Chasing Echoes

I gaze out my window at the damp Virginia landscape. Trees are pushing forth buds and leaves, the first flowers of spring have bloomed, and the grass is that vibrant green only possible after it rains. Something in me drinks it in and I feel my throat catch; “Beautiful!”

I stumble out of my bedroom, wiping the grains of sleep from my eyes, and look up to see my wife looking at me. She brushes her hair out of her face and smiles at me. My heart warms and I smile back; “Beautiful!”

I look at the faces before me. Old, tired, pained, some even vacant and seemingly not there. The word burns in me, in my very bones, and I continue preaching His words; “”According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you,”  My friends it is his mercy that gives us hope. His inheritance will not fail, is pure and holy, will shine just as bright as the day you first believed, and isn’t dependent on you or I. He keeps it for us!”  O! The Gospel! Beautiful!

What is beauty?

We walk through life constantly observing beauty. Many times we only observe and do not appreciate. We take in the grandeur around us and file it away as business as usual as though creation is mundane and to be expected. We drive in cars crammed in traffic jams seething with impatience, annoyance, and anger, all the while ignoring the beauty that exists around us.

Or, we take the beauty of another and magnify it to such a proportion that the true view of someone is distorted in grotesque caricature. As though the curve of hip, the turn of hair, the color of eye, are all that is needed to be beautiful. We gaze at this outward tent and ignore the beauty inside, fashioned in the image of the very God who made us. Where will that fleeting beauty be when age breaks the hip, makes the hair brittle, and dims the eye? Is your vision of beauty really so shallow and lustful?

We, the preeminent creation of God, grasp at these fleeting glimpses of beauty in the world and try to hold on to them. We turn them in to idols and worship them, though we won’t say that. We elevate physical beauty above all else. Pleasure is promoted as the thing to be obtained rather than a benefit to obtaining the only One who can give it without end. Creation takes pride of place as the thing to be protected no matter the cost to our fellow man. We’re stumbling about looking for something to worship and don’t even realize it.

“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. … The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” 
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

We long for beauty. We long for what beauty communicates to us. Beauty in every corner of creation whispers of the country we have never yet visited. In our unconscious desire for this beauty we often mistake the echoes for the source. We see a photograph and think we have it, not realizing we have a flat representation of a multidimensional and multi-sensory reality of such aching beauty that we cannot conceive of it. And what is it?

“To please God… to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness… to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

God is the source of all that is beautiful. We seek Him and His country; Heaven. Everything else is but an echo of the source that is Him. Let the sounds lead you to the source. When you start to glimpse Him, and see the glory of His mercy you can whisper through tears of joy; “Beautiful!”