“…for seven weeks I’ve
lived in here,
Penned up inside this
ghetto.
But I have found what I
love here.
The dandelions call to
me
And the white chestnut
branches in the court.
Only I never saw another
butterfly.”[1]
If this writer is to answer the
primary question driving this research and postulated throughout these pages,
‘What pastoral care method(s) effectively provide a space of beauty at the end
of life?’ one must first define beauty and understand its importance in
ministry at the end of life, if one is to know for what to look. This writer accepts that a definitive
definition of beauty can never be fully comprehended and that the exploration
of beauty is limited and tentative at best[2];
however, the hope in attempting a definition, no matter how fleeting, will
provide a mosaic with which to focus this investigation into its existence at
the time of death. To do this, this
writer will look to Jonathan Edwards and John O’Donohue for a simple, but
poignant, definition of Christian beauty and to the Old Testament for a
pre-Christian understanding of God’s beauty. Further, he will identify the need
for pursuing God’s beauty, acknowledge the increase of ugliness which is the
result of a loss of America’s God consciousness, and send a call to the
Christian community to awaken and see His beauty and to the hospice chaplain,
who is uniquely seated to facilitate the seeing of God’s beauty at the time of
death.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to attempt
to define and understand beauty without considering the work of Jonathan
Edwards who was/is the most prolific writer on beauty, with beauty being “…central
and more pervasive [in his writings] than in any other text in the history of
Christian theology.”[3] Further, Edwards felt it was not enough just
to know the definition of beauty in some logical format; “instead, one
had to have a sense of it or, we might say, one had to experience God's
beauty for oneself.”[4] So, it seems to be our duty to both
articulate a definition and grapple with a sense
of this beauty that exudes from God’s being. It is just such a sense that this writer hopes to extrapolate
from the musings of experienced hospice chaplains: chaplains who have seen such
beauty when the Lord was/is among them and their patients, as on Sinai, in a
holy place[5]. “[One] does not merely rationally believe
that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his
heart.”[6]
As simple as it may sound, John
O’Donohue, a 20th Century Celtic philosopher, defined beauty this
way, “God[7]
is Beauty!”[8] Jonathan Edwards’, an 18th Century
theologian and sometimes mystic, believed that the theology of beauty “…begins
and ends with God …an extraordinary vision of the divine Beauty replicating
itself in all of creation.”[9]
Throughout Christian history, theologians have built upon the foundation of
biblical revelation for such a definition. They have continually sought to
understand beauty as a “…sense of the divine being and character, as well as
the works of God, and to define beauty in terms of the excellence and glory of
God.”[10] Therefore, there is one thing that this
writer desires; like the Psalmist … one thing will I seek after… to behold the
beauty of the Lord![11] “Edwards argued that God’s ravishing beauty
is the first and most important thing to be said of God. ‘God is God, and
distinguished from all other beings and exalted above’em, chiefly by his divine
beauty.’”[12]
O’Donohue mostly rejects tangible beauty for a
mystical/spiritual beauty, embracing the ‘God is beauty’ mantra, and sees items
such as art or music only as a possible vehicle to experience real beauty. O’Donohue identifies beauty more as a state
of being or God’s creative work on a journey towards
completion/fulfillment. As an
illustration, O’Donohue offers, “You may hear a piece of music which turns your
thoughts to one previous moment of love.”[13] The aura remaining/created from that previous
moment of love is the real beauty and not the music. It therefore becomes the chaplain’s job at
the time of death to provide the vehicle, or trigger the aura, that
allows/helps the dying to find such a place of beauty. Joan Chittister writes: “It is beauty that
magnetizes the contemplative, and it is the duty of the contemplative to give
beauty away so that the rest of the world may, in the midst of squalor,
ugliness, and pain, remember that beauty is possible.”[14]
Even before the Christian era, Old
Testament writers related the idea of all beauty with the beauty of God. Such beauty, grounded in God, fixes “…a
degree of permanence and objectivity to the very idea of beauty.”[15] There are at least three ways in which the
Old Testament conceptualizes God’s beauty that has influenced the understanding
of beauty into the Christian era and is apropos to this research. First, “…behold the beauty of the Lord;” the
very being of God testifies of His beauty.
Second, God’s beauty is associated with His moral character; God's
excellence, honor, and majesty exude His beauty throughout all the creation,
created in His image.[16] “Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God
hath shined.”[17] Throughout Scripture there is no greater moral
virtue coupled with beauty than God’s holiness. [18] The psalmist David exhorted God’s creation to
worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,[19]
and declared that God would live among those who worshiped Him in such beauty.[20]
God
made everything beautiful in His time; from the very first, “Let there be…” to
the very least of His creation today, God, with all of His creation looking on,
continues to agree about His ongoing creative work, “It is good!”[21]
The third idea associating God with beauty is His continued work in creation.
“The whole of creation, functioning according to its intended purposes, in
harmony and fruitfulness, is said to be beautiful.”[22] Beautiful, because the beauty of the Lord our
God is upon His creation, and has established that His ongoing creative work is
now in the hands of His creation.[23] Forever, oh God, you are beauty, your
creation created in your image is beauty, and the beauty of your essence
continues in the work of your creation.
While
Edwards understood beauty as described above, primarily as a celebration of
God’s being, he also understood that contemplating God’s beauty was secondary
to the celebration of God’s being.
However, humans, as finite creatures with a finite understanding, must
transverse contemplating God’s beauty on the road to celebrating the beauty of
His being. “Thus, while secondary beauty
focuses on what immediately delights, primary beauty takes us out of ourselves
into a contemplation of God’s own beautifying life and how we contribute to its
expansion in the world.”[24] Conversely, refusing to delight in our
immediate surrounding that is endowed with God’s beauty will prohibit the
celebration of the beauty of His being and blind us from seeing the ongoing
influence of His beauty in the lives of His creation around us. “The conscious celebration of God’s beauty is
the end toward which the whole creation is drawn.”[25]
Edwards felt that creation is drawn to God’s
beauty and that we should be concerned with living in the presence of such
beauty more than anything else.[26] Maybe we should not be as concerned with
finding beauty as in recognizing His existing beauty and the ongoing work of
beauty in His creative work, which surrounds creation every day. “The natural world … enlarges the human
capacity to sense the fullness of God’s beauty, and the appreciation of that
beauty subsequently leads to ethical action.
Nature teaches us God’s beauty, and God’s beauty drives us to its
continual replication in space and time.”[27] Edwards loved the outdoors and spent much of
his time outside in the woods or fields around his home, because the beauties he
found in nature were really “…emanations, or shadows, of the excellencies
of the Son of God.”[28]
For the sake of this research, it
seems important to digress before progressing to a definitive understanding of
beauty and how it applies. The question
that must be in the mind of the reader, as it is in the mind of the writer, is,
What about the ugliness that seems to permeate the world around us? If God is beauty, if He exudes beauty in His
ongoing creation, and if His creation is participant in this beauty, where is
this beauty? This "…violence,
oppression, economic enslavement and social irrationality," this ugliness
has "…given despair a new warrant."[29] George Steiner, along with many others
watching our world, feels there is a "…systematic turn-about towards
bestialization."[30] When comparing the suffering in our world up
against God’s beauty, it often seems difficult to see… or is it, as will be
discussed below, overlooked, ignored, or clouded by the distractions of an
increasingly violent world?
T. M. Moore writes extensively on
this point and feels that, “…the demise of beauty in the arts is the result of the loss of regard
for God, then the hope for a recovery of beauty is somehow linked with
restoration of respect for God.”[31] While Moore is considering the demise of
beauty in aesthetic art, it is still apropos because he also understands beauty
as defined by Edwards and O’Donohue. God
is beauty; He exudes beauty through His holy creation, and His creation has (or
can) become part of this beauty in the things that he does. Therefore the artist, as beauty created by a
holy God who is radiant beauty, creates beauty in his artistic work when
influenced by the God of beauty. Moore
recognizes that, at least statistically, there “…seems to be no shortage
of belief in God in contemporary America; yet the decline of beauty and the
ascendance of ugliness has become a daily and widespread complaint.”[32]
Because
of a decline in contemplation of God’s beauty, it is possible that the
celebration of God’s being is ignored and His beauty is hidden. Christianity has dumbed down everything associated with God, His work, and His
church. “Much of the stress and
emptiness that haunts us can be traced back to our lack of attention to
beauty.”[33] One has only to attend the postmodern worship
service at the church on the corner to realize the theological shallowness of
the songs, the art, and the décor; nothing seems to matter. Modern Christian theology has become a mile
wide (reflecting its modern resurgence), but only an inch deep. Moore insisted “…that the hope for recovering
beauty in an age of ugliness and death rests with those who embrace this
biblical and theological perspective and heritage and who undertake the
responsibility of cultivating a theologically informed taste for beauty.”[34]
Gerald Hopkins believed that God was/is trying
to make His being “…known through the things of this world, and he lamented the
fact that people seem so dull of hearing and blind to the beauty and glory that
God is revealing all around them.”[35]
This demise of beauty in
the arts and/or in the recognizing of God’s beauty in both His being and His
creation, “…is the result of the loss of regard for God, then the hope for a
recovery of beauty is somehow linked with restoration of respect for God.”[36] If there is to be a restoration of respect
for God, it will take Christian leaders (theologians,
pastors, and Christian educators) accepting their God-ordained responsibility
to nurture a theological taste for beauty in the hearts and minds of the
ecclesia. “For, if cultivating taste as a spiritual gift and discipline does
not begin with these, the teachers of the Christian community, it will never be
established among the hosts of the community at large.”[37]
A “…persistent longing for beauty can serve as a
starting-point…” or a place of awakening “…a true sense of beauty in this age
of ugliness and death.”[38] The call to awaken is a call to take one’s
rightful place in God’s creative beauty, and when one does, one becomes more aware
of the beauty in the world.[39] “When we waken to beauty, we keep desire alive
in its freshness, passion, and creativity.
Beauty is not a deadener but a quickener!”[40] As one awakens in her approach to God, she
“enters the presence of One who is the embodiment of all things beautiful. Being in God's presence is supremely
pleasant, filled with delights, majestic and excellent beyond description, and
leads the faithful to exclaim, ‘how great is His goodness, and how great His
beauty!’[41]”[42]
This
research project is a starting point motivated by a persistent longing for
seeing God’s beauty at work in the efforts of the hospice chaplain, especially
at the time of death. This project is a
call for chaplains to awaken to the beauty in God’s creation and to the beauty
in the lives (work) of His creation. The
beauty that is already there, but often missed in the business of paperwork,
travel, and scheduling. The mentally and
physically exhausting work of the chaplain is especially suited for seeing
God’s beauty; “Edwards found the reality of God’s beauty was most obvious
during a time of ‘sensory overload’.”[43] No one recognizes the decline of, and the
recognition of, God’s beauty more than chaplains who live in the daily ugliness
of death. Patients, as most people
today, rarely, if ever, understand God in the beauty of His being, His character,
or His work; therefore “…it makes sense for us to believe that, if there is to
be any recovery of beauty in this age of ugliness and death, it must arise from
within the community of those who know God today.”[44] The chaplain must become the mirror in which
both patients and family can see God’s beauty in their lives and their own
creative work.
Surrounded by pain and suffering each and every
day, it would seem difficult, for most uninitiated, to discern beauty; however,
it is “…the ‘new sense’ imparted by God’s spirit that makes this discernment
possible. The new capacity for
perceiving God’s beauty makes one simultaneously more sensitive to deformity,
more attentive to the distortion of God’s mirrored loveliness.”[45]
Only those who have been there understand the ability for something strange and
beautiful to happen when a patient is at the end of life. The face relaxes as all fear, horror, pain,
and suffering seem to fade away and disappear.
“‘I have often watched a look of happy wonder dawn in his eyes when he
realized what was happening,’ writes a veteran [caregiver]. ‘He seemed to come alive in a new form.’”[46]
No symbol greater epitomizes suffering than the Gospel’s
rendition of Christ’s suffering on the cross, and yet, no greater picture of
beauty has ever been recorded. There was
never another time when God’s “…divine glory and majesty covered with so thick
and dark a veil …yet never was His divine glory so manifested by any act of
His, as in yielding Himself up to these sufferings.”[47] Edwards’ love for beauty caused him to look
for God’s beauty in places that astonished some; he “…knew that God’s most
astonishing beauty lies hidden in the earth’s suffering, because the anguish of
nature points to the agony of the cross.”[48] There was/is no limit to which God would go
to right the full brokenness of creation that it might be in harmony with His
beauty; the ugliness of the cross was that symbol to all of this ongoing
creative work.[49] “The experience of finite beauty is …grounded
in the transcendent beauty that belongs to all being [and] …persists regardless
of the destructive forces of ugliness or evil.”[50]
So the job of the chaplain could/would
basically be one of holding up a mirror so the world can see its own inherent beauty
as one created by God. When one sees
this beauty, there is a sense of homecoming, a sense of belonging to something
greater than this temporary life.[51] Not everyone hears/sees [G]god the same way
as everyone else,[52]
yet however one sees God, there is beauty in the seeing! This becomes especially poignant for the
chaplain, because when one loses “…sight of beauty [the] struggle becomes tired
and functional.”[53] Therefore, the joint search for beauty, the
dance between patient and chaplain, seems to obligate them in two directions:
“First, to seek this gift, and to desire it earnestly; and,
second, to practice this gift as part of one's everyday spiritual
discipline.”[54]
Throughout this section one can seen
how beauty and God are inseparable ideologues; God is beauty and/or beauty is
God. This is supported by both the pre
and post New Testament writers, calling communities everywhere, in spite of the
increase in ugliness, to awaken, pursue, and see God’s beauty. Finally, hospice chaplains are uniquely situated
to holding up a mirror so the world can see its own inherent beauty as one
created by God. When communities look
for beauty and “…respond with joy to the call of beauty …in an instant it can
awaken under the layers of the heart a forgotten brightness.”[55] God’s beauty will not lay dormant, but is
sure to spread when lifted up in joy, for “God’s beauty within the world is
infectious.”[56]
[1] Pavel Friedmann in I
Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin
Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 (New York: Schocken Books, 1993), 38.
[2] John O’Donohue, The
Invisible Embrace of Beauty: Rediscovering the True Sources of Compassion,
Serenity, and Hope (New York: Harper Perennial Publishers, 2003), 9.
[3] Belden C. Lane,
Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 171.
[4] Edward Hickman, "A
Divine and Supernatural Light," in The
Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, ed. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth,
1995), 14, quoted by T. M. Moore, “The Hope of Beauty in an Age of Ugliness and Death” Theology
Today 61 no 2 (2004), 161.
[5] Psalms 68:17.
[6] Jonathan Edwards, as
quoted by Lane, Ravished by Beauty, 184.
[7]
While this writer makes no excuse for his open belief in God, however, he also
recognizes that some who read this research may be of the non-theist
belief. Two of the eleven chaplains
interviewed for this research were non-theist. This author believe that this
research is valuable regardless of one’s understanding of God and that most
chaplains, theist or non-theist, recognize a part of G(g)od in the lives of all
people. Regardless of how one
understands or explains G(g)od, a piece of the Holy is there in each human
life.
[8] O’Donohue, The
Invisible Embrace of Beauty, 217-247.
[9] Lane, Ravished by
Beauty, 172.
[11] Psalms 27:4.
[12] Edwards quoted by
Belden C. Lane, Ravished by Beauty, 173.
[13] Ibid,
194.
[14]
O’Donohue, The Invisible Embrace of Beauty,
215.
[16] Genesis 1:26.
[17] Psalms 50:2.
[19] Psalms 29:2.
[20] Psalms 22:3.
[21]
Genesis 1.
[23] Psalms 90:17.
[24] Edwards, quoted by Lane,
Ravished by Beauty, 196.
[25] Lane, Ravished by
Beauty, 171.
[26] Edwards, quoted by Lane,
Ravished by Beauty, 174.
[27] Ibid, 172.
[28] Ibid, 177.
[29] George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001), 5-16.
[30] Ibid.
[33] O’Donohue, The
Invisible Embrace of Beauty, 4.
[35] Gerard Manley Hopkins,
"On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue," in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, ed.
W. H. Gardner, (London: Penguin, 1963), 166.
[39] O’Donohue, The
Invisible Embrace of Beauty, 7.
[40] Ibid, 4.
[41] Zechariah
9:17.
[43] Lane, Ravished by
Beauty, 188.
[45] Lane, Ravished by Beauty,
192.
[46] Glen Davidson, Living
With Dying (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1975), 95.
[47] Edwards, quoted by
Lane, Ravished by Beauty, 192.
[48] Lane, Ravished by
Beauty, 191.
[49] Ibid, 192.
[50] Deal W. Hudson, An
American Conversion: One Man’s Discovery of Beauty and Truth in Times of Crisis
(New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003), 125.
[51] O’Donohue, The
Invisible Embrace of Beauty, 2.
[52] Diana
Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco
Publishers, 2006), 205
[53] O’Donohue, The
Invisible Embrace of Beauty, 6.
[55] O’Donohue, The
Invisible Embrace of Beauty, 13.
[56] Lane, Ravished by
Beauty, 175.
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