Walking God's Earth - Chapter 1: Beauty PDF

# Chapter 1: Beauty We need to be re-educated in wonder and in the ability to recognize the beauty made manifest in created realities. -Benedict XVI The created world is beautiful. This beauty can be so arresting and powerful that our human ancestors marked out certain natural places and forces a...

# Chapter 1: Beauty We need to be re-educated in wonder and in the ability to recognize the beauty made manifest in created realities. -Benedict XVI The created world is beautiful. This beauty can be so arresting and powerful that our human ancestors marked out certain natural places and forces as spiritual or holy - the sacred tree or stone, the mountaintop, even the sun and the moon. As Mircea Eliade puts it, for a religious person, "space is not homogeneous": it is not all monotonously the same but is rather a map of the sacred, with spiritual power assigned to certain places and objects. We should not imagine our ancestors actually believed that trees were gods. What they sensed was that nature made the spiritual appear, connecting us to its larger force and power. True, this idea could lead further, toward superstitious thinking - toward the idea that by manipulating the object, one could manipulate the divine power itself for one's own advantage. But today's religions can be used in this false way too - as a manipulation of the divine, rather than a recognition of a transcendent power that is beyond us. Authentic religious experience is not of control, but of reception and connection, of tapping into something larger and wiser. Such receptivity to God can be found through receptivity to nature's bewitching and beguiling beauty. ## Christianity and Nature Christianity has at times forgotten this basic insight into the spiritual power of nature's beauty and focused instead on doctrines, or even on purely invisible souls. It's important for us to remember that the first story of Scripture is an extraordinary story about the sheer goodness of the created order made by God. Doctrines and souls are important, of course, but it is not with these that our human religious journey begins. It is with the experience of beauty. Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the greatest twentieth-century Catholic theologians, begins his fifteen-volume theology not with dogmas or morals, but with "theological aesthetics" - the importance of the experience of grasping and being grasped by beauty. Balthasar is recovering an ancient impulse, also seen in the philosophical statement that "all philosophy begins in wonder". ## Beauty Has Three Dimensions: 1. **Beauty has a form.** The first point is recognizing that beauty has a form. Balthasar's first volume is subtitled *Seeing the Form*. The Latin word for beauty is *formosa*. "Form" is a difficult word, we deride "form letters" and worry when someone acts too "formal". Why is "form" so crucial for beauty? We can grasp its meaning first by thinking about how the world looks in a fog, or when our vision becomes blurred, or even when light is dim and indirect. We cannot really "see," because seeing means recognizing and distinguishing certain shapes and their relationships. The idea of form is especially captured in human terms by considering what it means to see the uniqueness of a face. Human faces are remarkably distinctive, and their forms mark us more than anything else in terms of our identity. The Old Testament is filled with passages expressing longing to "see the face of God" or pleas to God to "let your countenance shine forth". Why God's face? This is a way of expressing what it means to see someone's true form, for their true identity and beauty to be revealed. To see "face-to-face" is really the culmination of what it means to see. John O'Donohue reminds us that "the first thing the new infant sees is the human face" and nothing else we see will ever "rival the significance of the face." The face here represents the form of the person. It is telling that our driver's licenses and course rosters have head shots for identification purposes! It is telling that when we meet someone, we look into his or her face; compare this to two dogs meeting at the park! One of the greatest nature psalms highlights the relation of God's face to the whole of creation: *When you hide your face, they panic. Take away their breath, they perish and return to the dust. Send forth your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the earth. (Ps 104:29-30)* 2. **Beauty reaches out and compels our admiration**. The face has a pattern, a form, and O'Donohue notes that it is this "hidden order and rhythm of pattern" that is the foundation of beauty. Such delightful form can also be found elsewhere: consider the form of games, works of art, music, and dance. To perceive beauty in the activity, we must see the form. This is why (unfortunately) many people consider baseball "boring"! Our world delights us insofar as we see the form. So let's ask ourselves, are we looking at the whole of creation in this way? The created world has an intricate, complex form - Pope Benedict calls it a "grammar", which "sets forth criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation" (*Caritas in Veritate 48*). Learning nature is like learning the complexities of a spoken language... or of baseball! Saint Basil praises God for the gift of human intelligence, for its ability "to learn of the great wisdom of the artificer from the most insignificant objects of creation." The tiniest of plants and animals." Much of human history has involved humans discovering how to become fluent in this language. Take the ancient art of beekeeping. Attention to the bees reveals the extraordinary intricacy of their lives. Bill McKibben explains that, among many other practices, beehives deal with summer heat with "a primitive form of air conditioning": when it gets too hot, some bees bring back water drops, and then they all stop their work and beat their wings together to evaporate the water.10 Or consider the "beehive democracy" when a hive gets too full and bees must go out and find a new hive - a complex process of decision making involving numerous "scouts" who then return and start "dances" that correspond to how good various possible sites might be.11 Over time, more and more bees gravitate to the better dances, and a decision is made together. McKibben connects all this to the real-life story of small Vermont beekeeper Kirk Webster, who carefully observes the ins and outs of his hives, working with their natural processes, helping them along, and reaping some sweet rewards in the process. And of course, the wider world reaps the rewards, too, since bees pollinate hundreds of fruits and flowers. While Mr. Webster helps the bees, he doesn't make their lives. The form is not something we as humans made up; rather, it is given to us, as one of millions of processes that make up "nature." 3. **Beauty draws us in to learn more about its intricacy** Now, bees may make you run away, so we must look to other examples for our second point: that beauty overwhelms us in reaching out and almost demanding our admiration. Consider the experience of California redwoods or the Rocky Mountains: in our society, we are still captivated by natural beauty and sometimes overwhelmed by its power, even its sacredness. Beauty like this has a kind of force, power, or inherent attractiveness - a luminosity or splendor - that moves us. We could say it overpowers us. It awes us. It has a kind of magnetism. It is like the (very few!) days when the weather is "perfect". As Balthasar writes of beauty, it "brings with it a self-evidence that en-lightens without mediation" - that is, its "form is so constituted as to be able to mediate from within itself the light that illuminates its beauty."12 These breathtaking moments are reminders of the ancient Catholic idea of the analogy of being. This very abstract-sounding term simply means that we experience ourselves and things in the world as a part of some vastly larger whole, something prior to ourselves and deserving of recognition, and even reverence. We can't fully understand it, but we just know something special is there. Existence itself is a great mystery - not in the sense of something unknown, but something with infinite depth, like looking down into the sea. As Balthasar puts it, God has made all things "with the grace of participation in the inexhaustibility of its origin. It bears within itself a wealth that cannot be consumed like a finite sum of money. You are never finished with any being, be it the tiniest gnat or the most inconspicuous stone. It has a secret opening, through which flow never-failing replenishments of sense and significance ceaselessly flowing to it from eternity."13 It is always possible to harden our hearts against beauty, but it involves effort. (By the way, this is why so much environmental harm must be hidden from sight, often elaborately.) This feeling of being grasped by beauty should lead to certain spiritual responses: humility, gratitude, and thanksgiving. For this is all a gift. We didn't make the beautiful day, the sun, the soil that regenerates the grasses. Beauty is like a gift in its sheer excessiveness. It is so much more than we might expect, and we respond best by appreciating it. Beauty is grace, and grace asks only to be received. It is way bigger than what we could have made. For Christians, God's grace is made manifest in many ways. But we should not forget that a primary experience of it is in creation. Jame Schaefer quotes St. Augustine's praise in *The City of God* for "the manifold diversity of beauty in sky and earth and sea; the abundance of light, and its miraculous loveliness, in sun and moon and stars; the dark shades of woods, the color and fragrance of flowers; the multitudinous varieties of birds, with their songs and their bright plumage; the countless living creatures of all shapes and sizes."14 Augustine is merely echoing the psalmist, who sings the various beauties of creation, and concludes: *How varied are your works, LORD! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. (Ps 104:24)* These momentary experiences of overwhelming beauty are important, but they are not the whole story. Think about our national parks, for example. The parks themselves - most often remote, forbidding, rocky, dreadfully hot or cold - capture both the power of nature's beauty and our sometimes limited ability to see it. In these places, we feel some of the rawest power of nature, almost like an emotional "pow" moment. Like our romantic movies, though, we gaze fascinated by the "pow" moment of emotional impact and then forget to develop the far more complicated knowledge involved in lifelong love of others. C. S. Lewis notes the many great seekers of romantic love are not interested in loving a person; what they love is the immediate experience, the thrill, of falling in love.15 Correspondingly, we can fall into the trap of thinking natural beauty is only experienced in remote places, where we get the "pow." We then neglect nature's beautiful form that is all around us. Much of nature (also like love) involves the humble, difficult task of daily care. Our word "humility" comes from the word for "soil." The form of nature's beauty might not be best captured by gazing up at majestic mountaintops, but in the soil beneath our feet. Is dirt beautiful? What about those nasty bees? Yes, everything is, but we probably need to learn to see its beauty. Thus, our third point: while nature's beauty can pack a kind of irresistible punch, it also requires an active response to this invitation - learning better and better to appreciate its amazing form in everything around us. If it is only mountains and eagles that move us, we can be certain that we will go on neglecting and destroying the equally beautiful and intricate bees and prairies, not to mention our own (mostly urban) spaces. Take the bee example: when I see a bee, it is not a "pow" moment - I think of avoiding getting stung! I need to learn from others that there is a form that requires respect and appreciation. Schaefer, in surveying patristic and medieval texts on the beauty of creation, calls this theme "cognitive appreciation brought about when contemplating the harmonious functioning of creatures."16 She notes how the medieval theologian Hugh of St. Victor reflects on seeing God's handiwork in nature: Some look at the world like "unlettered people" who "see an open book" and can "see the characters, but do not know the letters." When looking at the beauty of nature, they only see the "external appearance" but fail to grasp the "inner meaning" that reflects "the wisdom of the Creator."17 Today, we must learn again to be literate in the language of God's earth, in order to grasp its beauty. In order to enter into nature's beauty, let us not simply take pilgrimages to national parks, the "cathedrals" of the natural world. Let us also see the form in our home "parishes" and local regions. There's still a "pow" here, but it's a little more intellectual, more like what we experience when we learn the intricacies of a musical score or football play strategies. A great example of this "cognitive appreciation" of beauty is given by physicist Chet Raymo, who teaches the history of the natural world through what he has observed on his daily walk to work through a one-mile estate-turned-nature-preserve in New England. Raymo notes that after thirty-seven years, knowledge of this landscape "is in my bones" and yet every day still turns up "something noteworthy," because "every pebble and wildflower has a story to tell."18 He is able to take details of this journey and connect them to large-scale geological and evolutionary history, to distant stars, and even to the varieties of human making that have inhabited the place. As he writes, "A minute lived attentively can contain a millennium; an adequate step can span the planet," and a mile-long walk can traverse territory "as big as the universe."19 Let us find those close-to-home places where we can savor such walks. Another especially important but forgotten learning that we need to recover is the form of farming with nature. Food writer Michael Pollan, in *The Omnivore's Dilemma*, made Virginia farmer Joel Salatin a classic example of this skill. Salatin's medium-sized Virginia farm started as a degraded and worn-out set of hills and valleys. On 100 acres, Salatin now produces "40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 10,000 broilers, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits, and 35,000 dozen eggs."20 The meat alone would give 2,000 people 75 pounds each annually, and over 17 dozen eggs. His inputs? Salatin says, "I'm a grass farmer" - that is, virtually the whole farm output, outside of a small amount of chicken feed, comes from a single input: grass. Well, grass... and an intricate choreography of moveable pens and coops that enables Salatin to graze each portion of the field just the right amount (and with the right amount of, ahem, "leavings") so that it can then regenerate and again be grazed. As Salatin puts it, "We should call ourselves sun farmers. The grass is just the way we capture solar energy."21 But the process is by no means automatic. Indeed, it relies on not violating "the law of the second bite" that happens when cows graze one field continuously, using up the grasses they like and allowing species they don't like to take over. To follow this law requires intense human "seeing" - to each section of pasture, to the difference in "recovery times" depending on season and weather, and to the cows themselves, who must be constantly transferred (then the chickens are ported in to eat the bugs out of the cow leavings, and leave their own). Pollan calls the entire operation a matter of "practicing complexity," and Salatin notes that "everything's connected to everything else, so you can't change one thing without changing ten other things."22 The outcome is simple: a lot of very good food for almost nothing. This kind of farm is certainly capable of matching the output per acre of large operations, perhaps even surpassing it, in terms of variety.23 But the beautiful outcome requires intense attention to how nature can be coaxed to produce such pure gifts. One might wish we trained all our farmers with the skill that we expect from doctors and physicists; maybe if we paid them well enough, we would! Sadly, however, nearly nothing in our ordinary food system actually looks like this. In our society, much farming, especially of livestock and poultry, is as machinelike as possible from start to finish - from huge, constantly lit sheds to chickens that cannot stand because they are designed to bulk up as quickly as possible to concrete-walled slaughterhouses with processes that horrify the ordinary person (if they saw them). This is not nature's beauty, but the opposite. Why is this so? We will need to explore why, but a big part is because, to follow Salatin's process, there is an ineradicable human element, since the beauty of the process must be observed with the kind of intensity and care that the poet uses to choose words or the composer uses for notes. It is an intellectual process, but not a "logical" one. It is not a mechanical one. Working with nature's beauty is a kind of craft process, which can be made more efficient but relies on human attention, skill, and pacing. It is more like teaching or medicine at its best and thus has a labor intensity that we have sought to escape. If nature is as beautiful and bountiful as described here, why have we sought to escape working with it and in it? Why are most of us unlikely to want a job where we tend nature's beauty? In short, why have we lost our sense of this form and our place in it?