When Beauty Sings
Van Gogh, The Red Vineyard, 1888
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Early this morning, I was out for a walk—and oh my, what a chorus of birds singing lustily. I think they too were excited to be waking up on this beautiful morning. How else could they be singing—in harmony, with such distinctive voices, so exuberantly—if they were not, with me, gleeful to be alive?
I caught myself remembering as a boy blowing through my cupped hands, trying to mimic the mournful song of the dove. I imagined they were talking back to me. I felt close to them, as I did this morning.
And then this morning there were those splashes of blossoming color. The variety was dazzling. I felt envy for my friends who can name those flowers. I am sure I could come closer if I knew better how to say their names.
I long to see the beauty of the world with the eyes of an artist. After Van Gogh painted The Red Vineyard (the only painting he sold in his lifetime), he wrote to his brother Theo: “But if only you’d been with us on Sunday! We saw a red vineyard, completely red like red wine. In the distance it became yellow, and then a green sky with a sun, fields violet and sparkling yellow here and there after the rain in which the setting sun was reflected.”
I have a friend who is an accomplished painter. She talks this way. What she sees in a scene is color and shape and angles and arrangement. Beauty for her is found in the posture of people, the proximity to each other, the tilt of the head, the color of hair, light from the surroundings. I wish I could see the world as my friend does. I might get closer.
C. S. Lewis, in some of the best writing he ever wrote, The Weight Of Glory, talks at length about our encounters with beauty. He acknowledges a deep desire to enjoy beauty. It brings us enormous pleasure. But there is something bitter-sweet here too.
For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance.
The physical objects offer an “indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers.” The birds and flowers and sunrise are trying to tell us something, we’re not sure what. The message, Lewis feels, as I do, points us to our Creator, the one who gives this gift of song and color. We want to fall on our knees in praise and gratitude.
And then we make the dumb mistake of trying to extract some kind of abstract meaning. What if we just quietly rest in the joy that God has to offer, when he “welcome[s] us into the heart of things,” transporting us beyond words.
Glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. . . . we do not want 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, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
An ordinary little walk into beauty this morning made me joyful. It pointed me toward God’s presence in his lavish gift of beauty. Even though we cannot possess this beauty, we are nevertheless rewarded immensely. We have been lifted out of ourselves. We are ready to sing a song of joy with the birds. We are ready to give praise for the freshness of color and light and song.