T
HE
S
ENSUOUSNESS OF
G
OD
THE SENSUOUS IS SACRED. FOR TOO LONG IN THE CHRISTIAN tradition we have demonized the sensuous and pitted the ‘dim senses’ against the ‘majestic soul’. This turned God into an abstract ghost, aloof and untouchable; and it made the senses the gateways to sin. But the world is the body of God. Hopkins is the great poet of God’s beauty. He writes:
Glory be to God for dappled things . . .
All things counter, original, spare, strange; . . .
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Everything can be an occasion of God. The elemental presence of the divine is everywhere: wind, water, earth and fire witness to the urgency, passion and tactility of God. From these elements God fashioned the universe. It is not that God is reduced to a force of nature or that aspects of nature become mere images of God. Nature is divine raiment; the touch and flow and force of God touches us here but the divine presence is not exhausted by this. Both sensuousness of nature and our senses make the divine presence visible in the world. Nature was the first scripture, and at the heart of Celtic spirituality is this intuition: to be out in nature is to be near God. When we begin to awaken to the beauty which is the Sensuous God, we discover the holiness of our bodies and our earth.
W
ILD
E
LEGANCE
The rose which here on earth is now perceived by me,
Has blossomed thus in God from all eternity.
ANGELUS SILESIUS
BEAUTY INVITES US TOWARDS PROFOUND ELEGANCE OF SOUL. IT reminds us that we are heirs to elegance and nobility of spirit and encourages us to awaken the divinity within us. We are no longer trapped in mental frames of self-reduction or self-denunciation. Instead, we feel the desire to celebrate, to give ourselves over to the dance of joy and delight. The overwhelming beauty which is God pervades the texture of our soul, transforming all smallness, limitation and self-division. The mystics speak of the excitement of such unity. This is how Marguerite Porete describes it: ‘Such a Soul, says Love, swims in the sea of joy, that is in the sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity. And so she feels no joy, for she is joy itself. She swims and flows in Joy . . . for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.’ Because the nature of the heart is desire for beauty, to discover that it is so ardently desired by the one it desires brings overpowering joy.
The Christian tradition, loaded down with heavy institutional and moralistic accretions, has forgotten and neglected the Beautiful Dance that God is. The Sufi tradition has remained faithful to the wild elegance of the divine through its dancing dervishes. In the Hindu tradition, the Gods also dance.
When we acknowledge the wild beauty of God, we begin to glimpse the potential holiness of our neglected wildness. As humans, citizens and believers, we have become domesticated beyond belief. We have fallen out of rhythm with our natural wildness. What we now call ‘being wild’ is often misshapen, destructive and violent. The natural wildness as the fluency of the soul at one with beauty is foreign to us. The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul, the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency and the consolation of the lonesome that is not lonely. Our fear of our own wildness derives in part from our fear of the formless; but the wild is not the formless – it holds immense refinement and, indeed, clarity. The wild has a profound simplicity that carries none of the false burdens of brokenness or self-conflict; it flows naturally as one, elegant and seamless.
D
IGNITY AND
D
IVINE
C
OURTESY
COURTESY IS THE UNACKNOWLEDGED HEART OF CIVILITY; IT IS A disposition towards others which is graceful, polite, kind and considerate. Courtesy also includes some sense of old-world formality; it is the opposite of coarseness and self-presuming familiarity. Courtesy invites dignity. Dignity is one of the most beautiful qualities in presence. The true style of the soul is dignity. Where dignity prevails, there is an atmosphere of confidence, poise and sureness. A person of dignity is aligned with the beauty within; this is why dignity is unassailable from without. Dignity does not intrude or force itself. God gives us life and the world in each moment; he gave us these gifts with the other precious gift, the gift of freedom. Divine courtesy gives graciously and never intrudes on the dignity of our freedom. The most precious and personal gifts of our lives arrive with no divine signature or code of instructions. In that sublime space where God holds us, a space of infinite graciousness where we are cherished and loved, there the soul comes to bathe in the stream of mercy! This is at the heart of George Herbert’s poem ‘Love’:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d any thing.
Gracious love absolves the guest of all feelings of unworthiness and unease. There is so much to be learned of Divine Beauty from the silence of God.
I
NTO
B
EAUTIFUL
D
ANGER
WHILE BEAUTY USUALLY QUICKENS OUR SENSES, AWAKENS OUR delight and invites wonder, there are occasions when the force of beauty is disturbing and even frightening. Beauty can arrive in such a clear and absolute sweep that it throws the heart sideways. It takes over completely and we are overwhelmed, unsure what to do or how to be in the presence of this radiance. The authority of such beauty unnerves us for a while. This is of course an exceptional experience of beauty, yet it befalls everyone at some time. It could be the beauty of a person, the beauty of nature, music, painting, poetry or the unseen beauty of kindness, compassion, love or revelation. For a while we are caught up in the majestic otherness of beauty. It is an experience in which the sheer eternal force of the soul strains the mortal frame; the natural gravity of the body no longer grounds one. This causes unease and yet the unease is still somehow delightful. Perhaps this is what Rilke was thinking of in the first Duino Elegy:
And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic
Orders? Even if one of them suddenly held me
To his heart, I’d vanish in his overwhelming
Presence. ‘Because beauty’s nothing
But the start of terror we can hardly bear,
And we adore it because of the serene scorn
It could kill us with. Every angel’s terrifying.’
In the face of such beauty our bodies feel paper thin; this beauty could undo us. Eventually, time comes to our rescue and its pedestrian sequence calms us again.
Beauty manifests God. However, beyond what becomes manifest is the realm of God which is primal beauty. This is the splendour of divine Otherness which the human mind cannot even begin to imagine. We would dissolve in the light of that beauty. The sublime loveliness of the divine form would unravel every texture, every cell of our being. Out of this unknown, unknowable source flow the forms of everything that is. This primal beauty is suggested by the image of the beatific vision where the soul and God become the one gaze. To enter this pure presence is the dream and desire of the contemplative heart.