by Karissa Riffel
There have been few times in my life when beauty brought me to tears. Once, I was standing on the edge of a cliff on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, looking out over the ocean at Kilt Rock as the gilded sun lit the black volcanic stone and waterfall through the mist. The ocean churned far below in a shimmering expanse of silver and gold. I drank in the sight through watery eyes. Such majesty made me feel miniscule. When you can access most of civilization’s accumulated knowledge through a hunk of metal and glass the size of your palm, it’s easy to forget how small you actually are.
The other time was a few days later in Edinburgh, Scotland, a winding, medieval city with layers of history. We attended church on a Sunday morning at St. Giles Cathedral, right along the famous—if a bit touristy—Royal Mile. The building was a feat of architecture, but what I really remember is the singing. A procession of robed choir members trailed down the center aisle, their voices resonating around us from all sides. The experience felt transcendent. Again, I felt small, which was oddly comforting in its own way. I remember thinking, Now, this is church. Not that other churches conduct their services incorrectly. My own Midwestern Protestant church service is very different than the one at St. Giles. But I thought this was the way one ought to feel in church: enamored by beauty, humbled by the majesty of God.
The Physical World Matters
“It’s only your heart that counts,” people often say. This world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through, the folk song goes. This fallacy has permeated contemporary Christian culture to the point that we eschew everything in the world, preferring a dangerous, Gnostic ideology that leads us to pursue secret, spiritual knowledge as the only reality—an idea that is closer to Buddhism than the Bible.
However, God did give us beauty in the physical world. Romans tells us that God has revealed himself to us in creation: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (italics mine). [1] God could have made the universe purely utilitarian, but instead, he made it pleasing to the senses: He made apples sweet, water refreshingly cool, flowers colorful, babies cuddly. This also tells us that, along with goodness and truth, beauty exists necessarily; it is not a subjective human experience, but an objective reality created by God.
In her book, This Beautiful Truth, Sarah Clarkson writes about living with a debilitating mental illness and how God showed himself to her through the beauty of His creation. At first, she sought Truth through the study of theology, hoping for answers in books and intellectual thought, but she came up short. Then, she experienced the goodness of God through the community of others around a sumptuous feast: “God, I finally realized, is not a thought I must think, or a proposition I must know. God is the Lover and Maker, the Friend and Creator, and he makes himself known in the tastable, touchable wonder of his world.” [2]
Jesus himself came as a human in a physical body. Not only did he experience the life of a human, he also suffered and died like one. When he resurrected on the third day, he took special care to make sure the those people he appeared to knew that his body was physical. Although he appeared to his disciples, seemingly impossibly, in a locked room, he had Thomas touch his wounds. Scripture tells us that, as Christians, our own bodies will be transformed into glorified bodies. When the kingdom comes, there will be, not only a new heaven but a new earth.
The physical world is not a prison, a skin we shed when we go to heaven; the earth will be glorified, brought into its true fullness with the consummation of the kingdom of God. The most magnificent waterfall and the most colorful sunset are only dim reflections of the coming glory.
Beauty Reminds Us Who God Is
So often in the Protestant tradition, Christians tend to approach God with an ease that borders on irreverence. We attend church in buildings that resemble warehouses, wear t-shirts and ripped jeans to Sunday service, and reduce God to something we take alongside our beverages (All I need is Jesus and coffee!). We focus on this idea of Jesus being our friend—not untrue, but think about its staggering meaning when one comprehends the greatness of God: that the creator of the universe is your friend.
Out of the formless void, God spoke life into existence; he took chaos and gave it order. Not only did God breathe the world into being, he sustains it day by day. G.K. Chesterton compares the monotony of nature to the repetition engaged in by children. My daughter is still an infant, but no matter how many times I make a silly cross-eyed face at her, she laughs every time. If she could talk, I imagine she would say “Do it again!” just like the child Chesterton writes about. He says,
"For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. [3]
James B. Jordan makes an argument that the features of creation are not incidental. God does not use wind as an image of his Spirit; rather he created wind so that he could image his Spirit for us. The sun is Jesus and the new covenant; the sea is the Gentiles; mountains the nation of Israel. The entire world is God’s revelation to us. [4]
Beauty reminds us who God is: all-powerful and yet immanent in our lives and in His world. Let us approach Him with awe and reverence, this God who molded the heavens and makes daisies grow.
Beauty Gives Us a Calling
The entire second half of Exodus is spent on the tabernacle. God details special instructions to the Israelites on how to build it, right down to the gold moldings on the lampstands and the construction of the curtains. The finest artisans were charged with carrying out these instructions; both men and women of skill contributed: “every craftsman in whose mind the Lord had put skill, everyone whose heart stirred him up to come to do the work. God actually filled a man with His Spirit: “with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs.”[1] The details about the Tabernacle in Exodus also point us back to creation. God gives seven speeches, followed by Moses blessing the Tabernacle. In the seventh speech, God commands his people to keep the sabbath, reminiscent of God resting on the seventh day of creation.
This tells us that God not only cares about beauty, but he also wants us to create it. He purposefully imbued artistic ability in His people so that they could build the Tabernacle. We are image-bearers and thus also “sub-creators,” as Tolkien calls us.[5] We create, but only with what God has already made. This means that whether we paint, write, build, or sing, we are imaging God’s creative nature.
In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the word for “create” in Genesis 1:1 is poieo (pronounced “poy-eh-o”) where we get the English word poetry. This term bears the connotation of healing. As image-bearers of God, when we create, we bring about healing in the world—which, of course, is merely a shadow of the ultimate healing God will bring with His kingdom. Human-made beauty like I experienced in the music and architecture at St. Giles Cathedral serves as a reminder of this identity.
Beauty Gives Us a Longing
Beauty makes us long for heaven and the consummation of the kingdom of God. Like the princess Psyche in C.S. Lewis’s retelling of “Cupid and Psyche,” we long “to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from…” Psyche tells her sister that place is “my country, the place where I ought to have been born…All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me.” [6]
I write this as I sit by a cool, clear lake in Canada, surrounded by the sound of gently lapping waves. Pastel pink, blue, and violet are smeared across the sky like paint and reflect in the rippling water. The birds’ calls echo through the trees like a choir. And I cannot think of any better argument for the importance of beauty than this moment. The God of the universe has been wooing us, and indeed he is doing so still.
[1] Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2001. Romans 1:20; Exodus 31:1–5; 36:2
[2] Clarkson, Sarah. This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2021. 71–74
[3] Chesterton, G.K. “The Ethics of Elfland.” Gilbert Keith Chesterton: Orthodoxy. Accessed August 9, 2023.
[4] Jordan, James B. Through New Eyes. Brentwood, Tennessee: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Publishers, Inc., 1988.
[5] Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” ILAS 2350 - University of Houston. Accessed August 9, 2023. https://uh.edu/fdis/_taylor-dev/readings/tolkien.html.
[6] Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. London: William Collins, 2020.
Karissa Riffel is a wife, mom, and English teacher. Her short fiction has appeared in various literary magazines and in an anthology by Nightshade Publishing. Her nonfiction is forthcoming by the Anselm Society and CiRCE Press. She is co-host of the podcast Lit Ladies, and she writes about art and faith on her Substack Midnight Ink.