“Theology begins with the love of beauty…”

“Theology begins with the love of beauty”

—David Bentley Hart.

We are all theologians to varying degrees. Any thoughts dwelling on God make it so. Whether we are rethinking something or pulling from traditions, our default settings of what we’ve been taught or trying to work out just how God could allow something to happen. This ruminating, chewing over and reasoning makes us theologians—not in the sense we are qualified to teach theology, but that this is part of the exercise of our faith. 

Our prayer, worship, approach to scripture and actions are shaped by our theology whether that’s strictly controlled or wildly expansive, expecting God’s action or ambivalent about God’s interest in us at all, satisfied with a clear narrative or curious about the textures and tensions of faith.

All of us on this faith journey and have an operating theology. 

I’m wondering when and why it began for you. What is it that stimulated your curiosity? 

It may not be an easy question to answer, but certainly there are times along our journey where we have an ‘aha’ moment. Sure, there’s also many ‘hmm?’ moments too, but the ‘aha’ moments are when we recognise something beautiful in our faith.  

Often that is experienced in music. (I might suggest that the current evangelical music movement is trying to reclaim the beauty we once fully appreciated in a moment.) 

I do suspect that as the world has become faster beauty becomes more ephemeral as we rush by it. It’s why heading out to nature for a time is so great—it’s right there in front of us and with us. In fact our presence is part of that beauty too. It’s not ‘other’ from us—in the same way we experience it, it experiences us. A cloud of midges parting as I walk through, the hurrying away of the skinks, the gaze and companionship of a dragonfly, or a pīwakawaka picking off the bugs I disturb on the way. 

Most days though, I’m boxed in (and I feel quite comforted by that). My house is a box, my car is a box, my office is a box, I watch a box at night. All knowledge is now in a box that accesses ‘the cloud’ and I have access to knowledge, good or bad, like never before. 

The way I engage the world prioritises my senses quite differently to how I would have if I lived 200 years ago. ‘Is it right or wrong?’, is not the point—but what do I find beautiful?

I do know it’s in visual art, music, kinetic sculptures. I do know it’s when my son still cuddles me like I’m wonderful. 

Beauty is all around us—even in the most mundane places. A few months ago we did an exercise where we picked up stones or leaves around the church and looked at them under a magnifying glass. Suddenly these mundane things that we would pay no attention to, became complex, intricate and dare I say storied. These came from somewhere, had been shaped by processes and were now objects of curiosity. We probably don’t know where they are now, yet in that fleeting look, we saw that beauty often depends on how we look at something. In that case, with intention and magnifying, the mundane transformed into mystery—we saw there was much more we could discover if we spent the time.

A critical aspect of beauty is that it’s not something to solve. (cf. John Drane)

Deconstruction of faith often follows a path of unending questioning. A constant splintering apart because we aren’t satisfied with the solutions we were given. It’s really good to question, to have doubt, to be curious and to seek. 

Sometimes though, what we thought was immutable or never changing, is now challengeable. An example is when we discover our parents are simple human beings too. Or when we realise Snakes and Ladders has zero skill involved. Or that the system we live in doesn’t care about us as people, but only how useful we can be. 

These disillusionments often open pathways for more questions than answers. 

I want to suggest though, that actually it’s possible to view these disillusionments differently. 

Beauty is everywhere, and we don’t need to solve it. 

Take the pictures that toddlers draw and end up on the fridge. Arguably, not beautiful by many standards, but when looked upon with the loving parent’s gaze they become exquisite expressions of a child seeing the world, their developing and expanding their universe. Sharks have huge teeth and fins, because that’s what’s important to understand, boats are small, but people are massive, you have to see both wings on a plane, the sun is up and the grass is down. I love it because I love my kids.

Love transforms things into beauty. 

It’s actually central to Christianity where the Cross is the supreme example.

It’s through love that the grotesqueness is transformed into beautiful hope. It’s only through love that the cross is seen as salvation. It’s only through love that this event can be foundational to our spiritual formation.

And yet, no one knows how it worked. All we know is that this is what made a cosmic difference, but not why God needed it this way. (Lots of ideas, but nothing hard and concrete). This, this is a mystery.

And it’s here that we can be released of the burden to solve things. From experience and encounter, not just as individuals but as traditions spanning two millennia. 

The Cross as an expression of Divine Love toward us, works—and is mysterious and we can allow that mystery to call us deeper into it. Mystery is a big and expansive container for a multitude of ideas, but also, we can just leave it as a container, for it still to function well.

In sitting with my friend Father Chris Loughnan the other day, he described taking the eucharist in the mass. He spoke with beautiful simplicity of the awe and wonder he felt as the mystery of the eucharist transformed those who took it, into the very church, the very body of Christ itself. You could tell this was seeped into his bones. 

I was challenged by this because while I think the story of our Cityside/Baptist communion celebration is beautiful, it is wholly symbolic and non-mysterious—or to put it differently, any mystery there is, lies behind the symbols as a secondary consideration.

Could you imagine how different we would treat our communion if we believed a mystery of the bread and wine actively transforming us. Perhaps we would take seriously the urging of Paul to make peace with others before partaking it.

And in that space of unknowing yet trusting or believing, there is a beauty that elevates us beyond ourselves and into capturing something of the creative heart of God that speaks even now to us, “let there be light!”

At the turn of the century John Drane wrote a book Re-enchanting Christianity. One of his propositions is that ‘mystery is experienced, not solved’ and that we can embrace mystery through art and ritual, poetry and story, and of course through symbols and sacrament. I don’t need to solve the communion ritual, I can approach it with understanding Christ is present in it in ways I don’t need to understand. 

To that end when we find beauty, we tap into the divine mystery and are filled by it.