The Beauty Chasers

Recapturing the Wonder of the Divine

Timothy D. Willard

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780310123156
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Literatura y artes en el cristianismo

Can we afford to chase beauty in a world that emphasizes distraction and naked ambition over a lifestyle of wonder and spiritual restfulness?

The everyday road of life is littered with the pains of growing up, loving and failing to love, of peace and discord. What is God saying through all the muck of life? God speaks to us through beauty. But to hear his words, we must slow down and listen with our hearts.

What would happen if we slowed down and looked at the world and our lives with new eyes? The Beauty Chasers shows us a secret passageway that leads beyond the utility mindset that banished beauty from our hearts. Author Tim Willard gives us a guidebook for discovering how to see the world with fresh eyes and let beauty guide us in life and our relationship with God.

The Beauty Chasers will...

• inspire you to live life as a participant instead of a spectator.
• guide you toward a life of presence rather than distraction.
• give you permission to slow down and drink from the well of spiritual rest.
• refresh your perspective on the "wonder-full" ways of God. help you live like beauty matters.

Are you ready to live life to a different cadence? Do you find yourself longing to recapture the wonder in your spiritual journey? Are you willing to walk the path less traveled? If so, then read on, friend.

PART 1

SOMETHING STIRRING IN THE DEEP

Uncovering the Story of Beauty

CHAPTER 1

THE WINDOW

A Secret Passageway to a Place Called Love

There’s an old tale that goes something like this: Two terminally ill men shared a hospital room. Over time, they became close friends. Every day, they spoke for hours on end about their lives. They discussed their families, their children, their vacations, their high times and low times, their favorite times, and their times of service in the military.

One man’s illness forced him to lie on his back all the time. Let’s call him Sam. The other man, whose bed sat near the only window in the room, was allowed to sit up each day to take his medication. We’ll call him George. Each day, when George took his medication, he looked out the window and described what he saw to Sam.

The window happened to overlook a grand park, full of trees and pathways. People walked here and there and around the large pond at the center of the park. Ducks and geese swam in the pond. Great, old oak trees rose from the landscape and towered over the other trees and shrubbery.

“It’s such a wonderful park,” said George.

“Indeed, it is,” replied Sam. “Tell me more about it.”

“Well, just beyond the pond, the foothills of the mountains etch across the horizon, and if you look really hard, you can see the giant peaks rising into the distant clouds.”

“Wonderful,” said Sam, half whispering as he imagined the awe-inspiring view.

Each day, George described what he saw in great detail. Sam yearned for this hour to arrive. One autumn afternoon, George described a small parade as it passed through the park.

“I see families walking together and laughing. And oh, look, here comes a band marching through the park with floats and clowns and all kinds of merriment trailing behind it.”

Though Sam could not hear the parade, he could see it in his mind’s eye. What joy, he thought to himself.

On another occasion, George described a young couple reclining on a blanket near the pond. The young man played the guitar and sang, then stopped, leaned in, and kissed the young woman. Though neither George nor Sam could hear the serenade, they spoke about the moment in hushed excitement that night before they fell asleep.

One morning when the nurse came to give George his medicine, she found him lying lifeless in his bed. He had died in the night. She walked over to Sam, who was still sleeping, woke him gently, and told him about his friend. After a few moments of shared grief, the nurse called for the hospital attendants to remove George’s body.

For two days, Sam did not eat for the weight of his sorrow.

On the third day, the nurse visited him with a light lunch and urged him to eat. Sam obliged, and as he took a sip of his tea, he asked the nurse if she would move his bed in front of the window, where George’s bed used to be.

“I’d be happy to,” she said.

She moved his bed beneath the window, tidied his things, and left the room.

Though his heart was heavy, Sam brimmed with excitement and anticipation. If he could somehow pull himself up to the window, he could catch a glimpse of the park George had described to him every day. He knew he’d have to endure severe pain, but he had to prop himself up—he had to see.

After several pain-filled moments, struggling to raise his body high enough to see out the window, Sam was able to strain his neck and peer outside. To his utter shock, the window faced a brick wall. He fell back onto his bed, racked with pain and disappointment.

Confused, Sam called for the nurse. When she arrived, he explained to her how every day, when George sat up to take his medicine, he described the beautiful park, and everything that was happening inside of it. He told her how they often spoke for hours about what lay beyond the window, remembering their lives before their illnesses and their desire to return to the world they knew and loved. He explained how he had looked forward to the time each day when she’d bring George’s medicine and how those short moments had awakened hope in him once again.

“What compelled George to describe such beauty and joy to me every day?” Sam asked the nurse. “Why would he do such a thing?”

As the nurse listened, a gentle smile spread across her face. “I don’t know, Sam,” she said, emotion filling her throat. “George was blind.”¹

HAVE WE FORGOTTEN ABOUT THE POWER OF BEAUTY?

What does this old story teach us about beauty? Think about the way you felt as you read about George describing everything he saw outside. We empathize with Sam, who could not sit up and see it for himself. We want him to see the park, and we’re delighted that his good friend George took the time to describe its beauty to him. Now he, too, can participate in the natural wonder that lies beyond the windowpane. Now he, too, can revel in the simple, beautiful things that make life what it is.

As I read the story, I was reminded of my own life and thought to myself how I, like Sam, would have desired to be reconnected with the outside world so filled with the qualities I loved and missed. In recent years, like so many of you, I’m sure, I experienced uncommon valleys of despair as a global pandemic raged. I lost work and income and struggled with feelings of isolation and failure. I found myself in a sickbed of alienation longing for the park, hills, and mountains. It was a longing to feel human again. I relate to this story because it reveals the truth that when we strip life down to the bare necessities, we’re left with the things that matter most. And beauty belongs to them all.

Beauty jumps out of this story with the power to inspire Sam, to encourage his despairing heart. The beauty of the landscape invited his imagination to fire images in his own mind from years past—images that combined to form a nostalgic scene in his mind’s eye. Beauty reminds.

After George passes, it is beauty that moves Sam in his desire to see for himself the lovely park and hills and mountain peaks. He decides that his own pain is worth the vision awaiting him on the outside. And so he suffers through the act of propping himself up, urged on by the lure of what lies beyond the window. He wants to see for himself, to fulfill his longing. His desire infects him with an overwhelming need to return to the place he loves. Beauty inspires.

And what about his good friend, George, who died? What does his act show us?

It shows us that blindness cannot thwart beauty, and that each person possesses a deeper sight of the heart.

It shows us the power of the imagination to bring to life a world bursting with nostalgia and wonder.

It shows us that beauty possesses the power to sustain a life, perhaps even save it.

It shows us how beauty, when viewed as a gift, shapes the giver with humility and infuses the willing recipient with joy.

It shows us how beauty transcends the ill circumstances life throws at us; that even in a state of illness and near-death, something out there, beyond us calls to us, and offers hope.

Perhaps most importantly, this story reminds us of our own lives and how, when we stop and think—I mean really think about it—we realize how filled with beauty our lives really are.

I can’t help but think now of Sam. What if he was cured and could leave the confines of his hospital room? With a new lease on life, and a renewed love for beauty, how would he live differently? How would he approach each day? What would he do with his time?

I can see him walking out of the hospital doors, wide-eyed and laughing. Walking at first, then skipping, then running into the world, full of delight, and seeing everything again for the first time. I can imagine his whole body feeling like it did when he was just a boy—his heart beating out of his chest, his mouth forming a constant smile.

How would his renewed sense of beauty influence the way he talked to his family, I wonder? What would conversations with his friends sound like now, with beauty and joy ever on his heart and mind? Would beauty affect the way he spent his leisure time and the time he spent working?

How would his life take on new meaning now that beauty played a more central role; would it look different?

Would yours?

Would mine?

IS THERE MORE TO LIFE THAN MUCK?

God speaks to us through the everydayness of life. But God’s words sometimes come to us veiled and hard to understand. That’s because they are, as the writer Frederick Buechner puts it, “incarnate words,” spoken during the act of living. Each person must “ferret out” the meaning of those words. Every day, Buechner says, is another opportunity to listen and hear what God is saying. And not just what he is saying to the world at large, but to you, and to me personally.² Living is how you and I make sense of this world. Living is a kind of active language, and if we’re not paying attention, we’ll miss the meaning.

When I review my life, I can see how I spent my twenties largely on the road, living from college to college, from tour to tour—I toured in a band for several years—from one adventure to another. In my thirties, I found myself embroiled in another layer of life, trying to figure out how to live not on the road but with a wife, then with children, working at a “real” job, and then in academics.

I was trying to make sense of everything, just like you. My life wasn’t some gleaming romantic ideal. The everyday road on which I found myself was littered with the pains of growing up, of loving and failing to love, of peace and discord. I hurt people. I saw people crushed by the loss of loved ones due to cancer and suicide. I was betrayed by friends, and I betrayed friends myself. I fought my way through feelings of rage and lust.

What was God saying through all of this to me? Where were his “incarnate words?” All I saw was the muck of life. But then it hit me.

THE SECRET PASSAGE BEHIND THE BOOKSHELF

One night, several years ago—May something; I can’t remember—I sat on the floor of my study, combing through some of my favorite books by C. S. Lewis. I thumbed my tattered copy of one of Lewis’s essay collections, reread the sermon “The Weight of Glory,” and noticed something.

While Lewis wrote about the term beauty, the word he used to communicate an accurate biblical understanding of the word was love. But he didn’t use the word beauty to only describe objects we find pleasing to the eye (aesthetics). Instead, he described beauty as a staging point for something far bigger than mere aesthetic pleasure. Not the image of the galloping stallion but the quality of his movement. Not the “dappled dawn drawn falcon”³ but the edge of love we feel when we witness its flight.

For Lewis, beauty possesses a kind of magic that charges objects with visible delight. It also possesses a mysterious quality that invites the viewer to take up a quest.

But a quest for what?

The quest intrigued me. Was it a quest for something beyond...