Wonder, Welcome & Worship Through Beauty

Whether it’s a sunset, poetry, music or a brilliant idea, encounters with beauty have a delightful effect on us. Or maybe it's more accurate to say effects. A few years ago in the podcast “Being Known”, Christian psychiatrist Curt Thompson outlined a few of them. His thoughts are helpful.

Wonder 

When we have an experience with beauty we are captivated. Our attention is arrested and our minds, bodies and emotions are stirred. As Eugene Peterson has said, “Without wonder the motivational energies for living well get dominated by anxiety and guilt.”

Welcome 

Beauty is not stingy but hospitable. Even the parts of us we don’t feel hospitable toward are welcomed, and can experience renewal, in our encounter with beauty. Beauty gives us an invitation for connection. It exists to be experienced.

Worship 

When we experience beauty we have a sense there must be something beyond this. Our mind is turned toward that which is almost beyond words. And sometimes it is. We have an impulse to give thanks to someone and to tell others about it.

To experience wonder, welcome and worship requires that we take time to be “unproductive” and just linger with the beauty before us. To dwell with it, letting it draw things out of us and to draw us toward God, the Beautiful One. Our schedule can become so crowded or, if we do have time, we can become so anxious we don’t pause and sit with beauty for it to do its work on us. This takes a fourth “W”.......work.

Work 

Beauty gives of itself freely and also requires something of us. It requires switching our attention to something and doing the work to notice, whether it’s observing brush strokes in a painting or memorizing poetic prose. It requires energy but the work itself becomes an element of the beauty and part of the satisfaction we experience in it. 

Nature and culture are the theaters in which the glory of God’s beauty shines forth to us. It will be seen more fully in the new heavens and earth but it’s worth the time and effort to see as much of it as we can now. Allow yourself to have sensory experiences and create space for wonder, welcome and worship to rise. And don’t be intimidated by the work.

One thing I have asked of the LORD, 

that will I seek after: 

that I may dwell in the house of the LORD

 all the days of my life, 

to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD 

and to inquire in his temple. 

Psalm 27:4