When was the last time something beautiful stopped you in your tracks and forced you to take notice? Was it the way the waves foam on the beach, the intricate brushstrokes of a painting, or the speckled eggs in a robin’s nest? We “ooh!” and “ahh!” but after a moment or two, we move on. But what if, instead of simply admiring beauty, we learned to trace lines from it to its source?
Imagine walking along a forest path and noticing gold and amber leaves on the ground. If you didn’t know what they were, you might stop to take a closer look. Studying them for the first time, you’d notice their intricate system of veins, like little tributaries to a river. You’d also admire the rustling sounds they make and how they gently float down to the ground. After a few moments of marveling, you would rightly conclude, “These leaves are beautiful!”
But what if you didn’t stop there?
The leaf is beautiful, but it is meant to point you to something bigger and more glorious than itself. How incomplete our praise of the leaf would be if we didn’t connect it to the tree! To properly admire its beauty means we ask, “Where is this beauty pointing me?” To admire beauty is an invitation to look beyond the beautiful thing, and in the case of the leaf, to look up to the tree from which it came.
Late in Loving Beauty
Our human tendency is to admire beauty, but go no further. Before coming to Christ, Augustine believed he was a connoisseur of beauty. He infamously chased women, sex, and pleasure, as if trying to hoard up as much beauty for himself as he could. However, after he came to Christ, he saw beauty as an invitation to worship. Augustine wrote of his discovery of beauty:
“Late have I loved you, Beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within, and I was in the external world and sought you there… You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all.” (Turley, Awakening Wonder, 53).
Lovely things that once captured his attention and led him to believe he had tasted beauty were no longer enough. Ironically, his eyes had betrayed him. All along, he was blind to true beauty because he had not yet seen Christ. His soul longed to admire and behold God’s beauty and see him as the Creator and sustainer of all things. He alone is supremely beautiful!
The Ladder of Ascent
Augustine’s love of beauty stopped too soon. Beauty wasn’t something to obtain but an opportunity to ascend—and this has been called the ladder of ascent. We feel a similar pull when we see beauty. We want to connect beauty to something more and climb from the bottom rung to the top. Our desire for beauty is at its very heart, a desire for God.
We see this longing for beauty throughout Scripture, but particularly in David’s life. His life’s purpose, his one thing, was to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord (Ps. 27:4). That single-hearted gaze is where all of human history is heading. One day we will join David and all the saints in beholding the beauty of the Lord—without sin and suffering. But until then, we must practice ascending the ladder of beauty. For writers, that practice happens at the level of our sentences and progresses through our entire piece as we strive to bring beauty to the page.
Beauty on the Page
In this 3-part series, we’ve seen how holy leisure, the unhurried enjoyment of God in work and rest, opens our hearts to perceive truth, goodness, and beauty.
First, we looked at truthful writing as writing that is oriented to reality. It doesn’t have to explain everything to our readers, but helps them see what’s there. Secondly, good writing is well-ordered—not only in structure and style, but in affections. Good writing can address dark subject matter, but it must move the reader to love what is good and abhor what is evil. And finally, beauty on the page draws the soul upward toward God. In all three, the Holy Spirit is at work awakening our senses and souls to see God as the embodiment of truth, goodness, and beauty—drawing us in and pulling us up.
A writer seeking to write beautifully wants each word choice and sentence to earn its keep. The writer should ask herself:
- Is the language I’m using doing real work, or is it decorating something I haven’t thought through?
- Does the rhythm carry the reader, or does it bump and stall? Read it aloud to test for yourself.
- Is there one image, one sentence, one phrase that earns the reader’s trust and makes them believe I’ve seen or experienced what I’m writing?
- Am I reaching for abstraction when a concrete detail would land harder?
- Does the ending feel discovered or assembled? Assembled endings don’t always feel beautiful, but forced.
Write Beautifully
I imagine that Augustine, who was well-acquainted with admiring beauty, at first found it uncomfortable to stretch his admiration of physical beauty to God. Perhaps you feel a similar discomfort. We don’t always see God when we see something beautiful—we stop and move on too quickly, but beauty beckons us to look up.
Have you also been late to love beauty? Have you settled for admiring the leaf when you could have loved the tree? As much as you want beauty, so do your readers. So write beautifully to honor God and give your readers a foretaste of the future. Help them see, help them love, and help them ascend to heights they have not yet known.
Cara
Related Posts:
- The Christian Writer’s First Obligation is to See
- Good Writing Begins with Ordered Love
- 20 Bible Verses for Creatives and Makers
P.S. To learn more about holy leisure, check out my book: The Pursuit of Holy Leisure: Enjoying God in Everyday Places.
P.P.S. Do you long for your writing to be good, true, and beautiful, and to come from a place of rest? Download “The Writer’s Examination Guide” as it leads you through questions to ask as you craft your words.