Mystic Revolution

“We ought to observe also that even the small characteristics of things produced according to nature have something in them pleasing and attractive. For instance, when a loaf of bread is baked there are cracks in the surface, and these breaks, which are contrary to the purpose of the baker, are beautiful in their way, and stimulate the appetite. Again, figs when they are quite ripe gape open; and ripe olives when they are near to rotting are particularly good to look at. And ears of corn bending down, and a lion’s eyebrows, and the foam which flows from the mouth of a wild boar, and many other things- though they are far from beautiful, if one examines them separately- still, because they are characteristics of things formed by nature, help to adorn them, and please the eye. Thus if a man has a feeling for a deep insight into the things produced in the universe, there is hardly one of their characteristics that will not seem to him of a sort to give him pleasure.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Istigkeit- wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? ‘Is-ness.’ The Being of Platonic Philosophy- except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming, and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were- a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen as the divine source of all existence.”

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“Consider the birds of the sky: they don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they? Can any of you add one moment to his life span by worrying?”

Matthew 6:26-27, CSB

To see beauty in all things; to hear the whisper of God on the wind; to see the sunset in the eyes of a lover, and redemption in the heart of a friend; to feel the embrace of heaven as gravity and to find joy in the moment of repentance: this is Life.

This essay would properly be read with a hot cup of coffee next to a fire, for that’s where it was written, and it bears the soul of such a moment. It is a long essay, but anything worth saying right is worth taking time to say, so that’s what I’ve done.

I, as well as many others, have written profusely about the impact of technology on society. In defense of the modern world, however, is the accessibility to art and literature. A few weeks ago, I took advantage of this, and surveyed the works of the Romantic Skagen Painters.

Beginning in the mid 1870’s a group of painters settled in the quaint Danish town of Skagen, a quiet, contemplative town in the North of Denmark. It was there that the painters fell in love with the sea, and most particularly, the blue hour, a time in the evening when the whole world was awash in a ethereal light, the kind that reaches down into your gut and says that all is well, that it is the blue hour after all, and therefore the world is peaceful.

The paintings communicate that peaceful feeling; at least for me anyway. There is an indeterminate feeling that touches me sometimes, that I have not been able to define: a sorrowful joy, a well of solace, a repose, that is communicated by the Skagen paintings. I think the best word I have been able to find is gestalten. The paintings are works of gestalt, reminding me of my very small place in the world. They cause me to miss a place I have never been. They caress the soul, and heal the mind, as beauty inherently does. They put me at the subtle nexus between the recognition of death and the acceptance of time, between the fermenting desire to live and the knowledge of my eventual fate. It is a beautiful little place in my heart, like a cave nestled in the mountains. I always appreciate anything that can transport me there.

In fact, even as I write I am listening to Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Something about that work in particular has a deeply touching Beauty to it.

It is that that I want to talk about: beauty; the still small beauty that comes in the whirlwind, the demon-defying beauty that is ever-present, relentless. I want to talk about the is-ness, the just-so quality of the world that is beautiful in some death-defying, mystical way. I want to talk about the beauty that settles into your heart and rests there, giving you an unearthly tranquillity.

The problem with words, though, is that they are so wrapped up in concepts. To talk about something so transcendent through such a concrete medium as language is somewhat doomed from the start. What I aim to do, though, is paint a picture; this essay, while reasonable, will not be syllogistic; it will not be rational per se, because beauty is neither of those things. This is not an intellectual essay, to be grasped with the mind. It is a truth that is felt, in that little alcove of the heart, and that is what I’d like to do- communicate the feeling of what I’m trying to say. To quote the ever-salient Huxley from Heaven and Hell,

“In spite of a Natural History that was nothing but a set of drearily moralistic symbols, in the teeth of a theology which instead of regarding words as the signs of things, treated things and events as the signs of biblical or Aristotelian words, our ancestors remained relatively sane. And they achieved this feat by periodically escaping from the stifling prison of their bumptiously rationalistic philosophy, their anthropomorphic, authoritarian and non-experimental science, their too articulate religion, into non-verbal, other than human worlds inhabited by their instincts, by the visionary fauna of their mind’s antipodes and, beyond and yet within all the rest, by the indwelling Spirit.”

It’s there that I’m trying to reach- the antipodes of the mind, the escape from a too-articulate religion, and more broadly, a too-articulate life. It is somewhat reminiscent of the words of Lao Tzu:

“The Tao that can be told is not the universal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the universal name.

In the infancy of the universe, there were no names.

Naming fragments the mysteries of life into ten thousand things and their manifestations.”

The Tao Te Ching

Ironically, though, and for the sake of clarity, I think it would be helpful to begin with a definition. I believe that beauty is best defined as anything that is touched by the Divine, anything that communes with God. For Divinity to be so, it must have power, and part of that power is the impact that it leaves on that which it touches. Therefore, beauty is anything but in the eye of the beholder. In fact, to define it as such is to diminish it. As I will discuss shortly, part of the goodness of beauty is it’s otherness, it’s extra nos quality.

The guiding idea for this essay is essentially this: that beauty is anything touched by the Divine, and that all things are touched by the Divine, and therefore there is beauty in all things.

I would classify myself, along with many others lately (though I am somewhat late to the party), as an “Anti-Machine” writer. It was this idea, along with the idea of Anti-Death Manifestos, that inspired me to write this essay. I was struck with a question, that led to many other questions:

Can one defeat the Machine by finding beauty in it?

I think the short answer is a resounding yes, and the long answer is the following essay.

I will begin with this idea, that Truth requires a standard, just as good does. To determine if something is true, one must judge it against something else. This leads me to conclude that, since Christ says that He is The Truth, that He is the standard by which all truth must be discerned. This is mystical; but it is similar to consulting a dictionary. A word has a meaning in itself, but if you want to ascertain that meaning, you would reference a dictionary. Similarly, to ascertain the meaning of all things, one must go to Christ, by whom all things were made.

It is the same with beauty. Beauty is not an innate quality of a thing. It is not even an Aristotelian accidens. It is a quality communicated from elsewhere, by virtue of its being a good thing. As it says in James:

“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” (James 1:17)

Or to consult one of my favorites, the First Nations Version: “Every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father above, who gave us the sun, moon, and stars. But unlike them, the light that comes from the Great Spirit never dims, flickers, or casts a shadow.” To determine whether something is beautiful, then, one must hold it up to Beauty and compare. Beauty is an infusion of light from heaven, a purity. This is why I have defined it as anything being touched by the Divine- nothing can be beautiful without the source of Beauty.

Due to the deftness of Satan and his trickery, it is easy to become hopeless about the world. Even for the Christian, or for the one who recognizes that there is hope, it is no hard task to become weary of the never ending lights and sounds, the advertising, the running, the doing, the action, the death that seems to be omnipresent. I know I find myself in that place frequently. Out of sheer necessity, I have searched for the antidote, and I believe that this is it: only through attendance to beauty can we live in hope. Once you take this stance to the world, beauty is not so hard to find. I’ll begin with an illustration: that of the ugly face of Jesus.

I work in an area with a large homeless population, and every day on my way into work I usually pass by one or two sitting on the sidewalk. I have found that most are friendly and actually quite interesting. I met a man the other day named Augusta, who had a dog with him.

I asked him the name of the dog.

He replied, “Fall. Like the season.”

Augusta and Fall. Very appropriate, don’t you think?

So everytime I see him on the street, I try my best to greet him and his dog, to shake his hand, and ask how he’s doing. Occasionally I’ll buy him a coffee, but as I am preparing to go to college, I am trying to save as much as I can.

I met another man named Bishop, who sits on the sidewalk with his guitar. He’s asked me to play once or twice, but I have declined, being merely a pianist. He is, perhaps, one of the most upbeat people I have ever met.Then of course there is Dietrich, who everyone knows and who walks around and greets whomever he so chooses to greet.

These, and all others I encounter, are the ugly face of Jesus. They are not pretty to look at, and they have nothing to offer me other than an interesting conversation; yet they are the face of Jesus, and that is beautiful.

“‘For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me; I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and take you in, or without clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick, or in prison, and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these my brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

Matthew 25:35-40

Therein you find beauty; that the Divine touches the world through the conduit of the righteous, and clothes Himself in the rags of the poor. This beauty is a true theophany. It is the highest aim of man to become a conduit, a bearer of that beauty, an ambassador for the Divine; yet this is what the lowly Christian is: a bearer of otherworldly light, bearing it not in himself, but reflecting it as the moon.

This beauty can be found in all people. This is the glory of life: that to live means to be loved, and to be loved is to be touched by the Divine. The soul of every man has been whispered to by God; and though some turn away, the beauty of it is found not in the response, but rather in the act of God reaching out to all people. This beauty can be perceived in every moment of every day, because the Divine permeates every moment of every day. His omnipresence has concrete power; power to make every moment beautiful.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4)

The machine, however, cannot abide this ever-present Beauty. The grinding gears of consumerism and fatalism crush the souls of those just trying to make it, and the modus operandi of the machine is definitely unexpected.

“Hence a passionate, an almost desperate, thirst for bright, pure colours; and hence the overpowering effect produced by such colors whenever, in church or at court, they were displayed. Today the chemical industry turns out paints, inks and dyes in endless variety and enormous quantities. In our modern world there is enough bright colour to guarantee the production of billions of flags and comic strips, millions of stop signs and tail lights, fire engines and Coca-Cola containers by the hundred thousand, carpets, wallpapers, and non-representational art by the square mile. Familiarity breeds indifference. We have seen too much pure, bright color at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting. And here we may note that, by its amazing capacity to give us too much of the best things, modern technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.”

Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell

Thus it is not by stamping beauty out, but rather by redefining it, prostituting it, and producing it in excess that the machine seeks to defeat it. Is that not the case with all things? As I have written elsewhere, has not the same happened with freedom- misapplication and excess?

But to remember that true beauty is contact with the divine, and to recognize that in everything, from the people around you, to the grass prying its way upward to God, to the birds winging their way on the wind, to merry angels dancing in the trees in Fall is all one grand theophany that you are witness to, is to declare emphatically in the face of the Machine: “I have decided to live today, and to fulfill my job of being a human. You cannot defeat the beauty that is undeniable.” At this the gates of Hell tremble, because they cannot perceive Reality- for isn’t beauty the highest level of Reality? To perceive beauty is to perceive the contact point between God and Man, between heaven and earth. There can be nothing more real, and the Devil and all his angels cannot see it, though they try.

I read a spectacular essay from Grant Martsolf of The Savage Collective the other day entitled “Culture Making as Resistance.”

I highly encourage you to read the whole essay, but I appreciated this particular quote:

“One tactic of the Nazi Machine was to convince Poles that they had “no public life,” that their culture did not exist apart from what would be imposed on them by the Germans. This feels eerily familiar. One of the Machine’s greatest weapons is its ability to destroy and invert culture.

At the time, while working in a limestone quarry, Karol Wojtyła was an aspiring actor and playwright. He was convinced that resistance to the Machine had to be creative rather than destructive. To this end, he partnered with Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, an older actor and theater director, to establish an underground theater company that would become known as the Rhapsodic Theater. In Wojtyła’s own words, the Rhapsodic Theater was “a protest against the extermination of the Polish nation’s culture on its own soil, a form of underground resistance movement against the Nazi occupation.”

Founded in 1941, the theater performed a series of plays centered on the spoken word. Given the necessity of secrecy, performances were staged in living rooms with minimal theatrics or staging. The company performed hundreds of shows, including adramatization of Dante’s Divine Comedy and several of Wojtyła’s original plays, many of which have been preserved to this day.

But what was the point of the Rhapsodic Theater? It did nothing to slow down the Nazi military machine. At first glance, it might seem like they weren’t doing anything at all. Yet, the Rhapsodic Theater was, in fact, an extraordinarily active form of resistance. The theater ensured that Poles could still pursue flourishing and beautiful lives even in the midst of horror. They wanted also to ensure that something good remained when the Machine had swept through. In this way, the Rhapsodic Theater was an act of culture-making and, implicitly, an act of hope—hope that there is good worth pursuing and preserving.”

It is in this fundamental way that the observation of, and participation in, beauty is Anti-Machine: that either act requires hope. Hope of something better, hope of a living world, free from Machine, hope of something even more beautiful coming. Culture-making as Martsolf describes it is necessarily beauty-focused; focused on something transcendental.

Furthermore: the Machine wants you to be bored. I wrote an article last November entitled “The Boring Death of Modernity” (one of my better articles, if I do say so myself.)

I think that it is fairly self-evident that Beauty excludes boredom. To be surprised by Beauty, to be enamored with the theophany that is your neighbor, and to participate in God through acts of love, renders Boredom completely toothless. To use a thought from that essay:

“Don’t succumb to the vicious, viral boredom that infects the mind, body, and spirit. In the face of all, have hope. That’s how we fight the system, the brutal clamorous machine of hope-theft that numbs the mind, fattens the body, and banishes the famished spirit. If you are a parent, raise children that know when to sing, and when to fight. If you are merely a wanderer as myself, tell the stories of your heritage. Use the machine- don’t let it use you.”

I like that turn of phrase- don’t you?

It is here that I’d like to introduce the idea of beauty as sacrament.

I have grown up primarily in the Lutheran tradition, which places a heavy emphasis on Sacraments as means of grace. We are physical people, so it makes sense that God would institute Sacraments, physical means of communicating Divine grace. I believe that Beauty can be considered in this way as well. It can be said, truly, that God is beautiful; but it would be more accurate to say that God is Beauty. He is also Truth, and He is also Goodness. He is the wellspring of these things, not as concepts but as deep ontological realities that are entirely external to us. I stated before that to determine whether something is beautiful it must be with reference to the beauty of God, and that is true. But it is, perhaps, more accurate to say that if something is Beautiful, it contains within it something of God, for if God is Beauty, then, as I mentioned before, Beauty is a theophany. The world, viewed through this lens, becomes a livinggallery of iconography, pointing us to the Creator of all things. People become icons, and all things become bound under the all encompassing head of ineffable. To see the world as a revelation of God’s providence is to render everything a theophany, and all the world a gift.

If we consider beauty as sacrament then, we must consider creativity as worship. For isn’t it the deepest form of worship to want to imitate God in His work? To create something good, truly good, truly beautiful, is to operate as God does- with Christ as the modality of creation; it is to praise Him with actions that are rendered eternal in their nature, merely for having had their being in Him. We know that in Him we live and move and have our being; in Him also we create. This, too, is why culture-making is so powerful. Not only is it Anti-Machine, but it is poignantly anti-Death. Death cannot create; Death has no hope.

But we are not dead.

Another vital aspect of beauty, specifically as theophany, is its innate simplicity. Dr. Nathan Jacobs, who I have quoted before in previous essays, says this:

“…in the West, simplicity is more just about the fact that God is a super form, and so he doesn’t have particular traits, and so all attributes are the same attribute and its highly metaphysical. [But the Eastern Fathers] not only identify simplicity as an energy of God, they also talk about us, by participation, becoming simple. …What does that even mean for us to become simple? Because it surely can’t mean the metaphysical claim that we don’t have parts, right?… for the Eastern Fathers, God is The Good, and as He articulates Himself, He makes a world. All of these things are articulations of truth and goodness and beauty. But there is a tendency for us as individuals to be hyper scattered. We see the good of all these different things and almost put them in competition, whether its the good of sex or its the good of food or its the good of intellect, whatever it is. And those things oftentimes, in us, end up in conflict, as opposed to recognizing what Basil of Caesarea says, which is that you don’t need to be taught to love God, you already do love God, because God is the good, and you love good things, right? The thing is that you don’t recognize that all of these different goods that you chase after and see in conflict have a common origin point and they can be brought together in harmony…. A harmonious understanding of the true, the good, and the beautiful, the divine origin of these things have the ability to harmonize the soul and bring all of those desires together and in some kind of a balance, whereas a hyper focus, for example, gluttony; a hyper focus on one good thing is where there starts to be some sort of massive imbalance… which gives you some sort of excess, which manifests in these sins.”

This is the sort of Sacramentality of Beauty, that through attendance to Beauty, our messy souls are put back in order, and we are reoriented properly.I think that most problems in the Mind are caused by a disorientation; a confusion of one’s place in the world, and particularly, one’s radical smallness. It is very difficult to be anxious when you remember how big the stars are. Likewise, to perceive beauty in everything is to perceive one’s place in the world: as being quite, quite small. There is a comforting humility that comes with that; being a very small person means that there is not a lot you need to do; there’s not a lot you can do. The birds of the air recognize this. This is why they tend to their own- there’s not a lot they can do in the world; they are not overwhelmed with pressure to act- they merely act out of what they are, in acceptance of what is.

To be healed by beauty is merely to remember that the world is out there, and it is beautiful because it is touched by God, and you are beautiful for the very same reason, and that that is good. To love the good is to love God, and to love God is to love the good, in perfect harmony and simplicity. Perhaps that is what touches me so deeply about the Skagen painters- the depth of simplicity, that renders their work so profound. It is this simplicity that takes me to the alcove of my heart, merely to rest and remember.

As Meister Eckhart says,

“But we should not rest content with this: we should also derive great profit from all things, whatever they may be, wherever they may be, whatever we see or hear and however alien and strange to us they are. It is then, and only then, that we are in the right state of mind. And no one can ever come to the end of this process, but rather we should grow in it without end and come to achieve ever more…. We must learn to possess God in all things, while remaining free in all that we do and wherever we are.”

Contrary to everything that I have said so far is the world’s conception of beauty. That is sort of the moral of classic Disney princess movies, is it not? It’s almost saying, “It helps to be beautiful,” meaning that one’s identity is drawn from one’s outward appearance. Between Disney movies, nihilism, and modern feminism, that ideology is pretty much engrained at this point. As a man, I know this: it is rare to look into the eyes of a woman and not see death lurking there. Put another way- it is rare to find God and find a woman thereby. Modern feminism, in seeking the equality of women, has made women more commodified than ever before, symbolized by the OnlyFans sticker on the back of the minivan. In fact, I would say that this is part of the sin of adultery: that in some sense you are prostituting (literally) the true beauty of the body, which does bear the mark of God, and sharing it with those that it was not meant to be shared with. In marriage, the beauty of each other’s bodies is reserved for the two of them alone; but when it is shared, the Divine Beauty of the body is covered up by the muck of sin.

Because the Divine Reality of Beauty has been done away with, it has been replaced by a purely nihilistic beauty ethic: the beauty of demons; a dying beauty. As Huxley pointed out, it is a beauty composed of the excess of color, rather than a deep intention.

This conception must be rejected.

It is lifeless, hopeless, Godless, soul-crushing and full of Death. To reject the modern beauty ethic is to choose life. That, really, is the point of the essay: choose life. Live, live deeply, live fully, because life is worth living, because beauty is there, and because no one can take that away. There is beauty in the joy and there is beauty in the pain and there is beauty in all things in between. It is to see life as a fairy tale rather than a dark fantasy. It is to see it as chapter one rather than the wicked denouement. It is to see beauty even in Death, because Death is just the First Great Adventure.

I am of the Wildeian school of thought concerning art: ars gratia artis, that it is necessary precisely because it is so unnecessary. Some would condemn art because it is not necessary for survival, it does nothing to pay the bills, so on and so forth. I think that precisely because it does nothing for survival that it is extremely necessary. It is something that adds depth to the human experience: it is a reminder that you are alive and not alone, it is a reminder that life is not war, it is something beautiful. One of my favorite artists is Norman Rockwell, merely because of his apparently mundane subject matter. With pieces like “Hey Fellers, Come On In,” and “The Catch,” he shows that it is not art that dignifies life, but rather life that dignifies art. Even boys swimming in the pond with a sign that says “No Swimming,” is worth painting, worth showing the world, because there is inherent Beauty in life.

It is this sort of art that reflects the “is-ness” of the world. To quote Huxley again from Doors of Perception,

“What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescaline, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing value of brain and ego into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescaline taker, draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being. More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with ‘is-ness.’ To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say…. [Botticelli and many others] had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the power of even the highest art to express.”

To reiterate a previous point, creativity is worship, because to create is to try to capture the beauty of Istigkeit, of suchness. To recognize suchness, to recognize that the world is as it is and not another way, is to merely stumble upon God’s sovereignty without looking for it. Istigkeit sums up the entire idea of Beauty, of theophany, of suchness, of gestalt, of everything, because to recognize things as they are is to perceive the nexus of Heaven and Earth, where God’s hands deftly guide the plans of man. Istigkeit is the philosophy of the sparrow and the lily, imitated by the mystic and the monastic. And it is this; this that refutes the draining funeral procession of rush hour traffic, of sirens, of death, death everywhere, because the sparrow and the lily are so, and that is enough.

As a 19 year old, I do not quite know myself yet. This is very alarming, and I think mostly is the result of a mere lack of time. I just haven’t been around for very long. As a result, I think a lot about self-realization, the mechanics of it, whether other people are required for self-realization, and so forth. I don’t really have the answer yet. In thinking about Beauty, though, I think I’ve found a back door to self-realization. As I said before, Beauty has an orienting quality. Kierkegaard shines some light on this:

“He does not pretend to be anything else, and neither is he taken to be anything else, but before God he is himself. In his contacts with others, it seems as if at every moment he must wait in order to find out from the others what he is now at this moment. But he does not wait; he is in a hurry to be before God, contented with being himself before God. He is a lowly human being in the crowd of human beings, and what he is in this way depends on the relationship, but in being himself he is not dependent on the crowd; before God he is himself. From “the others” a person of course actually finds out only what the others are- it is in this way that the world wants to deceive a person out of becoming himself.”

Therein, too, is Istigkeit: that the lowly Christian recognizes his place in the world, that he is, and that that is good. Therefore, his is-ness informs his identity. It is by holding fast to God, that one lets go of the world, of its opinions, and of its cares. The ever-present Beauty in the world reminds us that we are always before God; and therefore can always be content with being as one is.

“Indeed, this is already earnestness- if it is understood properly, not as the dreaming poet or as the poet who lets nature dream about him understands it- this, that out there with the lily and the bird you are aware that you are before God, something that usually is entirely forgotten in speaking and conversing with other human beings. When just we two are speaking together, even more so when we are ten or more, it is very easily forgotten that you and I, we two, or we ten, are before God. But the lily, who is the teacher, is profound. It does not become involved with you at all; it is silent, and by being silent it wants to be a sign to you that you are before God- so that you also in earnestness and truth might become silent before God.”

Soren Kierkegaard

This, this is beauty: that we are driven to silence by the lily, and our prayer becomes the breath of being, and that that is enough. The world seems to never have enough. Especially with the rise of the cult of Progress, nothing will ever be enough. But before the lily, the sparrow, and the ugly face of Jesus, you are found. God declares you enough. And at this divine caress of your soul, beauty emerges, trembling at first, but growing stronger, emboldened by Christ who gives it growth. God becomes the gardener of your soul, warming the ground with His countenance and watering it with His truth.

That; that is beautiful.

“If someone were to go entirely out of themselves with all that is theirs, then truly they would be so rooted in God that if anyone were to touch them, they would first have to touch God.”

Meister Eckhart

I am alive, and I have found that what is, is beautiful. Witness the rending of mortality, and with it the rending of the machine. Its death begins now- our life begins now.

We are the envy of angels, the nightmare of demons, the theophany of the Good, the death of the self, the garden of God, the torment of Satan, the eternal fire, the impossible possibility. Oh unfathomable beauty, that breaks upon me like waves on the stony cliff! I am reminded of the passage from Milton:

“And for the heaven’s wide circuit, let it speak

The Maker’s high magnificence, who built

So spacious, and his line stretch’d out so far;

That man may know he dwells not in his own;

An edifice too large for him to fill….”

Paradise Lost

The Light does not die with us.

One final thought before I close out this essay.

I read the spectacular work Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance almost two years ago. It had an impact on me, such that when I revisited it in preparation for this bit of writing, I remembered exactly how I felt at the time: a deep sadness, though I do not remember why. I identified with his desperate need for understanding, and found the book quite captivating.

What I define as God, being the source of all Beauty, he calls Quality. Throughout the whole book, his goal is to define what “quality” is. What is quality writing? What is quality art? What is quality work? In fact, he is trying to ascertain what I have delineated already here: that there is Beauty in all things, and that it is an attribute of something higher than the thing in itself.He gets at what I have previously written about in a sort of sideways fashion, concerning Scientism and the consequent duality that it promotes. He says this:

“This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we’re used to it. But it’s not right. It’s always been an artificial interpretation superimposed on reality. It’s never been reality itself. When this duality is completely accepted, a certain undivided relationship between the mechanic and the motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you’re really stuck it’s Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go…. If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what is good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you’re born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you can develop. It’s not just “intuition,” not just unexplainable “skill” or “talent.” It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.”

In other words: not Scientism, but science, promotes a duality-driven view of the world: the scientist and the experiment, the student and the studied. This puts us out of touch with Reality, with Beauty, because, as I mentioned at the beginning, words are not quite capable of expressing the truth about Beauty. Science cannot study Beauty; it cannot be logicked into understanding. But that does not mean it is not real. You see, the cult of science would like to do away with Beauty because it is uncomfortable- it doesn’t fit into any certain categories, it is not easily defined without reference to the Divine. This is the failed promise of empiricism and skepticism- it promised absolute knowledge, and yet failed miserably.The truth is much deeper. It is this: that your soul has been touched by the Divine, and is therefore beautiful, and that the world has been touched by the Divine, and is therefore beautiful as well. That is the common denominator of the universe, the bottom line of all things, that “God so loved the world,” and thereby rendered everything beautiful. It is this that unites the world, and makes us one; our Oneness has just become a synonym for Divine Beauty.

I have discovered a lost road- the lost road of enchantment with the world. I invite you to walk this path, as others have invited me.

It is a beautiful path, and the sun is setting on the world. The pale moon rises, the Watchman’s Light. As I travel I am waiting for the dawn, for a new morning. It will come, quite soon actually. I was once told that this too shall pass.

I am comforted by angels and carried gently on the stream of Time.

The night is shorter than you think.

To live in constant recognition of the ever-present beauty is to find yourself in a thin place, a place where heaven touches earth. It is a place of saints and wandering mystics, of redeemed prostitutes and warrior kings. In a thin place, the world seems of glass, and I seem of glass; transparent and fragile and knowledgeable of my own ignorant breakability. Time flows like a tide and I accept it, like a wall accepts the gentle brush of light. All things seem present, time and death and the Blue Hour and the desert. It is there that my prayers seem as if they don’t have to travel far.

All things seem present.

I wish I could widen my gaze, look at everything, understand. It is in this I see my humanity, and this humanity is good. I must remind myself it is good. It is humble.

I accept my glass world, and my glass world accepts me, and God has shaped it.

It is gestalten, it is all things.

It is not a safe place, per se.

But when has Truth ever been safe?