Week Three Part Two - Chapter 4

Chapter Four—For the Beauty of the Earth

In 2002, Julie and I renewed our wedding vows. Our original wedding day was a wet, overcast event in which two very young and “in love” people committed themselves to something bigger than they either imagined. I had just graduated from college (barely) the week before and Julie really didn’t get to plan her wedding the way she would have wanted. It was beautiful and tasteful yet it was not what she had envisioned for that special day.

So on a beautiful spring morning in an outside garden service, Julie and I recommitted ourselves to the vows we had made ten years earlier. It was amazing. Julie was stunning in a simple white gown and hair up in flowers with curls hanging down framing her deep blue eyes. Samuel walked her down from the back door of the church to the garden of tall trees that shaded the area from the morning sun. Noah carried the second ring we found for the occasion and Emma tried her best to drop flower pedals for Julie to walk on. I was a little thinner in the waste (and the hair) than I was ten years earlier. Dear friends from seminary (whom we had spent the past five and a half years living life together—see the previous chapter) were there to celebrate with us and one of my favorite professors performed the ceremony.

It was beautiful but now, six years later, the beauty of that moment is gone. We have lots of photos and videos taken by neighbors. Yet in all of the photos and all of the video, nothing can capture the beauty of that day and that moment. Even in that moment though, we were left wanting more beauty.

Wright talks about the “transience of beauty” (pg. 40). A photograph, a recording, a book, a painting, a play, a film—all of these things are flashes of beauty that fade away. Wright says that beauty always leaves us wanting more. Beauty is “the sense of longing, the kind of pleasure which is exquisite and yet leaves us unsatisfied….The world is full of beauty, but the beauty [itself] is incomplete” (pg. 40).

Wright suggests that we know, deep inside, that this beauty is fleeting and transient. But at the same time, we deeply long for a beauty that is permanent and lasting. Paul says that permanence is coming and today we see things through a dimly lit mirror but someday, “we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely” (1st Cor. 13:12). Wright says that God promises to complete what God began “The beauty of this world will be enfolded in the beauty of God—and not just the beauty of God himself, but the beauty which, because God is the creator par excellence, he will create when the present world is rescued, healed, restored and completed.”

Questions—
1. What did you experience this week (see, touch, smell, hear) that was beautiful? How does that compare with the most beautiful thing you have experienced?

2. Have you ever longed for beauty? What is it like? What is it like to experience beauty knowing that it won’t always be the way you experienced it for the moment you were there?

3. How has that beautiful thing, not lost its luster but left you longing for more beauty?