To See The World Anew

Van Gogh, Almond Blossom, 1890

Now that the elections are over, are you breathing more deeply? Has your hyperventilating begun to calm down? Are you stepping back and beginning to get your life in order? I hope so. That’s what I’m trying to do. Perhaps now we can tackle the hysterical notion that nothing matters more than politics. I know I can be somewhat naïve here, but I have said for many years that politics doesn’t matter as much as we have imagined. I suspect there is something hollow in our society that has us frantically trying to fill it with something. Maybe now we can think in fresh ways what deserves our attention so much more than politics.     

I’ve been thinking lately, for example, about beauty. I’m not sure I am very good at this, but I am trying better to notice beauty all around me. I am convinced, not only from experience, but from a lot of reading, that noticing beautiful things bring us great joy. I think about the beauty of that twinkle in the eye, from across the room, from my lovely Sharon. I think of the conversation I just had with our grandson, words and ideas flying all over the place, but held together with deep love. I think of the sunrise out my window and the sound of birds wintering in the desert. I think of the joy of being together, after church, after the pandemic, after politics, simply drinking good coffee and talking with friends. I think also of gazing at the startling beauty of Rembrandt or Van Gogh or Monet, or even into the sorrow of Hopper. I am chastened to remember there is so much more beauty to behold than I ever see.   

C. S. Lewis talks often about beauty. We sense in the beauty we behold a “glory” of which our ordinary life is only “the first sketch.” There must be something deeper going on here, we keep saying to ourselves. We are profoundly attracted to beauty, and yet we know we can’t quite enter into beauty: We do not want, says Lewis,

merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty 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. [We are] on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. Someday, God willing, we shall get in.  

We sometimes experience this cross over, this opening of the door. Euros Bowen spent his life as a parish priest for the Anglican Church in Wales. In one of his poems he asks what it would be like to be resurrected like Lazarus? What a crossover, to be sure. What if we stepped out from the tomb only to find a the world made utterly new? Lazarus discovers “what he died of / was familiarity, the same old things / day after day.” But now things seem profoundly new.   

Now there is more than sound

in the noises around him, feelings

feel more, taste tastes more, smelling

is more than smelling. He cannot

hold back the smile, standing

at the back door, watching the boundlessness

of the almond tree whiting out the yard.

Instead of the dreary “same old things,” life becomes boundless. Just look at that blossoming almond tree “whiting” all over the place. Life becomes more of everything. We are allowed to see with new eyes and hear with new ears. Maybe we can even love more tenderly. It’s as if we are seeing a layer of something just beneath the surface.  

Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, shares some thoughts about this poem. What we find here is “the perception of abundant and purposeless beauty,” putting us on an edge, on a threshold, inviting us to see through the “stale and routine” of everyday life. We become aware of “the blinding shower of blossoming light.” We are able “to see and sense everything again, as if for the first time.”

When Jesus calls us, like Lazarus, to come out from “the same old things / day after day,” he calls us to be made new. How can we resist this invitation? How can we imagine anymore that something like politics can fill our longing for what is beautiful? I’m trying to listen, attentively, as Jesus calls, to come out and start living and see the world anew.