Come back. Come in. Come ever onward.
The world’s a spinning coin of glory:
To each the sound, to each the story,
To each the color, breath, and byword.
Beauty bleeds through days and seconds,
A holy honey in the land of living.
We taste and see the good of giving
By a God who bends and beckons.
Beauty always beckons. It calls to us from an unseen depth. I believe the Irish poet John O’Donohue shared the conviction:
When we experience beauty, we feel called. The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life. The call of beauty is not a cold call into the dark or the unknown; in some instinctive way we know that beauty is no stranger. We respond with joy to the call of beauty because in an instant we awaken under the layers of the heart a forgotten brightness.
Charles Taylor draws attention to our “forgotten brightness” in Cosmic Connections, where he explores the beauty that poets have chased after, especially in nature. In reflecting on their work, he says, “We need a relation to the world, the universe, to things, forests, fields, mountains, seas, analogous to that we have to human beings we love and works of art; where we feel ourselves addressed, and called up onto answer.” We seek a conversation through beauty, a holy dialogue. Beauty addresses us, and we answer back. There’s always a call and response.
In worship of the beckoning God, I aim to do three things in this article: (1) provide a God-centered definition of beauty; (2) suggest the role that beauty plays in Christian apologetics as an indirect method; and (3) present examples of how beauty “beckons” us in the realm of poetry.
What Is Beauty?
It’s best to start with definitions. But you would be surprised how many writers avoid this with “beauty.” The concept is like Mt. Everest, so grand that its peak pierces the cloud line and stays out of view. Writers often prefer to talk about how beauty affects us rather than what it is. Roger Scruton, for instance, says, “We call something beautiful when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form.” This is true, but what is beauty?
At the outset of Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Scruton offers a series of platitudes we might use to determine whether or not something is beautiful—for instance, whether it “pleases us” and whether we appreciate it “as a thing in itself” and not merely something to be used to achieve another end. We call a rose “beautiful,” for example, not because we want to use it to get something else but because it draws us to itself. “My pleasure in beauty,” he writes, “is therefore like a gift offered to the object, which is in turn a gift offered to me.” This gift-giving and receiving is all well and good. But again, what is beauty?
I’m not content only to call it an “experience” or a “category,” but we do need to have some sense of definition. For starters, when we define words, all we’re really doing is relating what we don’t know to what we do know. Definitions are about relationships. And so in trying to define beauty, we’re attempting to relate it to something else we know. The psalmist actually does that for us in Psalm 27:4, “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.” To gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to "inquire in his temple” is to be with God, in his house. More specifically, to gaze upon the beauty of God is to gaze upon his presence. Thus, for the psalmist, beauty is God’s personal presence. It captivates. It enraptures. It overwhelms. And it satisfies our deepest longing. As Vern Poythress puts it, “in seeking communion with God, the psalmist is also seeking the beauty of God.” Beauty is unimpeded divine presence, or at least what glimmers we perceive on this side of paradise.
The poet David Whyte once described beauty in similar terms:
Beauty especially occurs in the meeting of time with the timeless; the passing moment framed by what has happened and what is about to occur, the scattering of the first spring apple blossom, the turning, spiraling flight of a curled leaf in the falling light; the smoothing of white sun-filled sheets by careful hands setting them to air on the line, the broad expanse of cotton filled by the breeze only for a moment, the sheets sailing on into dryness, billowing toward a future that is always beckoning, always just beyond us. Beauty is the harvest of presence.
Perhaps Whyte is talking about the harvest of time—where somehow the past, present, and future all seem to meet and mingle for a rare moment. What was gathers to what is and whispers of what will be. But even there, isn’t it striking how God describes himself in Revelation with the same trinity of terms: the one who was and is and is to come (Rev. 4:8)? Beauty is the unimpeded presence of the one who holds the past, wields the present, and directs the future. But this glorious rabbit hole runs deeper still, to the trinitarian nature of God. The Trinity, it turns out, has everything to do with beauty. As Vern Poythress wrote recently, “The harmony among the persons of the Trinity is the ultimate beauty.”
Trinitarian Beauty
Start with the truth that God is his own community: Father, Son, and Spirit. Community, relationship, and love are central to who he is. All acts of love we’ve experienced have emerged from the threshold of God’s holy and timeless self-giving fellowship.
In the eternal fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit, there is ceaseless love and boundless personal knowledge. Love entails self-giving (as we can infer from John 3:16), so the Father, Son, and Spirit are constantly giving themselves to each other as unreserved and beautiful gifts. Every moment, the divine persons are opening the wonder of each other. It’s eternally Christmas in the Godhead. But with that self-giving is the complete and exhaustive knowledge of each other, which they all share as the one God. We’re told that the Spirit searches the deepest fathoms of the Father, setting the treasures before the Son (1 Cor. 2:10–11). In fact, Paul says a few verses later that the Spirit we receive helps us interpret spiritual truths. But if truth is what the Spirit gathers in the fathoms of the Father, then he’s ultimately gathering the Son, who is the truth (John 14:6)!
In short, deeply personal love and knowledge burn in the center of God. There is nothing held back in the Godhead’s giving, nothing unknown, and nothing impersonal. As Cornelius Van Til put it, “within the Trinity there is completely personal relationship without residue.”
For the psalmist, beauty is God’s personal presence.
Thus, living in relation to the God who knows and loves himself perfectly also means living in relation to beauty. We defined beauty as the presence of God. That’s what the psalmist pined after. But in many ways we’ve lost this pining in the modern West. Ironically, we still pine for something given the name of beauty. After all, whom do you know who would not want to behold beauty—through a person, a song, a landscape, a picture, a story? Beauty will always draw us. It will always beckon us. The problem is that many people have detached beauty from its deeply personal trinitarian roots. They pick flower heads and gaze at petals while leaving the animating life in the ground. Charles Taylor would say this is what happens in a secular world when impersonal law and order rule the day and the personal God is forgotten. There has been in the West what he calls an “anthropocentric shift.”
Things have become so human-centered in the West that God seems like an old myth we only tell children until they come of age and see for themselves how void the world is of God’s presence. That is a terrifying tragedy, and it’s false. The world is and always will be God-centered. There’s nothing we can do to change that. And so beauty, no matter how hard we try, can’t ever be fully torn from the Trinity. In fact, that’s why beauty is powerful in the first place: it’s an echo of the overwhelming presence of God. Beauty is not just a beckoning; it’s a beckoning by the Trinity.
More to Beauty
Perhaps this definition of beauty as divine presence seems vague and abstract. Let’s put more detail into the definition.
First, beauty is gratuitous, reflecting the eternal gratuity and self-giving of the Trinity.
Second, beauty is objective; it’s “really there,” just as God is. Beauty isn’t so much “in the eye of the beholder” as it is "before the eyes of the beholder.” It’s there, and we’re forced to respond to it. Scruton said, “beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.”
Third, beauty is expressed indifference and distance. As Poythress has written in Making Sense of the World, “Beauty always involves both unity (the commonality in harmony) and diversity (the distinction between two or more things between which the harmony exists).” The diversity and difference in the world depend on and reflect the unity and diversity of God. This component of beauty may strike us as strange at first glance. We think of difference and distance as negatives, but distance and difference are actually good things. And they are good things because of who God is.
Think of it in simple terms. Isn’t it good, isn’t it beautiful, that you and I are different from each other? And in the Godhead, isn’t it beautiful that the Father is not the Son but is distinct from him (though they share the same essence)? Or that the Spirit is not the Father or the Son? Difference, distinction, and distance aren’t negatives; they help us distinguish one thing or person from another. And that is good. It’s this very difference, distinction, and distance (rooted in God himself) that makes way for creation: a realm different and distant from God, and yet God dwells with it. What’s more, difference and distance lay the foundation for presence and communion. Without difference or distinction, there could be no communion because there wouldn’t be different beings, different persons. All would be one essential blob.
Fourth, beauty is desirable, but not in a possessive way. We desire to share in what is beautiful without trying to control or take possession of it.
Fifth, beauty goes across boundaries. Beauty doesn’t “stay in one lane.” It goes across the barriers of tribe, tongue, and nation; it breaks through the borders of one culture’s preference and spills into others.
So, adding to the root definition of beauty as “the presence of God,” we might add these notions of gratuity, objectivity, difference, desire, and boundary-crossing.
When we say that something is “beautiful,” we’re actually saying that it somehow reflects the presence and character of the Trinity.
Jonathan King in The Beauty of the Lord argues in addition that beauty is “an intrinsic quality of things which, when perceived, pleases the mind by displaying a certain kind of fittingness.” That last word is key: fittingness. By this he means that “beauty is discerned via objective properties such as proportion, unity, variety, symmetry, harmony, intricacy, delicacy, simplicity, or suggestiveness.” Something beautiful is fitting or appropriate in some way. So, we could add “fitting” to our definition.
David Covington, on the other hand, questions whether beauty is the best term to use in our discussions, since it “as a premise, overlooks the ugly, the degraded, the repugnant.” That’s a problem for Christians since “Scripture wraps its chief aesthetic statement in mystery; the repulsive crucifixion stands as the centerpiece.” John Piper would seem to concur: “At every point, Christ proves superior, and at the most important moment in history, the beauty of Christ shines most brightly as the ugliest being is undone by the greatest act of beauty.” That greatest act of beauty is the cross. If this is true, then our understanding of beauty needs to not only capture what draws us in, but what might repulse us and yet still be supremely valuable. If the cross is the centerpiece of a biblical account of beauty, then we need to include the spiritual purpose of things when assessing their beauty. In that sense, the cross may appear hideous, but it carries the most beautiful purpose in history: to bring people back into communion with God.
Now it seems I’ve complicated our nice, simple definition of beauty as the presence of God. But I’m not so sure. If I say “beauty is the presence of God,” then we need to keep in mind who God is as the Trinity. And isn’t the triune God all of these things?
•Gratuitous: The Father gratuitously gives himself to the Son and Spirit in love. The Son does likewise to the Father and Spirit; as does the Spirit to the Father and the Son. God is always giving himself to himself, but he’s also constantly giving himself to his creatures in the countless blessings and beauties of creation and redemption. The Trinity is gratuitous in the highest sense.
•Objective: The Father, Son, and Spirit are the objective, personal reality that stands behind and upholds creation at every moment. Without the triune God, we have no objectivity, since all things would be lost in a swirl of chance—what Van Til would call “pure contingency,” a place where anything and everything happens “just because.” That would violate the existence and meaning of everything. Van Til wrote,“As the absolute and independent existence of God determines the derivative existence of the universe, so the absolute meaning that God has for himself implies that the meaning of every fact in the universe must be related to God.” Exhaustively objective truth lives in the Trinity.
•Different: Even the concept of difference comes from the Trinity, as already noted. The three divine persons share one essence. God can only create using the resources he has in himself. That does not mean creation is divine in any sense, but that the good things given in creation are never detached from the Giver. If there is to be difference in his creation, that difference or distinction must somehow be inside him, but on a Creator’s level (rather than a creaturely level). The Trinity is where difference originates. Distinction within God is the archetype for ectypal differences in creation.
•Desirable: Of course, the Trinity is the greatest object of desire because we are “disposed for communion” with God in every sphere of life, as Geerhardus Vos put it. But this God is the God who communes with himself in three persons. We desire to commune with the God of communion. And this situates all holy desire in the context of personal relationships—not merely as impulsive longings we strive to satisfy. The Trinity is the house of desire. It’s where our desires are born, and where they go to live.
•Boundary-crossing: The Trinity is the one who crossed boundaries to create—the Father uttering the Word in the power of the Spirit. But even before that, the personal “boundaries” distinguishing the Father, Son, and Spirit don’t keep the other divine persons out. The Father, though distinct, is in the Son, who is in the Spirit. In the Trinity, personal boundaries are crossed without those boundaries being violated. In fallen creation, God crosses the boundaries we put up in calling to himself one people of every tribe, tongue, and nation (Rev. 7:9).
•Fitting: The Trinity is fitting both internally and externally. Internally, it is fitting or appropriate for the Father to be “eternally unbegotten, ”for the Son to be “eternally begotten,” and for the Spirit to “eternally proceed” from the Father and the Son. This grounds the work of God in history, such that it is fitting for the Father to plan redemption, the Son to be sent for our salvation, and the Spirit to proceed from him and the Father so that God might dwell in his people.
•Purposeful: The Trinity is the purpose-giver. The Father, Son, and Spirit have a comprehensive purpose with reference to themselves (to love and glorify one another for eternity) and to creation. And, as Van Til said, “without a comprehensive purpose, every act of purpose on the part of man would be set in a void.” Every purpose in existence,from a stone in a stream to the Son on a cross, emerges from the Trinity.
In short, we can still say that beauty is the beckoning presence of the triune God. We just need to understand how rich the phrase “triune God” is. When we say that something is “beautiful,”we’re actually saying that it somehow reflects the presence and character of the Trinity. This aligns with the conclusion of my friend and former teacher William Edgar, who says beauty “means being conformed to all that is involved in a living, grace-filled,covenant relation to God the creator and redeemer.” God’s presence is a call to conformity. It is a beckoning. It requires our response in relationship to him. Where that call, that beckoning, is not present, neither is beauty. For beauty always beckons.
The Place of Beauty in Reformed Apologetics
Now that we have some sense of what beauty is—the beckoning presence of the triune God—we come to the question of its use in apologetics. Where does beauty fit amidst the feuds of logic and the clamour over worldview coherence? I ask this as someone committed to a Van Tilian approach.
In his lecture “Van Til Goes Pop,” Daniel Strange asks, “How are we doing in broadening the ‘bandwidth’ of apologetics in the Van Tilian tradition to deal with late modern culture and in particular ‘popular culture’?” As a student of Van Tilian apologetics, I learned the importance of “the transcendental method” and how to find logical inconsistencies in the arguments of those who oppose the Christian faith. I learned how to interpret, deconstruct, and reconstruct arguments. I learned how to articulate the Christian faith as the only logically defensible position. And I learned how my values and behavior should align with my deeper convictions. All of this is wonderfully helpful and biblically mandated if we are to present a reason for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15).
But here’s the problem from late modern and popular culture: What if someone isn’t moved by logic and argumentation? What if someone huffs at the idea that his behaviors should match his deeper convictions? What if, in response to the sensitive and brilliant transcendental approach to godly life and faith, someone offers the dreaded three-word response: “I don’t care”? What then?
We may want to say, “Well, good luck and good riddance! We tried. ”While it’s true that people are always fully responsible for their sin, this approach doesn’t exude empathy and love. We need to do more. But does Van Til’s apologetic have anything to offer people who aren’t overtly focused on the logical coherence of their worldview? As Daniel Strange put it, “How can those in the Van Tilian tradition communicate effectively and get apologetic traction in a late modern culture that does not lead with the intellect, but with emotion, desire, and imagination?” I aim to answer that question by applying Van Til’s method to beauty. The key is using the transcendental method with emotions and experience instead of logic. I focus particularly on our encounters with beauty.
Van Til must have seen this as a possibility. He once wrote that God was “the source and criterion of truth, goodness and beauty.” And he noted that poets and artists rely on the Logos of creation and redemption to harness the powers of symbolism. “Without a revelational foundation,” he said, “all symbolism and all art in general would fall to the ground.” If the source and criterion of beauty reside in God, and if God upholds all of the world by his word (Heb. 1:3)—the very world upon which poets and artists stand to create things of beauty—then God must be central to our discussions of beauty.
But how do we proceed from here? It would hardly do to shout at beauty enthusiasts, “You must presuppose God to love anything beautiful!” There may be truth to that, but it seems to leave out the central strength of beauty as an apologetic. If beauty always beckons, then beauty is an invitation, perhaps an indirect one, to the truth and goodness of God. We don’t shout invitations; we extend them. We offer people a way in. This is an indirect approach that may have more traction in our time than direct rational argumentation.
Beauty: Entering Into Presence
C.S. Lewis gets at this in his essay “The Weight of Glory.” He starts with a more open admission: we all carry an unspoken secret. He says, “The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.” In other words, we carry the secret that we’re outsiders. And our greatest fear is to remain outsiders,
repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.
Ah. . . the longing to be inside. Isn’t that often the call we experience with beauty? The psalmist longed to enter into the temple and dwell in the presence of God. When I stare at the verbal depiction of Aslan’s country in The Silver Chair, I want to go there, to be in the landscape. When I listen to the soft melodies of the Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi, I want to inhabit them somehow, to live in the notes, to dress myself in them. I feel the same way when I look at Thomas Cole’s View on the Catskill–Early Autumn. The vanilla-blue sky at the horizon seems to run headlong into eternity. I want to get in there.
Have you felt this way when you experienced something beautiful? Lewis did. “We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”Yes—that’s it. We want to pass into it, to fully receive it. The trouble is,
At present, we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
Beauty is all about getting in. As an apologetic method, beauty allows us to stand and stare, or listen, or taste, or touch, or smell, and say, “God, how do I get more of this? How do I get in?”
And Christ is the key, our way in. He not only called himself “the door” (ἡθύρα, John 10:9); he was the fully embodied presence of God among us. In Lewis’s image, Jesus is “the right side of the door” turned toward us. As the beautiful Son of God, Jesus leads us to something hideous—the cross—so that we might find the depth of beauty in the unimpeded presence of God. As David Covington wrote, “The power of beauty is the power of the cross. Repentance and faith bring us to true beauty. Beauty as an ideal does not bring us salvation; God uses his own beauty, his own truth, and his own power to bring us to himself.” In the cross, Jesus brings us back to God himself: the source of all beckoning in beauty. Through Christ, and through him alone, we get in to the beauty that surrounds us.
How, exactly? There’s no shortage of mystery here. But we can at least say that Christ as the Son of God is the embodiment of God’s beauty, God’s presence. And so if we have union with him, then we have an unbreakable, Spirit forged bond to the source and sustainer of all things beautiful. All things.
In one of my favorite poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes,
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle,dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Every fiber and fleck of beauty we experience in this life has been fathered-forth by the one whose beauty is past change. And Christ, with his shepherd’s crook of truth, ushers us into communion with him.
It may be that we live in a world that isolates truth from beauty, that wants to experience things without being directed by things. But that’s a fantasy. As Covington wrote, “truth is powerless without beauty, and beauty is rudderless without truth.” We get both in Christ: the beauty of God and the truth of God. He is our way in. All we have to do is encourage people to “taste and see.”
Taste and See
The psalmist gave us an apologetic method for beauty when he said, “taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” (Ps. 34:8) There is great hope to offer others in that simple invitation: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” Let me end with two examples from the realm of poetry.
The first is a microcosm of life in four lines—slightly bitter but strangely sweet.
Many a wrong, and its curing song;
Many a road, and many an inn;
Room to roam, but only one home
For all the world to win.
George MacDonald penned those words in his haunting work Phantastes.The words describe every human being who has ever lived or ever will live. Every life is riven with wrongs, but those wrongs, by grace, can teach and cure us. Their songs linger in the woods of the soul. As the curing songs follow us, we wander and seek rest in myriad mansions and motels—any place or person that will have us. And yet as we wander, although we have plenty of destinations, there is only one place we could ever crown with the title “home.” MacDonald later reveals that this home is a house of love, where lover and beloved stare face to face.
MacDonald’s lines, like a seine net, have caught many readers over the years. Some knew of what he spoke. Many didn’t (and still don’t). For those who want a way in to these words, we offer them the only door available: Christ. It is the grace of Christ that turns our wrongs into curing songs. It is the grace of Christ that grants us a home—a room in the heaven-house of God (John 14:2). To really get inside these words, we must walk through the threshold of Christ. And so we invite people: Taste and see.
Second, consider the delicate and prophetic lines from Jane Kenyon in her poem “Otherwise.”
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
Kenyon’s “otherwise” was the haunting reality of her early death. She died of Leukemia in 1995. Her husband, the poet Donald Hall, would survive her by twenty-three years. She knew her otherwise was coming. But she also knew that every otherwise she enjoyed each day was a gift—what we would call grace.
As the beautiful Son of God, Jesus leads us to something hideous— the cross—so that we might find the depth of beauty in the unimpeded presence of God.
How many of us are waltzing through our days in ignorance of what could be, of what losses might have met us rather than the gains we hold? How many of us are truly aware of the “otherwise”? Kenyon’s poem is a wake up call for every reader. One day, we know, it will be otherwise. Are we ready to meet that, to enter that leveling mystery of humanity? There’s a way in—a door that goes beyond the eventual otherwise of life. And his name is Christ. It’s through him that our otherwise becomes a new story, a narrative of horizons: where earth and sky never fully meet. In Christ, our immortal journey begins. Lewis, again, saw the reality of this because he knew the “otherwise” of death was not an ending for “ordinary” people:
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations— these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.
I never met Jane Kenyon. But if I had, I would have known that I was not meeting a mortal, hopelessly set for an otherwise of non-existence. She was destined for more. We all are. Which destiny we take up is decided by the sovereign grace of God, who controls every otherwise in the grand story he’s telling across the ages. It’s a story with Christ at the center, the Christ who, as Hopkins put it, “plays in ten thousand places.”
These are just two examples of tasting and seeing. There is no shortage of examples in our path everyday. The beauty we routinely encounter is always a beckoning: to Christ and the presence of the triune God. The way in is God’s door, the person of Jesus given for sinners so that they might stand in the beauty of the Trinity.
Conclusion: Beauty and Otherness
Let me end by noting something utterly lost on the world: the other-centered nature of beauty. Beauty is always an invitation, a call to taste and see that the Lord is good—not merely that “life is good.” As Andrew Klavan put it in The Truth and Beauty, “The meaning of Jesus’s life is the meaning of everything. His truth is truth. His right is right. His beauty is beauty.” The beauty we encounter in the world—be it literary, visual, aural, or tactile—points our lives toward the beauty of God, in every chapter, sentence, and phrase of our days. For, as Klavan reminds us,“Your soul is not a ghost in a machine; it is a story your life tells. We are just flesh, but flesh is a language, a word; it speaks of a meaning, right or wrong, good or evil, our selves, our souls.”
Our lives are speaking meanings. As we absorb and reflect the beauty around us, our response tells a story that others might be reading in us. And so our encounters with beauty are not ultimately about ourselves. They are for others. This is the other-centered nature of beauty. Russ Ramsey wrote,
The pursuit of beauty requires the application of goodness and truth for the benefit of others. Beauty is what we make of goodness and truth. Beauty takes the pursuit of goodness past mere personal ethical conduct to the work of intentionally doing good to and for others. Beauty takes the pursuit of truth past the accumulation of knowledge to the proclamation and application of truth in the name of caring for others. Beauty draws us deeper into community. We ache to share the experience of beauty with other people, to look at someone near us and say, “Do you hear that? Do you see that?”
From an apologetic standpoint, we can also ask, “Do you want to get in there? Do you want to go deeper with me?” Our beckoning into beauty is no lonely endeavor; it is relational—just as the God of beauty is relational in himself.
Our world assumes beauty is all about us—what we encounter, what we enjoy,what we yearn for. But John O’Donohue was right: “In the light of beauty, the strategies of the ego melt like a web against a candle.” After the melting comes the true meaning: the triune God whose presence is always beckoning us into relationship with himself and into self-giving relationships with others. Beauty always beckons us away from ourselves and into the presence of the God who is building up his people one living stone at a time. In praise of all that he fathers-forth, we marvel and step toward the divine voice that beckons.