One of the things I love most about reading is finding my own experiences written in someone else’s words.
Two years ago, while staying in a hostel by the English coast, I got up early to sit on the cliffs by myself and stare out at the ocean. I wrote this in my journal:
Right now I’m seated between two cliffs, not far from the hostel. The morning light on the water is beautiful, the air is still, and I can hear birds calling to each other across the fields behind me. I wish I could do more than look at this scene. I wish I could fully experience it, pull in its beauty, breathe it in and make it my own.
I want to run into the ocean, but I know that won’t satisfy me. It’s not enough to stand on the cliffs or to fly above the water like so many gulls that have passed overhead. And it’s certainly not enough to try to capture it with my camera. I cannot fulfill this strange desire to somehow consume this beauty and really partake of it. I can only remain still and look.
That morning I praised God in wonder at the beauty he had created, but I was still aware that the pleasure I felt was incomplete, that it fell short of what my soul really desired.
Then today I read an essay by CS Lewis that miraculously gave words and meaning to what I had been feeling:
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that bounty is enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. … That is why poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of a murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather the greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in and through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.
The essay, The Weight of Glory, is absolutely worth reading in its entirety, but this passage particularly struck me as it spoke so clearly about a feeling I had struggled to express. Lewis’ words not only validated my experience, but they tapped into an unspoken revelation and made it speak. Of course I was not satisfied by merely looking at physical beauty! I was created to be intimately united with beauty. Not the beauty of the earth – that is only a symbol, a poor reflection. It served its purpose to point me to a higher beauty. My soul cries out to be perfectly filled with the beauty of Christ, to put on his glory, and it will never be satisfied with anything else.
