“Beauty, like justice, slips through our fingers,” says Tom Wright in Simply Christian. We photograph a sunset, and we are left with only the memory. A full symphony’s glorious sound speaks to us differently in a live concert than in a recording. The view from atop a mountain leaves us itching for more, and the itch doesn’t go away (chapter 4).

I have a confession to make. I am fascinated with near-death-experience books about heaven.   I’ve read many and, in all, beauty is a central motif. In 90 Minutes in Heaven, Don Piper talks of vivid, dazzling colors, the sparkling teeth and smooth skin of his grandmother, the perfectly beautiful features of familiar people, even features that hadn’t been considered attractive on earth. Eben Alexander, a surgeon who found Christ through his after death experience, speaks in his book, Proof of Heaven, of a beautiful woman who toured him around heaven –he was deeply attracted to her loveliness, which was not at all sexual.   Susanna, a personal friend of mine, tells of her near death experience in terms of bright light, beautiful flowers of brilliant colors, and silky, swaying, soft grass.  She still remembers, 60 years later, the sweet smell of the grass which enveloped her as she lay down in it.  All who’ve experienced the heavenly version of near-death say words are insufficient to convey the captivating beauty!

Tom Wright says beauty, along with justice, spirituality, and relationships, is an echo of a voice calling to us from another world. He likens beauty to a collector finding an unknown piece of music by Mozart which is marvelous yet seems to have gaps where other instruments are supposed to enter—it’s beautiful but incomplete, and we yearn to hear the piece in full.

And we are puzzled by beauty’s quick fading –a young person’s beauty is admired for a time, but we all know what’s coming. We are puzzled by its elusiveness—a butterfly’s brilliant colorful wings lose something the minute they cease to fly and are pinned to a collector’s board. We are puzzled by beauty’s incompleteness –the exquisite colors in a sunset take our breath away and then turn dark in a moment, leaving us wondering about a world beyond the sunset where colors don’t go away.

Christians point to beauty as something that calls us out of ourselves and strikes something deep within us, an echo of a voice claiming, “this beauty is not in your imagination—it’s real! Heaven and earth are full of glory. I made them glorious.”

And so Wright concludes with the claim that the longing for beauty is really a longing for God, the good Creator, who made all things beautiful. The presence of beauty in our world is a signpost to a larger beauty that will one day be complete when God rescues his beautiful world from the invasion of darkness. The hope of the Christian is that Susanna’s sighting of soft swaying grass and flowers of brilliant colors IS reality, a reality that’s just around the bend, just out of reach, but soon to be experienced in its fullness.

 

The above is personalized summary of Tom Wright’s writings on beauty in Simply Christian, chapter 4.