A quest for truth, goodness and beauty...



Our sojourn into Quebecois Montreal has been part of our annual summer retreat for renewal:  it is one of the ways we both live into the quest for truth, goodness and beauty. It is a calling to discern the sacred within the secular - it is incarnational theology at its most ordinary - and most profound,too.  And as the artist, Makoto Fujimura, recently reflected on the 10th anniversary of September 11th, the search for the transcendent beauty of God's presence within the pain and horror of life as we know it is one of the ways people of faith can join God in the redemption of a broken world.

So here are a variety of my favorite vacation photographs coupled with random quotes about beauty.  They are, to be sure, just a hint of the blessing we experience.  But as Joan Chittister once observed, a mystic is the one who can see the eagle within the egg, yes? Most of these pix come from Dianne's incredible eye as we walked the city and include subway stops, markets and whatever else grabbed her heart and attention.  A few come from my observations but mostly from the pro...

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old:  Franz Kafka

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul: John Muir

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it: Confucius

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within. The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen: Elizabeth Kubler Ross

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Theologically, the whole of earth is “Ground Zero.” We live in the fallen world in which every good, true, and beautiful reality is quickly idolized to something selfish, greedy and destructive. Christians believe that Christ came to redeem this path to self-destruction by taking on all of our “pride of the flesh” on the Cross.“Ground Zero,” in Christ, can also mean a cancellation point, a new beginning where we can stand on the ashes of the Wasteland we see and still seek renewal and “genesis moments.”  Mako Fujimura 

So look, but you wont see it
Listen, and you wont hear it
Reach out, and you wont hold it
You cant know it, but you can free it
You cant name it, but could feel it
I've been waiting for the lies to end
Holding for the bad to go
I've been hanging for the ugliness to change
Waiting for a world too true
Holding for a world too good
Hanging for a world too beautiful... (The Cure)

Dostoyevsky once let drop the enigmatic phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time it used to seem to me that this was a mere phrase. Just how could such a thing be possible? When had it ever happened in the bloodthirsty course of history that beauty had saved anyone from anything? Beauty had provided embellishment certainly, given uplift—but whom had it ever saved?

However, there is a special quality in the essence of beauty, a special quality in the status of art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolutely indisputable and tames even the strongly opposed heart. One can construct a political speech, an assertive journalistic polemic, a program for organizing society, a philosophical system, so that in appearance it is smooth, well structured, and yet it is built upon a mistake, a lie; and the hidden element, the distortion, will not immediately become visible. And a speech, or a journalistic essay, or a program in rebuttal, or a different philosophical structure can be counterposed to the first—and it will seem just as well constructed and as smooth, and everything will seem to fit. And therefore one has faith in them—yet one has no faith.

It is vain to affirm that which the heart does not confirm. In contrast, a work of art bears within itself its own confirmation: concepts which are manufactured out of whole cloth or overstrained will not stand up to being tested in images, will somehow fall apart and turn out to be sickly and pallid and convincing to no one. Works steeped in truth and presenting it to us vividly alive will take hold of us, will attract us to themselves with great power- and no one, ever, even in a later age, will presume to negate them.

And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three. 

And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoyevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy. After all, he was given the gift of seeing much, he was extraordinarily illumined.  And consequently perhaps art, literature, can in actual fact help the world of today:  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn