Beauty Is Truth, Etc.

This week I ended up talking about beauty in religious worship, which is actually something I’ve never put any thought at all into before *sarcasm*. No, but seriously, it was interesting to listen to what people from different backgrounds talk about it, as well as trying to articulate what I think in a rational fashion devoid of facial expression and hand gestures – you know, using words.

I guess the main point of what I was trying to say is that the experience of beauty really depends on synergy more than anything else, a synchronicity between your ideas and beliefs and the aesthetics you encounter. I mean, if you’re in a Calvinist church or something and you think that images are idolatrous, a stained glass window of the Nativity at your local parish isn’t going to strike you as beautiful. If you find it in a Roman Catholic church, where representation of religious iconography through didactic art is highly prized, then you will think it’s beautiful, because it matches your idea of beauty in religious worship. It has to do with expectation, what you think you’re in for: if I went to my local Anglican parish and the priest chanted the Mass in Latin, used incense and wore embroidered vestments from the 17th century, I wouldn’t exactly be overcome with a sense of beauty so much as I would be intensely confused…on the whole, it would be more distracting than affecting. So yeah, I guess I think beauty lives in the connection between a person and their expectations, in the collision of the two within an experience.

I keep thinking about the concept of the Sublime that the Romantic poets used – the idea that there is an overwhelming experience of beauty, for them connected to nature, within which a person encounters the Divine. One feels awed, terrified, exhilarated, faced with one’s own smallness in the presence of something so much greater and stronger than oneself. It’s the feeling of standing in front of a large waterfall, beauty and terror mingled together in the experiential realization that what you are encountering is so much greater than yourself, that this place has been touched by the hand of God, that there is something so heartbreakingly beautiful that it cannot be comprehended.

For me, that feeling of awe is what I think beauty is in religious experience. Because there are a lot of things that are pretty or quaint, cute or impressive; what I’m searching for is to be opened up, faced with terrifying exhilaration in a moment of feeling that there is something so Awesome, so Beautiful, that I cannot help but be both small and overjoyed at the same time.

During the Reformation, while the Reformers were out arguing for the truth of their theology using the Bible, the Roman Catholic Church composed music (as well as of course maintaining her other sweeping artistic accomplishments) in the belief that the music would convince people of the truth of her own theology. Because something so beautiful must be true, because the experience of its beauty could leave no doubt, because – in religious expression – beauty and truth are the same.

Sunset Ennui

So recently I haven’t been going to church. At all. This is unlike me – hence the absence of excessive blog writing. I don’t know: I guess I thought that my inaction, inattentiveness maybe, was due to an extreme case of writer’s block connected to exorcism-paper-composition. Those demons do get pretty routine after a while, you know; they all start to blend together in a goopy, rather hot soup. I would not recommend choosing that item from the menu, btw.

Aside from this, some random events in my life seem to have collided rather nicely. For one thing, I’ve been channeling the great Dr. Johnson by reading Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” a 17th century ‘medical text’ that has been described as “One of the maddest and most perfectly paranoid, obsessively organized, etceterative assaults on the feeble human powers of concentration ever attempted” (Angus Fletcher). The sheer gargantuan amount of book this man has written comforts me, because I at least know something that I’ll be doing for a good long while.

Thusly, Burton has described melancholy as a result of habit, a lot of which has to do with idleness – in fact, the author claims to have written this massive treatise as a means to keep busy and avoid melancholy himself. Clever. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps my habits aren’t contributing to my general state of ennui. I mean, just because everything from preparing proper food to exercising feels oppressive doesn’t mean I should actually have stopped doing those things. Hopefully, a more rigid schedule will help me get back on track. Fortunately, school starts again soon. Problematically, I’m not taking any actual classes. Let’s hope I can find some more God-centered reasons to get up and about every morning (and also not to survive mainly on bread and jam…).

Meanwhile, colliding with this is my manic re-reading of the Harry Potter series, which is still as compelling as the first (or whatever) time through. Woohoo Harry Potter! I guess what depresses me is that I wish I was out following some mission and conquering evil as part of my school-days, or really any of my days at all. Not that I wish excitement would fall on me in the form of the most dangerous dark wizard of all time being hell-bent on killing me: that would not be ideal. But maybe that somebody – anybody – would give me some sort of meaningful job to do. God would be nice. But really anyone pointing me in some kind of direction would be greatly appreciated. It’s the feeling, after all, that there’s something wrong with my life, that I’m not doing what I’m supposed to. Perhaps the Dementors are too close?

So that’s me, pushing the safety limits on medication dosages waiting for it to kick in, which does not seem to be the case. *sigh* But seriously, this is a real problem that seems not to be getting better. Blech.

In closing, here is a poem by Sylvia Plath, “Ennui”

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.

The Great Silence

Sometimes I feel like my life is too full of mystery, of silence, of unknowing. I’m sure that mystery if a good thing – a part of life – but at the same time, you don’t want it taking over your life and turning it into some sort of creepy swamp filled with unidentifiable wildlife.

Not all mystery is bad; when dealing with the Divine, for example, you really don’t want to know everything. Despite my general aversion to disorientation, I think I’m getting used to letting God be in the driver’s seat…well, more like a really loud and belligerent front-seat passenger. I’m starting to embrace the mystery of God’s unplottable plan for my life. In the beginning, it was a small adjustment that totally derailed the train that is my journey…or anyway, redirected it. I was planning to go off and study some sort of philosophy of mental illness and, instead, I went to theology school. Trust me: they are not basically the same. At the time, it wasn’t totally a mystery: I did experience a very clear command. The point is what still escapes me. Why did God send me theology school, exactly? One step at a time right? Step one: admitting you are powerless, or something.

It is as if…imagine looking up and seeing a blue light streaming down on you, rays drenching your face. A white dove appears in the midst of it, coming down toward you, seeming to alight on you (because, clearly, there’s no representation of the Holy Spirit other than a dove). A blue mist-like light fills the room, like a film obscuring everything behind it. You can feel it on your face, in your hands, and it’s like a light curtain, soft yet palpable, something you can reach out and touch. You can put your hands under it and lift it up, see behind it at the bottom, but if you try and raise it too high – try and see more of what lies behind it – it slips through your fingers. That’s what mystery is like: thus far shall you see, and no farther. I can believe that that’s good mystery.

But I don’t think all the mystery of my life is good; some of it feels downright oppressive. There are things I wish I could talk about but that I can’t say, and sometimes I feel like parts of my life are full of white cobwebs, a knotted film covering up and hiding and trapping things about me inside of it, made up of every time I’ve dodged a question or left something out or been creative with the truth, trying to make sure it’s impossible to see the things I’ve spun around and kept closed within. I do a pretty good job of appearing completely transparent and open, but really that just misdirects people away from the idea that there might be things I’m not saying. It makes me feel safer, less vulnerable. But at the same time, it’s really hard knowing there’s so much pain I can’t express, so much truth that I can’t share, that there are things no one knows. On the one hand, there are things I had to promise not to say in order to pursue justice or whatever. But on the other hand, I also feel like it wouldn’t be at all fair to tell anyone anyway, because it isn’t really my right to make people listen to anything that might make them hurt somehow, not that I really expect my life has that much impact. I can’t risk doing that to the people I care about.

So I live in my little mystery world, mystery girl. I wonder if I could get some kind of superhero outfit? I’d totally want it to be black and purple, with a cape, and maybe some impressive boots.