Stored for thee at home: On the dimming of earthly beauty

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 29, 2024

In most years since the mid-1980s my wife and I have been privileged to spend a week or more at a small three-season “camp” on Willsboro Bay, just off the widest part of Lake Champlain in northern New York State. The rickety and thoroughly delightful cottage was built (without a foundation) in 1950. It was purchased in the 1980s by my wife’s parents, who spent roughly half of each year there once they retired. In younger days, we would bring our six children for a week-long visit in mid-Summer.

When my wife’s father and mother died, this precious property passed into the hands of their eldest son, who continued to allow family use in the Summer months. To our way of thinking, it is one of the most beautiful spots on earth. But now that the eldest son has passed on as well, the beloved “camp” will be sold. As I write this, we are enjoying our last visit, and at this moment I am alternating between writing and looking out the windows.

There are many ways for the beauties of this world to dim. We can, as in this case, have them taken away from us—something far more difficult, of course, with persons than with places. We can be separated from them, or even lose them completely, through preoccupation—sometimes necessary, often not—with other interests or responsibilities. And of course, like my wife’s parents, her brother, and all of us eventually, we can be separated from them through circumstances, illness and death. Sometimes it can be very sad to see them slip away.

Spiritual highs and lows

There are analogies to be drawn, I think, between the glowing and fading of earthly beauty and the various phases of the spiritual life. At times we can be gifted with a deep awareness of God in prayer, offering us treasured moments of peaceful rest, but we can also experience such moments little or not at all, as prayer becomes a path to its goal—an absorption in God which, through the exercise of our wills, is somehow both now and not yet. And just like the beauty of this world, feelings of spiritual ecstasy—when treasured for the sake of the ecstasy—can be a snare, a distraction from doing God’s will.

One is reminded, for example, of the experience of St. Ignatius Loyola: Whenever he was supposed to be studying, he would experience sublime thoughts and imaginings, and so could make no progress…until he realized they were snares of the Devil to keep him from fulfilling his responsibilities. And so he learned to banish them and get on with the job at hand. In the same way, even when we are not being tricked by temptations, our spiritual experiences can take emotional forms—perhaps, for example, the gift of tears—or we may be elevated briefly by a kind of contemplative vision. And yet these experiences are not to be treasured more than a prayerful dryness, in which our wills are more active, even though our spiritual “success” seems less.

The same is true of our liturgical experiences. We may feel most caught up in the liturgical action when the setting is gorgeous and the music uplifting (however defined by our own tastes), but it it is always a great mistake to confuse our emotional highs with our spiritual union with Christ. As in all other cases, even liturgical earthly beauties may (and indeed must) be appreciated for what they are. For if they are not appreciated as signs of something far greater—if they are treasured because of the feelings they induce—then they are simply more distractions from our true end, and the true end of worship itself.

Recommitment

The ultimate importance of beauty of any kind is not the pleasure we take in that beauty but its call to a recommitment to its source, which is God. It is one of the most common human mistakes to attempt to find greater and greater satisfaction in those things which have beautiful qualities (which, using scholastic terminology, we might very instructively call accidents) without recognizing that substantial beauty to which all accidental beauties point. Willsboro Bay ripples with an ever-changing lightness from the sun, but were I to attempt to immerse myself ever-more completely in that beauty, I would not achieve ecstasy: I would simply drown.

The situation is essentially the same in our human relationships. If I seek to appropriate the beauty of another as a kind of sensory drug, I begin again to confuse an “accidental” pleasure with the substantial beauty which subsists only in God Himself. If this sounds like a diminishment of the other person, that response serves only to demonstrate our misunderstanding when we seek to exalt anything apart from the source of its very being in God. Just as a recognition of God as the source of the beauty of Lake Champlain enormously enhances its value, so too does our recognition of the source of any person’s value in God vastly enhance our true appreciation of the enormous gift that person is—in some ways, even and also as a gift to me.

But each and every beauty is not a gift to me as if I am its reason for existence, as if I am its lord. Rather, each such gift is a great and often dramatic sign that I too have been loved into existence, that I too have been called to a stewardship of every good gift that falls within the sphere of my responsibility, of all that is beautiful, indeed, of every created thing that has entered into my life by the work of God.

This is the law of the gift. We bless God for what we have received. But we also use what we have received as the particular path along which we draw closer and closer to God. When beauties pass here on earth, they pass only to be consummated in their source in Heaven. It is just as Francis Thompson wrote of Christ some 130 years ago in his great poem “The Hound of Heaven”:

‘All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!’
…
‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’