God Speaks in Beauty

Selling sunsets

Beauty is not sentimental, cheap, or puffed up with positive thinking. Nothing so thin could bear its weight when it walks through the door. It is deeper, higher, and wider than that, calling us back from the puddle-like lives in which we splash with a hushed, confident voice.

Beauty does not fight for attention.

And yet, for all the breath that it has stolen, it is profoundly useless sometimes. Unlike a hammer for the striking, a blade for the slicing, or an ice-cold Coke to quench your thirst, Beauty doesn’t always have a reason for its being.

Sometimes, Beauty just is.

That’s why we miss it. We don’t know what to do with things that can’t be sold. Even sunsets are for sale these days. Except they’re not. Every price tag hanging clumsily on a burning horizon robs the twilight of its mystery. Beauty retreats with every bid we make to buy it until whatever it is we’re selling isn’t a sunset anymore.

It’s just self-tan sprayed on a sky full of pretense and anxious striving for control.

Losing control

That’s where Beauty leads – beyond illusions of control. There, with Truth and Goodness, it stands patient and waiting on the path. The one that winds far beyond the fog into those wild places that have no use for maps and navigation apps. Where we’re stripped clean of power and plunged neck-deep into vulnerable waters.

Like a baptism… or a washing machine. True Beauty overwhelms us when we choose it. Head beneath feet, it carries us away with every breath surrendered to its flow. We drown in its surging, washed wide awake into a single, sober, revelation.

We are not the main event.

The wave

One time, I caught a wave so big it right-sized me in a second. I was bobbing on the backline like a cork; my longboard smelt like fresh wax as the swell surged in set by set. The morning was straight out of the womb, still settling into the day unfolding before its amber light. It was cold – cold enough to make you breathe deeply and smile wide in the crisp exhilaration of the moment.

Seagulls carved ripples in the tides as they swooped low to meet them in their rising. It looked like fire dripping off the tips of their wings each time that they did. I turned my head to take in the sunrise and – not a word of a lie – a pod of dolphins raised their fins to cut the water closer than I could throw a stone.

I laughed so deeply, it felt like a prayer.

I guess I was grateful… pensive… alive. Of course, it doesn’t stay a picture postcard when you’re trying to ride the ocean. At some point, the time comes to paddle. You look back, lie flat, and pull yourself across the water stroke by tiring stroke. This is what I did.

The swell was fast approaching. I spotted a forming heap in the deep that felt like mine for the taking so I started to paddle. Four strokes in, I looked again. The modest heap was now a mountain. The kind they call a rogue. It rushed up behind me without warning or mercy and lifted me like a geyser. Blood drained fast from my face as ocean spray stung my skin in the wind now whistling through my ears.

Fear came clamouring – a wave of its own, it pried control from my white- knuckled fingers. Something like instinct triggered as fast as falling dominos. Quick-hands-fast-feet. I was standing and sliding at breakneck speed down the churning face of Everest… for a second… until a force that felt like a landmine ripped me off balance and crumpled me like paper. Water fell heavy as a hammer and wrapped tight around my fetal frame; I was a tumbling stone churning in power desperately waiting to breathe. Gravity was a stranger there. Those wild waters had no reverence for earth or sky; all was writhing chaos –

until the light.

Blinding, bright salvation met me as I burst above the surface and sucked in more air than I could use in a lifetime. I swam out of the wash, hobbled over rocks, and found my waiting board on the beach. Sinking down beside it, I stared out at the place that could have been my grave. It was calmer now. Gentle waves were riding tides and lapping at my feet. I just sat there, feeling smaller than the grains of sand between my toes, in my ears, and up my nose.

“This all goes on without me,” I thought.

“These oceans have carved back the earth since the first dawning day. They’ll keep pounding its shores till the last gathering night. And all the while, people like me throughout the generations will find space, for a moment, to join them.”

I smiled, grateful for the grace that allowed my intrusion and the mercy that left me alive.

It was all so Beautiful.