The Glory of God

This time of the year in the Northwest is known for its short, dark, gray and wet days. But this morning the sky is bright with large patches of sunlit blue sky amidst great, lumbering clouds heading eastward. When I took my youngest granddaughter to school this morning we turned a corner and were suddenly taken by the beauty of peaks of the Olympic mountains to the west, above the waters of Puget Sound. They were covered with deep blankets of fresh snow and lit up with brilliant morning sunlight.

You know how, sometimes, you get surprised by beauty. Well, this morning is one of those times. As I recall that moment now, my mind goes immediately to the opening lines of Psalm 19 that express the glory of God so powerfully:

The reality is that most of the time we sleep-walk our way through our days. Because of this, we miss so many of the gifts of beauty that God has made, that he surrounds us with at all times. In those moments of surprise, when we are suddenly captured by the transcendent mystery of beauty, it is as if our eyes have suddenly opened up from sleep. It might be a small flower, a sunset, a vista of snow-capped mountains in the distance, or a sudden burst of sunlight in a forest glen enhanced by the sweet notes of a songbird in the trees. Whatever it is, in those moments we are taken out of time for a brief moment and sense ourselves in the environs of the holy.

In moments like this, we know we are in the presence of something greater than ourselves. We sense our infinite smallness in the immensity of creation, and we are caught up in the realm of wonder and awe. Such moments are so profound that we are often made speechless. No words seem capacious enough to contain the majesty of the experience. But, the truth is that our souls, in such moments, suddenly hear and understand that “voice that goes out into all the earth, to the ends of the world” and are awakened by them.

Beauty stuns us out of the monotony of our daily routines and startles our usual complacency. The sudden recognition of beauty wakes us up! It takes us, for the briefest of moments, out of the narrow confines of our solitary egos and places us in the Presence of that which is greater than ourselves. Why should we not call such moments miracles? That is what they are.

We might ask why beauty strikes us so? The answer is that beauty points us toward the perfection of God, the source, the sustainer, and the end of all that is. To put it another way, beauty reveals the mind of God to us. In the presence of beauty, we sense that we are not alone, that He-Who-Is, the One who created all that is, seen and unseen, just tapped us on the shoulder and said, “Look! This is for you. Stand still for a moment and know that I am God.”

As the great 19th century poet, William Wordsworth, recognized, “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,/ Little we see in Nature that is ours;/ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon…For this, for everything, we are out of tune…” Beauty is God’s gift to awaken our sleeping minds and hearts. We are too often caught up in the things of the world, and beauty is God’s way of bringing us back in tune with our better selves. Beauty is the secret hidden behind the veil of the world’s brokenness. Let us be awake, then, to beauty, to the glory of God. And let us give humble and joyful thanks to the Gift-Giver when we find it.