Divine Revelation Through Love
The extraordinary revealed in the ordinary
While reflecting on the readings this week, my mind was drawn to one of the opening scenes of Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop where the main character is compelled to stop and pray by a juniper tree in the shape of the cross. The extraordinariness of this moment is not in the discovery of Christ in the world, but the ease in which this simple image appears amidst the very mundane surroundings. Unassuming, the image of the juniper remains in my mind long after the captivating descriptions of the New Mexico landscape fade. In fact, it is the juniper that reappears in all the readings, for they speak of finding God in the beauty of creation around us, allowing ourselves to use our senses to push us towards an act worthy of God. Just as the juniper compels the man to pray, the beauty of creation and the presence of God compels us to love, becoming a cycle of beauty and love that ultimately makes the two inseparable. It is in the single “ordinary” moments of human love that beauty reveals an extraordinary God.
In The World Made Flesh, Hans urs von Balthasar describes how there was a period of time where the expectation was that God could not be found in the ordinary. Divine revelation was thought as something that could only be acquired through contemplation and through separating oneself from the physical world (Balthasar 110). Yet this fails to acknowledge that “the reality of creation as a whole has become a monstrance of God’s real presence” in the world (Balthasar 420). Creation, the ordinary physical world, reveals God most fully, and this is done through beauty. Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu writes that beauty is the “most visible sign” of God’s work, and it is through beauty that we begin to wonder about the mystery of God (26, 34). This recognition of divine revelation through beauty leads back to the act of love required, for “revelation itself is a foundation of a dialectic” ultimately leading to the “discipleship,” which consists of love of God and humankind (Balthasar 115).
If the goal is love, then the figure of Christ is necessary to a discussion of beauty, for Christ is a remarkable act of God’s love. There are two essential elements to beauty in relation to Christ. The first comes from Balthasar in that Christ is “God’s greatest work of art,” thereby the most beautiful (117). This then leads to the idea mentioned in the lecture that all images are centered around Christ. The very idea of beauty centers around the figure of Christ, for he crosses both the physical and the spiritual world. Through Christ, we “experience the cosmos as the revelation of an infinity of grace and love — not merely to believe but to experience it” (Balthasar 109). The second element arises from Roberto Goizueta’s Caminemos con Jesus. Goizueta’s writing reveals the suffering that is present in the sacrifice of Christ and in the struggles of living. He explains the possibility for beauty to arise from the suffering, just as Christ does through the gift he offers through the Resurrection. In the midst of the suffering, though, Goizueta describes the importance of the “celebration of everyday human life” (131). It is those who are able to celebrate those moments in the love they share with their community that beauty and the presence of God appears.
Although beauty always is present, the issue is recognizing its existence. According to Balthasar, experiencing beauty does not require anything beyond the physical, for “seeing is an encounter with reality” (391). The physical senses are capable of seeing God because they are able to witness creation and the interactions between people. We dwell in reality because God is present all around us. Our senses are unable to fully see this, though, until that beauty is seen in the context of an act of love: “In his love for his neighbor, the Christian definitively receives his Christian senses, which, of course, are none other than his bodily senses, but these senses in so far as they have been formed according to the form of Christ” (Balthasar 424). Loving our neighbor transforms our sight for we witness God fully in the act. Smiling at another, watering a flower, playing a piece of music all become truly beautiful because each is marked by God in the face of Christ in another, the color of God in the petals, and the sound of His triumph through the notes.
Once we are able to see that beauty individually, the call becomes for our community as a whole to become beautiful through these acts of love. Goizueta writes that the “highest form of aesthetic praxis” is “celebration” (109). Through celebration of life and the beauty of the world, through worship of God we are acting in a fitting manner and with love. The community is called to become beautiful through life itself and the relationships between people. Gonzalez-Andrieu says, “Beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community” (35). The word beauty could be easily replaced with the act of love. Once again, beauty cannot be separated from love when defined in relation to God. If life itself, mundane and unassuming as the juniper, becomes an endless act of love between neighbors in God within the community, the beauty that is witnessed there reveals God Himself.
