I had a wonderful childhood with parents who loved me. Sometime when I was a young teenager, I became aware of beauty: the sea, green pine trees rising up into a blue sky at the home where my grandparents lived, the gentle slanting sunlight at the warm golden end of the day, the glowing moon swathed by clouds in a black night sky. Also – when I was a little older, perhaps – the beauty of words, of stories, and pictures. My parents and I always read together: Winnie the Pooh, and The Wind in the Willows when I was little, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and Elizabeth Goudge when I was older. My mother also read me poetry when I was little, and I discovered more on my own when I was in high school, and after. “Now rings the woodland loud and long, / The distance takes a lovelier hue, / And drown’d in yonder living blue / The lark becomes a sightless song. …”
Particularly when seeing the piercing loveliness of nature when I was alone in a beautiful place, I would feel stabbed by its beauty and my love of it, yet sense its remoteness from me. I later read in a book by C.S. Lewis called Surprised by Joy, that he had experienced that, too; he referred to it as “joy”, a longing for the beauty that he saw and for an unknown something beyond that beauty, and of his pain that he was not with it, that it was somewhere beyond him in a place he couldn’t reach (or maybe that it wasn’t even real). It is enough to make you desire to be noble and pure of heart, so as to be like this beauty that you have seen, fleetingly, unveiled for a moment.
When I was younger, I didn’t really look, and couldn’t recognize what was going on inside of others; perhaps I wasn’t yet kind enough to care much. At a later age, at some point (I don’t remember when or why—perhaps due to having read stories that spoke of their characters and revealed the thoughts and motivations that would otherwise be hidden in their hearts), I began to sometimes perceive the good in others, and its beauty. A physical therapist, who with great cheerfulness kept working with me for a long time, and I later discovered that he was giving up his lunch break to give me extra help. Another occasion when someone spoke with utter honesty and lack of guile or artifice or embellishment, wanting only to express what was true. A look – soft eyes of utter compassion, suddenly visible in the face of a listener when another revealed the pain that he had hidden inside of himself. Someone’s patience, in perfect courtesy, even when you later realized he was in pain. All of them, sudden sights into the hidden heart of nobility – great and memorable, too, like visions of beauty.
Because these two things – loveliness of nature and images, loveliness of heart – both struck me in somewhat the same way, as a beauty etched indelibly into the mind, I began to call them “natural beauty” and “moral beauty”, two faces of what we (perhaps subconsciously) desire that is beyond our ordinary, flat experience, beyond the world.
People tend to think of moral beauty only as “being nice,” a sort of small milk-and-water thing, perhaps because they have no conception of it. I think of moral beauty – when you catch a glimpse of the real thing – as something deep and burning, active and intent. It’s expressed well in some books that I love, such as George MacDonald’s Phantastes. “A nobler countenance I never saw. … The whole face grew stern and determined, all but fierce; only the eyes burned on like a holy sacrifice, uplift on a granite rock. … The light that had been confined to his eyes, now shone from his whole countenance.” Holiness.
I sometimes think that if we saw the being of another human, without all the everyday trappings and the fakeness that hides us, we would (if we were awake) be deeply moved, either with admiration or with deepest pity, for what we saw there. And if we were seeing one of a holy heart, we would be awed.
Being alive has a sadness to it, when these beautiful things are all that is truly desirable and we are not with them, not united with them, but only sometimes see a flash of their faces in the midst of the ordinariness of our lives. And I know that I myself am too weak and flawed and selfish, am not really worthy of them – a sense of inadequacy that I feel when I am away from them. But when they come upon me, when I am with them, then I love them and they love me, and there is no separation between us; perhaps they draw me into themselves and welcome me there, from their generosity and graciousness.
Different religions have, I think, different qualities that are of central importance to them. For Buddhism, I’ve read, it is compassion, a truly great thing; for Christianity – similarly, but not the same – it’s “love”. I have always been Christian, so I’m so glad to find that the Christian emphasis is, it seems to me, the best of all. The word “love”, like people’s conceptions of my notion of “moral beauty,” is overused and watered down. “Love”, I think, in its heart is, or involves, union. Love wills, in completeness, the good of what it loves; I feel as if in some way this draws them together and unites them. Earlier, I had heard without understanding that in the Catholic Church (my own particular branch of Christianity), there is a belief in the “communion of saints”; I am so glad of it, now that I have further reflected on all this. I have a feeling that it describes (in its heart, but at best we usually only see the surface) the relationship of those who allied themselves with all goodness and beauty, and through them, with God, from Whom all the goodness and beauty came, a hint of Whom we had in them, and through Whom they are wholly present to each other, and to all existence, to each thing.
Life has a sadness to it, because we are separated from what is perfect, because we are flawed and finite. It seems like our only true purpose is to ally ourselves with the beautiful and the good as much as we are able, to be loyal to them as much as we in our weaknesses and variability can, to ask that they fill us, and that we be made like them.
(This is a very weak and unsatisfactory conclusion, I think, to what I had been saying. But I haven’t lived out my life yet; I hope that with experience I will be able to say something better and more beautiful before its end.)