More Beauty Than We Can Bear

More Beauty Than We Can Bear--June 28, 2016

"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" [Psalm 8:3-4]

There is a line from Marilynne Robinson's beautiful novel, Gilead, which rings in my ears every time I hear these words from Psalm 8.  Robinson's dying minister-narrator says this:

"Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it.  I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave--that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do them great harm."  

More beauty than our eyes can bear.  That is the truth.  We live in a glorious world, a world bursting at the seams with wonder, with good things created by a good God, a world that is handed to us as a free gift to cherish along with each breath.  And we walk around so often with our heads buried in screens, with a numb sense of entitlement that it will always be there and will always be around, so we don't need to treasure it now.  We miss so much, because we do not pause to consider that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear.

There is a conversation in Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple, where the one character suggests that God must be frustrated when people walk past the beauty of the world--like the title color flowers in a field--and don't notice it.  We are not owed violets.  We are not owed the smell of rain or the taste of peaches. We are not owed the gift of people who love us unconditionally--these are all blessed gifts that God lavishes on us day by day, and so often our eyes are closed to them.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the midst of the Nazi crackdown on the Confessing Church movement in Germany, "It is easily forgotten that the community of Christians is a gift of grace from the kingdom of God, a gift that can be taken away from us any day.... Therefore, let those who until now have had the privilege of living a Christian life together with other Christians praise God's grace from the bottom of their hearts. Let them thank God on their knees and realize: it is grace, nothing but grace, that we are still permitted to live in the community of Christians today."  Such beauty--in the gift of those connections with one another, in the gift of those soul friends who show us the face of Christ--and so often we take it for granted.

All of this is to say that you can't turn in any direction--not up at the night sky, not down at the flowers sprouting under your toes, not right at your side where the people God has put in your life offer their presence to you--without seeing the work of God's fingers.  It is a wonder, says the psalmist, that God is not only "mindful" of us, but that God cares for us with such depth and abundance.  But that is God for you--gracious beyond our ability to comprehend. 

There is indeed more beauty than our eyes can bear.  But that doesn't mean it isn't worth looking up... or down... or sideways... to take in, to appreciate, what grace gives us moment by moment.

Today, let us open our eyes, and take in as much as we can of the sheer goodness of God that has been placed in our lives.  And know that you walk into everything else in your day surrounded by such a love that puts all these things in your path, such a love that is mindful of you and lavishes on you and me more beauty than our eyes can bear.

Great God of all creation, thank you.  I look up, and there are signs of your goodness to me.  I look between my toes at the grass under my feet, and there is your goodness yet again.  I look beside me, and there are the ones you have put in my life as blessing... as undeserved gift... as grace.   Thank you. Thank you.  Thank you.