ON GOD, BEAUTY AND MEANING

In this reflective essay, we explore the relationship between God, beauty, and meaning. Learn how an appreciation for beauty can be a gateway to the transcendent and how understanding more about the world deepens our sense of purpose and meaning. Don’t miss this thought-provoking piece on faith and aesthetics

This little reflection I wrote more than two years ago, on God, beauty and meaning:

I was pushed out of the womb, from perfect peace and seamless existence into a full-blown chaos to then balance between my mother’s heartbeat and everything else. My eyes slowly began to open up and claim this world piece by piece in order to build my own one. I was born into a divine family, whose god-like powers I gradually took over, by seeing with my own eyes, walking with my own legs and feed myself – I could sustain myself in ways only the divine parents could provide to my newborn self.

The thing is, as I was growing, every year I thought, this is it – the big me, nearly as smart and independent as my mom and dad. With my parents losing their regal gowns, the world would at once begin to lose its divine splendor. I thought I’d grow up and there will be nothing left to grow – a full set of teeth, a good vocabulary, a nicely-formed prefrontal cortex – one day my body would finish its development. I thought I’d stop growing the way adults seemed to and the day I’m done would be the day the world loses its last bit of magic as everything would get explained away into a thin air, like a fog, scattered by heat of the sun. The adults seemed to be grown up as they knew all the answers, even to the biggest questions, such as, why we’re here, if there is god, what happens after death. They picked their choices from the well of facts and shoved them in a drawer as a document proving they finished the journey and got to the destination of their choice. I was scared of the world that is all explained away, harnessed by science and technology where if anything exists outside the box is only there because the ever-expanding box hasn’t devoured it yet. Everything beyond our grasp is only such way because we lack the technology, the magic spell that has already brought death to most of our myths and deities, to everything inside ourselves that used to look up to the stars and see eyes looking back at us.

I don’t want to stop growing, I’m not done with answers, my God is still above and bigger than any box could contain, than I could ever contain – and that’s okay. It’s not that I’ll never be able to find Him, but exactly the opposite – I will find a little bit of him every day for the rest of my life, in art, history, symbols, nature, philosophy, science and the very people I get to meet. The more I learn about the world and the patterns it’s laced with, the more I see Him, the more this life and this world reveal themselves as poetry, where each and every word plays its part into the whole and flows in it as notes of music merge into melody. This poetry is bright and tragic, ebbing and flowing, fierce and calm as a symphony, a grand masterpiece we’re too impatient to listen to while living our lives stuck on a single chord. It’s easy and comforting at first, but tiresome, lifeless and maddening later. Just as the nature is not made of single color and man of single emotion, the world is not built of single layer, of the physical and tangible, the measurable. If you can sense beauty, it’s already a gateway to the transcendent, the more you study it, the more it grows within you and around you as if all things begin to glow from within – a sculpture is not just a graceful piece of marble, a song – not just a sound, but a story of passion, suffering, excellence and love and all the deepest parts of you that even though caged in rationality, still look up to the sky, trying to find those eyes looking back at you. You!

The more I learn the more my arms stretch upwards, grasping for something, or someone, rather, higher than me, who shows how much there is still to grow and to find. It’s been 27 years of me on this earth and thank God the world has only been getting bigger and with it – the meaning.