Doorway to the Divine

Was there anything about beauty today? Not obviously. I cycled in the autumn sun, cold and bright. I talked with the counsellor about writing, and she commented how it comes easily, flows readily. I wrote a column yesterday, based on reflections in this journal: it was straighforward and simply. I enjoyed doing it, and I enjoyed having done it - the act and the accomplishment.

Is this beauty? Is it an entry, a doorway, into God, into the Divine? Surely it is: even when not actively about God as such, by name, it partakes of his nature, which is 'beauty'. To reach toward the numinous, the transcendent, is to reach towards God - personal being or even the stratum of reality, general and impersonal, which is the Divine, the Sacred.

These intuitions are the realm of what Catholics call 'natural religion' - a lower stage than the revealed religion, of Christianity; but nevertheless pertaining to, exhibiting, the general revelation of God in Romans 1.20; the 'unknown God' revealed through, even pagan, unbelieving, art and poetry in Acts 17; the creaturely experience of the sparrow in Jesus' sermon.

These are the common experience of all people, including perhaps especially, those who deny God altogether. For they too have a real and vital experience, even relationship with God. Perhaps not of saving faith, but the conditions of life, of existence, are dependent on a Divine Order, sustaining the logical and physical framework of the universe.

God is not a hypothesis, but a living reality - what Tillich called the 'ground of being': the power of being itself. And this is expressed through 'ultimate concern', not always directed toward the correct direction, even or especially in the church itself, but expressing that primal urge toward the light, toward the source.

In this way, all art, all human products of creativity and beauty, participate in the attempt to find their way back to the origin of all things, to that one integrating factor, which can alone give meaning to our lives.