Beauty

What kind of God are You, my Lord?

Those who know You least say You are ugly,

a moral monster, an insufferable tyrant.

Those who know You best long to dwell in Your house

to behold Your beauty all the days of their lives.

Who is fit to teach me—

Those who know You least or

Those who know You best?

Who is fit to teach me?

You are, O Lord, for who knows You better

than You know Yourself?

You who are worshiped for Your beauty,

show me Your beauty that I may worship You better.

       

Is Your beauty

A snow-capped mountain—distant, cold, and severe?

A flower—fading and easily crushed?

A haunting aria—filling the soul with longing it cannot quite satisfy?

Surely these are but faint echoes of Your beauty,

The sound of a song heard dimly in the distance,

Or shadows cast by Your great light down into our darkened world.

An earthly melody may move a heart of flesh,

But Your beauty turns a heart of stone into living flesh.

So what is Your beauty, Lord?

What is more beautiful than Love?

Love that plans to surprise the ugly beloved with love

Love that sacrifices its life for the beloved

Love that gives the whole self to the beloved.

The love of the Father; the love of the Son; the love of the Spirit—

The eternal Love of the Triune God.

If You are a moral monster, O my God,

Why does meditating on Your beauty fill my heart with warmth

And fit me for loving my neighbor?

Why I Wrote The Beauty of God

According to pollster George Barna about one in every eight American adults is an ex-Christian. These are people who once identified themselves as Christians but now call themselves atheists, agnostics, or something else. I wrote The Beauty of God for a Broken World, because of an ex-Christian who sat one day in my office. At one time he was part of a young adults Bible study I led. I baptized the lovely young lady who became his wife, and I married them. Some time after that they moved out of the area. When I caught up with them again, he had become an ex-Christian. He told me that if he ever decided to believe in God, it would not be the God of the Bible because he God of the Bible is ugly. Ex-Christians are frequently troubled by suffering in the world and by specific teachings of the Bible. For example, they object to the idea that a serial rapist and murderer like Ted Bundy might go to heaven, simply by believing in Jesus, while some of his helpless victims might end up in hell. The kinds of questions ex-Christians ask cannot be answered in 30 seconds. They require a thorough, thoughtful response, and that is what I have tried to provide.

Till We Have Faces--by C S Lewis

I just finished this amazing book by a master Christian story-teller. I had read it a number of years ago, and I remembered the basic plot line except for the brilliant ending.

One of Lewis’s most fascinating proposals was that the ancient pagan myths, by embodying the deepest fears and longings of the human heart, point toward their perfect fulfillment in Jesus Christ. In Till We Have Faces, Lewis reworks the Greek myth of Psyche to produce a tale that fits into none of the standard categories for novels. It is first interesting, then puzzling, then at the end incredibly and surprisingly beautiful.

Psyche was born divinely beautiful and destined to be married to a god, but this is really the story of her ugly sister, Orual, whose possessive love for Psyche threatens to destroy Psyche’s happiness. When Orual adopts a veil to hide her ugliness, we recall St. Paul’s reference to the veil that covers the faces of people who reject the gospel (2 Corinthians 4). Along the way we see the emptiness of those oh-so-sensible rationalizations that try to provide a psychological explanation for every encounter with the supernatural.

In some passages I sense the same mystery and wonder that I feel when the little otter meets Pan in Wind and the Willows or when Mr. and Mrs. Beaver describe Alsan to the Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I suppose this is not a book for everybody. (No book is, except the Bible.) But I suspect that there are many who will find that it exposes the ugliness of their own souls without leaving them in despair. We need to see the things in us that must die if we are to see the beauty of our God. Seeing him is the only way we can be transformed from Orual into Psyche.