Called to Create—Resonance, Beauty, and the Need to Create
Ecclesiastes 3:11: "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart…”
Hartmut Rosa is a German sociologist, political scientist, and philosopher who writes about the speed of modern life and its effects on the human condition. In his book entitled Resonance, he contends:
The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world…. My thesis is that life is a matter of the quality of one’s relationship to the world, i.e., the ways in which one experiences and positions oneself with respect to the world, [and] the quality of one’s appropriation of the world.[1]
We need beauty to make us (1) contemplate things bigger than ourselves, (2) orient us rightly to the world, and (3) enjoy a quality of life and relationships that transcends that which is simply “practical,” which I (Daniel) would argue is inherently practical!
We see this at work in how God chose to create the universe. He created galaxies and nebulae and black holes, trillions of stars representing far-away places, causing us to wonder and dream and imagine. We see it at work in his creation of our world. He made majestic mountains and deep ocean trenches, rolling wheat fields and rushing rivers, soaring vistas and gorgeous sunsets. He made insects with some of the most beautiful, intricate shells you’ve ever seen, a living art museum just burrowing through the ground! He made aardvarks and giraffes and platypuses, penguins that are always dressed for a formal occasion, and whales that sing hauntingly beautiful songs. As the psalmist tells us,
1 The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
3 They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world. (Psalm 19:1-4)
God’s creation reveals to us his character. It helps us to experience the God who is the Creative Creator and to reflect on his majesty. In Psalm 50:2 the psalmist writes, “From Zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth.” Beauty can reveal to us glimpses of the Ultimate Good, the Truly Beautiful.
It is intriguing that God chose to have a profession when he came to his earth. Jesus wasn’t just a rabbi; he was also a tekton (carpenter, stonemason, skilled craftsman; cf., Mark 6:3). God-in-the-flesh chose to come as an ARTISAN… and Jesus becomes the perfect icon (image) of God according to Colossians 1:15.
Beauty can touch our hearts in ways that logical discourse cannot; it taps into a different part of our brain, a separate part of our psyche. Sometimes a picture truly is worth a thousand words; a sunset can sometimes say more about God than thousands of lines of theology.
Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft writes, “[There] are only three things that we never get bored with, and never will, for all eternity, because they are three attributes of God, and therefore [attributes] of all God’s creation: three transcendental or absolutely universal properties of all reality… Goodness; Truth; and Beauty.”[2]
God is all three.
And when we tap into beauty—through sculpture, or painting, or poetry, or film, or food, or fill in the blank with any of dozens of other art forms—we tap into a part of how God created us… to see beauty that transcends brokenness. It can point towards GOODNESS and TRUTH and BEAUTY in small and large ways, beautiful things to point towards the Creator who is true Beauty. God has placed eternity in our hearts and given us a sense of resonance, a longing for the good and true and beautiful.
Is your ministry doing that? I’ll tell you, it can be a struggle for me! It has taken intentionality and conscious choice to try to tap into the right side of my audience’s brains. So how can you do that this week?
When writing your sermon, find a way to turn a beautiful phrase. Seek forms of the poetic in your preaching.
Rather than overwhelming people with logic and facts and one-sided debate, reveal to them a story of what God is doing or paint a beautiful picture of a God who is full of goodness and grace, truth and beauty.
Find sermon illustrations that truly illustrate, that aren’t just “preacher stories.”
Sometimes a picture and reflection is worth a thousand words.
May we continue to find ways to tap into the resonance—the eternity in our hearts—that God has placed in each person we encounter.
1. Hartmut Rosa, Resonance, 8.
2. As quoted in Russ Ramset, Rembrandt is in the Wind, 6.
