Seeking beauty amidst outrage
“Come to me, all of you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest! Take my yoke upon you and learn from me because I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Indeed, my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30).
Note: While it stands on its own, this piece is a follow-up to a previous post.
My cousin reached out the other day, lamenting over our family’s seeming apathy toward the evils and horrors of the world. He asked me for advice, to which I responded, somewhat facetiously, that he ought to just move to New Mexico like I did.
Beyond that, I simply told him that to battle evil is to go to war with it within our own hearts; quoting St. Seraphim of Sarov:
“Acquire a peaceful spirit, and thousands around you will be saved.”
It seems like every piece of news kindles the flame of an underlying anger in us all; rage gets passed around like trading cards and with it the condemnation of others. The condemnation of others is a trap of the ego to distract from the real work of caring for our souls and those around us. Battling the evils of this world begins by confronting the darkness in our hearts.
In other words: The Truth needs no defining; it needs people to live it.
I watch debates a lot. Too much. Despite my movement toward a less technological life, the theological debates online grab me. I usually can justify it by explaining (to myself) that they are educational; I do learn quite a bit from watching them: I learn theology, how to better defend the faith, logical fallacies, etc.…
More than this, though, the debates have forced me to confront my own worldview, to investigate my paradigmatic lens, to challenge my presuppositions, and to ask why I believe what I believe. This has been foundational to how I engage with everything; it has made my university programs start from the meta-level before working down to the concrete. It is fun to interrogate theological and philosophical perspectives and tracing where they originate or what they’re downstream from.
However, what struck me watching a debate recently was how little it seems some people do this, especially when they assert themselves as an authority on certain positions. We have no shortage of debaters online but have a serious scarcity of persons willing to examine the log in the eye of their own soul and, by God’s grace, confronting the deep-seated illusions of their hearts.
The reason I bring this up is that my cousin and I have begun talking quite often about Christianity, broadly, and Orthodoxy, specifically. The conversations we have been having have made me re-consider watching these debates and, more concretely, guarding myself against what I talk about and with whom. My cousin is serious about investigating Orthodox Christianity, the Bible, and seeking a better way to live. His lamentations regarding the way things seem to be going in this world are not isolated but part of a larger movement of people slowly opening their eyes to forces at work beyond the material.
For, indeed, the days are evil (cf. Eph. 5:16).
Yet these conversations with my cousin are both a reminder of the real spiritual warfare that we must engage in lest we be pulled into the mire of sin and ignorance and at the same time somewhat clarifying that these debates with people who won’t or cannot interrogate their own paradigmatic lens—and speaking with people who refuse to do so—is a part of that same spiritual warfare leading us away from God into ignorance and egotism.
The modern deluge of information parading across our screens—with its promise of revelations of macro-level horrors and systemic evils—is explicitly designed to hijack our nervous systems, pushing into despair and silencing the mythical birdsong outside our windows. There is so much that others may do that will be problematic for us; what is irksome to me may not be to another, but what is irksome to them may not be an issue for me, yet it all threatens our peace and pushes us to tumult and shipwreck.
My son likes to touch trees when he is upset. It calms him to grab leaves gently and chew on pinecones. This is what we’re missing when we are plagued by the horrors of this world, especially that which we cannot do anything about; we’re missing Creation, the very gift that God has given us to partake of and walk within. And when we forget to walk within Creation, we miss out on walking in the presence of God, enfolding in ourselves and the various outrages we obsessively seek out online and carry with us throughout the day.
Outrage doesn’t make us who we are; it doesn’t reveal to us the inner depths of our hearts. It merely keeps us on the surface-level with the world around us and at arm’s length to our fellow man. If there’s one thing that Christianity fundamentally grounds itself in is being as communion. We cannot know who we are unless we are willing to step into relationship with God and neighbor. If we are solely in a relationship with ourselves and a digital world, we will remain in a self-referential mode of being. Therefore, we will remain fixed in a horizontal worldview.
To realize a vertical worldview is to step into relationship with the transcendent: with the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. We cannot do that by fighting with avatars and shadowy cabals. We do this by stepping into relationship with Beauty—with Christ in God—encountering His divine eros leading to a practice of Goodness which ultimately reveals Truth.
It is the very grounding of our experiential—and communal—ways of knowing God and sharing in His life with others in love.
While we obsess over the potentiality of dark, demonic cabals operating in the upper echelons of society, we risk overlooking something far more profound. More staggering, indeed, is the reality that Beauty Himself loved man enough to descend from the heights of heaven, uniting Himself to us while we lived under the tyranny of darkness, sanctifying our very nature by the encounter of His love. Beauty became Man so that man could become what is beautiful, and good, and true. Beauty descended into the lowest parts of the earth, destroying the power of death and liberating its captives, because Beauty wants all men to be united with Him.
These debates and modern discourse never investigate what is Beautiful, but what is True; the risk is over-intellectualizing what transcends reason and reducing what is beyond Good to pure moralism. It’s a temptation of mine to get worked up about people being wrong; I doubt I’m the only one and as much as I can become irritated by people’s apparent inability to investigate their own beliefs and interrogate their presuppositions these conversations with my cousin have made me realize that that’s a waste and a distraction.
It’s demonic, really, because it risks leading our hearts from simplicity to division, from being oriented toward God to things of this world, inflaming our pride, arrogance, and even our dark desire to dominate others.
All the while Nikiforos is chewing on a pinecone, joyously hanging from curtains and breathlessly greeting icons of the saints. He’s smacking books, he’s snatching leaves, he’s crawling in dirt. He’s investigating Creation, and he is living out the good, the true, and the beautiful.
The Beautiful draws us to Himself; when St. Paul, quoting a Greek poet, affirms that in Christ “we live, and move, and have our being!” (Acts 17:28) he is proclaiming this notion that God, Who is Beauty, moves us for we who are of Him desire to rest in Him. Christ declares this when He calls all to take on His yoke, for in doing so our souls will find rest (cf. Matt. 11:29). We were not given this life to obsess over what is propositionally true, but to move toward—and become—He Who is Beauty and Love.
Time itself has been sanctified by the Cross. Every moment since then has been appointed by God for the salvation of man; time is merely the measurement of space between man’s encounter of divine eros in God. But time itself transcends a linear path when we descend into our hearts where the hidden man—Who is our Beauty—abides in us (cf. I Pet. 3:3-4).
Time then becomes a window into eternity. Like the icons of the saints, the birds singing in the trees offer a banquet of praise to God, resting in the rays of His loving embrace.
As St. Maximus the Confessor teaches in Ambiguum 7, all things came into being so that they might become perfect—not perfect in themselves, but for the sake of Love, to find their rest in the One Who brought them into being (On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, 48-49). By entering Creation Christ manifests the transcendent, uncreated Beauty that calls to each of us in the depths of our hearts. A call that does not require us to argue, define, and dominate others with treatises about Truth, but a call to strive toward embodying it.
Deep calls to deep (Ps. 41:8 LXX), compelling us to seek Beauty rather than winning arguments—acquiring the peaceful spirit of which St. Seraphim of Sarov spoke.
That is the slow, quiet work that needs attending. Anything less is a mere distraction threatening to close the windows to eternity in time. No amount of outrage or vicarious debate victories is going to put our hands to the plow, to start cultivating that patch of ground where we might find that beautiful pearl, worth a great price, for it is life itself.
Witness, NM 