Leaning into the Longing

I recall an experience with a magnificent sunset.  I was pulled into its beauty.  I literally chased it along the Kentucky trails, until the last light disappeared behind the horizon.  The loss of the sunset felt catastrophic. 

Here in Kansas, sunsets are incredible.   I navigate the road, trying to maintain my driving skills while adoring the splattering of colors draped along the tips of the trees. I feel profound loss as the sky transforms to the darker hues of dusk. 

Still on the topic of glory…Glory is a big thing.  Beauty.  Beauty is a big thing too. The beatific vision.  When you reach, reach, reach, almost touch it….but it is gone.  The loss of beauty is devastating. The good dream from which you suddenly awaken to realize that you are back in mundane reality, and the baby is crying. 

Plato understood this in his cave.  Augustine captured it in his beatific vision.  C. S. Lewis talks about it in The Weight of Glory.  Ann Voscamp encapsulates this concept in One Thousand Gifts.  

Why does beauty produce a longing, yearning?  An old ache exists, a brush of ancient nostalgia, but not for something from this lifetime.  As C. S. Lewis says, this earth is merely a symbol of something else, and we will outlive nature.  The stars will burn out.  The galaxies will collide.  

“Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled lines on a flat paper.”

Why do we as a people long for art, for beauty, for the representative?  We will not be fully happy, fully satisfied, until we can fully grasp the true beauty of Creator God.  While we search  for this complete and total satisfaction on earth, we will not find it.  Could it be that contentment is leaning into the longing?  Is it being happy and satisfied in the dissatisfaction, knowing that it will ultimately be fulfilled in the final Vision?  

“We see now but in a glass darkly, but then face to face.” 

1 Corinthians 13:12.  

Can we continue to run after the visions of beauty, the penciled drawings on scrap paper, embrace the longing, and know that one day, the veil will be lifted?  There is great joy to be discovered in the beauties found in this lifetime, and even greater joy in the awareness that they can’t compare to the beauty for which we were created.