilderness World of John Muir, a collection of accounts from his journals and books. Here’s an account I enjoyed of one of John’s experiences:

Once I was very hungry and lonely in Tennessee. I had been walking most of the day in the Cumberland Mountains without coming to a single house, but in crossing a dark-shaded stream whose border trees closed over it like a leafy sky, I found the frail Dicksonia [a southern hemisphere tree-fern very rare at that latitude] that I had looked for so long, and the first magnolia, too, that I had ever seen. I sat down and reveled in the glory of my discoveries. A mysterious breathing of wind moved in the trees, and the stream sang cheerily at every ripple. There is no place so impressively solitary as a dense forest with a stream passing over a rocky bed at a moderate inclination.

Feelings of isolation soon caught me again among these hushed sounds, but one of the Lord’s smallest birds came out to me from some bushes at the side of a moss-clad rock. It had a wonderfully expressive eye, and in one moment that cheerful, confiding bird preached me the most effectual sermon on heavenly trust that I had ever heard through the measured hours of the Sabbath, and I went on not half so heart-sick, nor half so weary.

Although I have read a number of John Muir’s books, I’m always compelled to dig deeper into this man’s thoughts to see what he might teach about the tension that Christians have in seeking to reconcile the truths of God’s general revelation (His works) and His special revelation (His Word). Muir is ideal for such a study, since his father was an outspoken fundamentalist who believed that the natural world and its creatures were gifts to mankind to use as we wish and that to study the natural world instead of the Bible was sinful.

This thinking was common among many of the Christian pioneers of the upper Midwest. For instance, after a great slaughter of passenger pigeons near the Muir farm in Wisconsin—for pigeon pies—one of the children said, “It’s awful like a sin to kill them.” Muir goes on, coloring his narrative with the Scottish brogue of his native land: “To this some smug, practical old sinner would remark, ‘Aye, it’s a peety, as ye say, to kill th’ bonnie things, but they were made to be killed, and sent for us to eat as the quails were sent to God’s chosen people when they were starving in the desert.’” [Ironically, the world's last passenger pigeon and John Muir died within four months of each other in the fall of 1914.]

John Muir house

John Muir went on to question that purely utilitarian view of God’s creation in many ways over the following decades, much to the displeasure of his father, who to his dying day sought to turn John from celebrating the wonder of God’s creation to preaching the Gospel to the lost—as though one had to be sacrificed for the other.  I often wonder how a lay preacher as well-versed in the Scriptures as Daniel Muir was missed all those creation celebration psalms, especially Psalm 104.  How could he have missed the fact that his son’s love for the creation was a reflection of God’s love for it:

KEY SCRIPTURE:
The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made. All your works praise you, LORD; your faithful people extol you. They tell of the glory of your kingdom and speak of your might, so that all people may know of your mighty acts and the glorious splendor of your kingdom. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures through all generations (Psalm 145:9-13).