truth and beauty

I wish I had music in my soul. It seems easier to put voice to it all that way, to put the hard unbeautiful words into some beautiful form that goes down easier. You can say more while saying less and the critics are too busy nitpicking the sound to go hard against the lyrics.

Plain words in a plain paragraph form, like this, leave nowhere to hide. I tell you what I think and wait to be torn to shreds for it. I write prose for the same reason people write poetry, but without the poetic form to excuse my emotion as “art.” Mine will be dismissed as the emotions of a weak vessel, but if this were a song the emotions would be considered its life force.

The feelings are allowed in art.

No wonder art has lost its place in church.

There’s at least some small exodus from Evangelicalism, Inc., with its warehouse buildings and windowless sanctuaries, back into traditions that lean into rhyme, rhythm, color, and beauty along with the truth. To my surprise, I have joined it.

If you follow my life in a timeline of the churches I’ve been part of, you’ll find that I followed the light: from four different windowless warehouses with bare walls to migrating into the well-lit foyer to, finally, sitting down every week in a cozy former synagogue with tall windows down each side, sunlight pouring generously in. There are small reproduced paintings in between the window frames depicting various Biblical scenes, and colorful banners hang on the walls. The altar is draped in rich fabric according to the liturgical season. Candles flicker. It’s humble, and it’s beautiful.

The feelings are allowed in beauty.

Truth and beauty are two of my highest values, but they’ve always felt at odds with each other. In this culture, we use phrases like “the awful truth” or “the ugly truth”—the thing nobody wants to hear, but somebody has to be brave enough to say. Those who offend with the truth get recognition. For several years, I tried this tactic on for size in my own writing, and it worked; it got a lot of comments and shares and traffic. It felt like I was doing something that mattered.

But it was ugly. Marked by pride, flattery, ego, and conflict. Even if everything I wrote was true, very little of it was honest.

Honesty is where truth and beauty find overlap.

The feelings are allowed in honesty.

In the realm of Christianity I’ve spent the most time in, there is this unspoken idea that the only really-true truth is the one that has been stripped of every element of life. “Real” truth, Truth with a capital T, should sound like a mathematical fact or a scientific law: black and white and unarguable and entirely dismissive of complicating factors like God or relationship or humanity.

Any emotion or soul or spirit—even the Holy Spirit Himself—renders a truth-claim suspect.

It’s idiotic, really. We were made human, in the image of God, only to attempt to become robots in how we discern what is true. We’ve made a sort of idol out of certainty—out of being able to believe a “fact” simply because “God said so,” without regard for the creative evidence both within us and without us that screams our facts are at best incomplete. Our truth is not honest.

If we are honest, humans were created for beauty. Humans are wired for emotions. Humans thrive in relationship. If we’re honest, relationships and emotions are some of the messiest and grayest areas of life. You can’t slap a mathematical fact or a scientific law on any of it. It’s just too unpredictable.

To me, that’s why it’s beautiful.

It’s a glimpse of God at work—glorious, fierce, incomprehensible. It’s a reminder that I am not in control and I don’t get to tell Him who He is. It’s walking under the trees in a whipping wind while the sky roils with thunderheads, or lying in the grass with the sun on your face and the thin buzz of honeybees all around. It’s the familiar rhythm of spring rolling into summer or the phases of the moon, punctuated by the chaos of invisible solar storms or devastating natural disasters.

There is order and there is chaos. There is truth and there is beauty. There is body and there is emotion. There is what we know and a whole universe of what we don’t know at all.

Honesty—the space where truth and beauty overlap—is what I see at the heart of the exodus from warehouse to window-light. I, for one, am worn out by robotic certainty and “the ugly truth,” because I know that the honest truth, the truth that holds space for the divine as well as the human, is beautiful.

God is beautiful and the maker of beauty. God is true and the standard of truth. My job, as His image-bearer and witness, is honesty.

on -ologies

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a parent. In fact, for the first 25 years of my life, I didn’t want to be a parent, and I felt some shame about that as a young Christian wife. I jokingly credit my change of heart at age 25 to the good old-fashioned biological clock, but maybe there was a nudge of the Holy Spirit in it as well, because it turns out that having kids has changed my life (shocker!).

I probably say to myself at least once a day, “I can’t do this.” And I truly was not built for it. I’m extremely auditory-sensitive and my children are both very loud. Clara barely stops talking to take a breath from sunup to sundown, and Jane communicates each of her feelings in a different pitch of yell or shriek. My nervous system gets a workout every single day.

They don’t know it, but it’s through my two daughters that I have also found sanctuary for my soul—internal, quiet, rest.

How? Because they have shown me who God is.

All the years that I spent reading and studying the Scriptures before I had children were good and edifying, but all that propositional knowledge merely laid the foundation for finally experiencing what is true. In parenthood, I get the palest glimpse into the reality of God as a father who lavishes love on His children and a mother who gathers her chicks under her wings. The Gospel is no longer a one-dimensional story about how I can “get out of hell free”—it’s the good news of victory, that the Creator of heaven and earth has resoundingly defeated sin and death so that both realms can be united again as His kingdom and I can be part of it, because—what is this miracle?!—He wants me there.

I have met God the Rescuer, and He is good.

I have met God the Redeemer, and He is good.

I have met God the Nurturer, and He is good.

I have met the King, and to my amazement, He’s not a control freak. He’s not obsessed with punishment, retribution, or how my behavior reflects on Him. He is the Prince of Peace, gentle and lowly. He delights in me and the thoughts and reflections I share with Him the same way I delight in everything Clara and Jane are learning and doing each day.

Sometimes I think we get so lost in theology and terminology that we forget to look for God Himself, and hesitate to let Him be God when He colors outside our preconceived lines.

I understand it—the fear of being flippant with the truth, or defining who God is based on the narrow parameters of how we feel or what we experience. Those things can never give us a complete picture. But what can? Do we expect that any of us will find our picture of God to be perfectly accurate when we meet Him face to face, regardless of whether we know the “right” theology, soteriology, eschatology, or other -ology?

My hope for that day is that I’ll have more than a picture; I’ll have a relationship.

A picture might give me some facts so I can recognize Him when I see Him, but the relationship is what I can take deeper and deeper into eternity. The relationship is what transforms me into His likeness. The relationship is where everything I know to be true about Him actually becomes true in my life.

It wouldn’t do my children much good to be raised by a portrait of me. To know my philosophy on parenting or my stance on discipline or even a disembodied fact about how much I love them.

None of it matters unless they get to live in the reality of it, a living and breathing and dynamic two-way relationship.

The Bible depicts God’s connection with His children as that of a breastfeeding mother with her baby, and there are few relationships as real, experiential, and vital as the mother-baby dyad. Facts and depictions can’t feed, comfort, hold, warm, support, love, and sustain a life. The baby deprived of any of those experiences, let alone all, would fail to thrive.

Human experience doesn’t live on the pages of books or the lines of doctrine. And God doesn’t fit there, either.

I am reminded of the words of James that used to make me feel so uncomfortable:

But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without works, and I will show you faith from my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. The demons also believe—and they shudder.

James 2:18-19

Rather than contradicting salvation by grace, as my younger self often worried, these words underscore my point: Knowing a certain set of facts is not evidence of faith. I’d argue that most of the underworld knows a lot more information, and more accurately, about God than any human on earth. It doesn’t make them His disciples.

Facts and information don’t create disciples any more than they raise babies.

A friend of mine went through a multi-year health crisis which impacted her so much that she couldn’t do anything, including go to church or read her Bible or spend time with other believers. For several years she passed her days mostly alone in her room, with little more stimulation than the view of tree branches from her window.

But the Holy Spirit communed with her there.

Her story has led me to reflect on the substance of my own walk: I love the Scriptures deeply, but suppose all my Bibles and Bible study resources were suddenly no longer available to me?

In relationship with the Triune God, the Word-Made-Flesh would still dwell with me. God would still be Father to me. The Holy Spirit would still animate me.

All the -ologies in the world can’t compare with that.

“And the Father who sent me has given evidence about Me. You’ve never heard His voice; you’ve never seen His form. What’s more, you haven’t got His Word abiding in you, because you don’t believe in the one He sent.

“You study the Bible,” Jesus continued, “because you suppose that you’ll discover the life of God’s coming age in it. In fact, it’s the Bible which gives evidence about Me! But you won’t come to Me so that you can have life.”

John 5:37-40, The Kingdom New Testament

the heavens declare

The evening light wanes early now, summer pink fading to September grays and blues in pillows of dispersing raincloud. The silver half-moon is visible for an instant before being swallowed back up by the mist. The heavens declare.

On a clearer night, I would stay out longer in search of a sky striped with shooting stars or dancing with pillars of aurora—though it’s getting too late in the season for such an already-unlikely event. Still, God’s artistry is unbound by what is “likely.”

The heavens declare.

When I was a little girl roaming wide-open spaces under a cloudless wind-whipped sky, I looked often to the face of the mountain in the northwest corner of the horizon, thinking I might see the face of God there. That was the biggest object I had categories for, so in my mind, that was God’s domain, the closest visual I had to God Himself.

But have you noticed? In the Bible, God is not the mountain. God is on the mountain—in the cloud.

God is not an ancient face of rock, half-buried in glaciers, concrete and definable, conquerable by anyone with the will and stamina to try. And He’s not a momentary formation of cloud, shifting and changeable, enterable by anyone who can climb or fly high enough.

He is neither… and both.

Ancient, real, challenging, multifaceted, mysterious, pervasive, impossible to capture.

The heavens declare.

Heaven is declaring God’s glory;
    the sky is proclaiming his handiwork.
One day gushes the news to the next,
    and one night informs another what needs to be known.
Of course, there’s no speech, no words—
        their voices can’t be heard—
but their sound extends throughout the world;
        their words reach the ends of the earth.

Psalm 19:1-4 CEB

“Glory” is a strange word in Hebrew. Its source word, transliterated kabad, is a verb best defined as “to be heavy, weighty, burdensome.” Kabod is the noun version we translate “glory.”

The heavens declare God’s weightiness. His abundance. That He is not to be trifled with. Like the mountain, He is massive and immovable. Like the clouds in the expanse, He is mysterious and unpredictable. His own Creation reflects tiny pieces of who He is and what it means to enter into His presence. It is a heavy thing.

A heavy, wonderful thing.

And the Creation can’t help itself but invite us into the Creator’s throne room.

The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

1 Kings 19:11-13 NIV