Hotel Room with a View

Hotel Room with a View

Thoughts on Beauty

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I arrived at the San Francisco airport near the time day turns to night and it was dark by the time I got to the hotel where I would be staying in the San Francisco area.  The next morning I took three pictures of what the area around the hotel looked like.  I noticed beauty in different forms.  I began to think about beauty.  I had purchased a book about beauty, and hadn’t yet read it.  I still haven’t yet read it.  But it is on the list of books to read – a list which I am not moving very fast on shortening to be honest.  The Book is Beauty Will Save the World by Brian Zahnd.

 

Often when I begin to think of reading a book, I begin thinking of what I might imagine about a subject before I start reading the book.  That way I am able to have a dialogue with the author, and be able to enter the conversation with some core viewpoints on the matter.  I do not doubt I have much to learn but the process may well be aided by thinking about the subject before taking up the book.  I saw an interesting contrast of scenes outside my hotel window depending on the direction I looked from the window.

If I looked one direction I could see the beauty of the San Francisco Bay.  I noticed the interesting mix of trees in the San Francisco Bay area.  There were trees that one might think of in the forests of Washington and Oregon, and there were trees one might see in Los Angeles and San Diego.  The structures of human life seem to have been built to fit into the natural setting of life along the bay.

 

            In another direction there was a hill not yet much developed except for the expressway with its automobiles running along it.  One was reminded that San Francisco is known for its hills as well as its bay.  This hill seemed almost barren.  There is a different sort of beauty in an undeveloped hill as compared to a carefully planned waterfront view.

 

            Then if I looked elsewhere I saw buildings built in an attempt to preserve beauty in communion with nature and in service to the needs of human community.  Trees are planted in the parking lot to help avoid the sterility of an endless asphalt pad.  The buildings are painted with varying colors.  Some of the colors seem to have been selected to capture an aspect of the natural setting in which the buildings were erected.  From an artistic perspective choosing paints both to highlight and contrast the background help give a scene a greater sense of both fullness and completeness.

           

            I began to wonder if people shortchange themselves by failing to look around at their setting with artistic eyes to see if there is a way they may see their setting within a community and within nature and to find a way to create a scene with beauty to fill the space where they are building or keeping watch over their portion of land.

            It is easy in our modern era to imagine that God does not care about beauty.  But if we believed he did not care about beauty would we set aside time to see natural beauties spread across the world in their varied ways?  Would we be speechless before the greatness of a Grand Canyon if we believed God did not care about beauty?  Would we take walks in natural habitats hoping to capture pictures of birds, animals, blooming flowers, or reddened clouds near sunset?  Would we sit by an ocean site sniffing in the smell of the ocean, listening to waves crashing against the rocks and trying to take it in with our camera if God cared nothing about beauty?

            I do not know Hebrew.  But one who has studied the Hebrew language told me how in the Book of Genesis translators could correctly translate the Genesis account as saying that God looked at what he had created and saw that it was “beautiful.”  In Greek philosophy the philosophers longed to contemplate on those things which were good, true, and beautiful.  In Hebrew it would seem that such concepts as beauty, goodness, truth, and form ideally would grow together as they grew and were shaped towards perfection.  The philosophical concept of beauty is a form of something that grows into the perfection of what it was meant to become.  That perfection has a look and a form that is the beauty which its creator meant for it to possess when it reaches its fullness.

            Not everyone has the ability to create a beautiful house that is breathtaking to see.  What if a homeowner instead of building a dream home wherever he could find his property,  instead looked at the property, its context against nature and within a community and like Rembrandt thought about how he could create something beautiful that would fill this one particular space with beauty? We would think of building beauty not just to please ourselves but to make connections to community and nature.  Beyond creating only physical beauty for the spaces in which we live we would fill time and our lives with a spiritual beauty of truth and goodness and kindness, for God is a God who loves beauty.  We are a people created in his image and we would make our goal to fill earth, its spaces and its time with beauty.  We would seek at the end of the day to present the good we have done not in order to please him for our safety's sake; but knowing that in presenting what is pleasing to him we would have drawn nearer to discovering that truth, goodness and beauty after which we yearn.  For the good, the true, and the beautiful that we seek are in him and he has caused them to abound in all his "good" and "beautiful" creation.