More thoughts on Beauty

I wrote last week about questions; the fact that we spend our lives asking questions and seeking answers. One of my 'all my life' questions has been about beauty: why do we even recognize beauty? or why what I see as beautiful you may think quite ordinary? or, what is it that touches us so deeply when we see a beautiful sunset or sunrise or person or work of art or tree or, or, or? More questions!

I was reading this morning some poetry of Wordsworth's, his 'Tintern Abbey'. He is remembering his response to the view and to the stream and woods and beauty that he saw in his younger days and he is expressing something very deep within himself:
         These beauteous forms, 
     Through a long absence , have not been to me
     As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:    
     But oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din
     Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
     In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
     Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
     And passing even into my purer mind,
     With tranquil restoration - feelings too
     Of unremembered pleasure; such perhaps,
     As have no slight or trivial influence
     On that best portion of a good man's life,
     His little, nameless, unremembered, acts   
     Of kindness and of love.  

St Augustine many centuries before put a name to the reality of Beauty and its effect upon us. He was living a hard, self-indulgent life of 'pleasure' and yet something kept nagging at his inner being. I imagine he was a passionate man and so he struggled, he searched and finally put a name to this nagging feeling in his heart. God. And in his "Confessions' ( one of the spiritual classics of Christianity) he told the story of his life and of his search and of the One who was searching for him. One phrase he wrote to God never fails to touch my heart as he speaks at last about finding what he was searching for:

     'Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved you!...you called  and cried to me and broke open my deafness: and you sent forth your beams and shone upon me and chased away my blindness...'

Sadly, so often we as Christians have not realized that God is Beauty in all its amazing forms and that God calls us, cries out to us and, if we let God, breaks open our hearts to love. That is another thing that Lent is meant to be for us.