Breathtaking Beauty Feeds Faith
Posted by Pat Gohn in Faith on Thursday, September 17, 2009 6:00 AM
Hiking and backpacking were highlights of my young life, so, I will never forget standing on a high outcropping of rock overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. The majesty of that vista touched my young girl’s heart. Somehow I knew that God was with me in that moment of intoxicating beauty.
Years later, climbing trails in the Colorado Rockies, the same wonder and awe overtook me. Similarly, I’ve been mesmerized by snorkeling in an ocean coral reef, coming face to face with a sea turtle while being surrounded by schools of blue and yellow tangs.
But none of these beauties of creation captivated my heart like the hours I have spent looking deeply into the eyes of my newborn child. As a mother, I have spent many such moments, gazing into the eyes of a tiny soul looking back at me.
In all of these encounters, I came into contact with Beauty of a transcendent kind. And through creation I intuited that these amazing wonders could only have their existence in God as a Creator.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) teaches that there are two ways we come to experience the “proof” that God exists. First, CCC 32 states that as we experience the world’s order and beauty, “one can come to the knowledge of God as origin and the end of the universe.” Second, CCC 33 teaches that the human person – by the signs of his spiritual soul – reveals, “the seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material. ”
Beauty captivates me and my experiences of it have been “timeless” moments. As if time stood still and I became absorbed into something larger than myself. By drinking deeply of Beauty, I was connected to it: I participated in it. It was exactly this “participation” in a thing so beautiful, so totally beyond my own being that made me ask: “Who made such a thing?”
God was and is drawing me to toward him (True Beauty) by appealing to what was beautiful to my mind and heart. True Beauty reflects just one of the attributes of God, whom the Church defines as Truth, Beauty, and Goodness itself.
CCC 319 reads:
God created the world to show forth and communicate his glory. That his creatures should share in his truth, goodness and beauty - this is the glory for which God created them.
The Church holds and teaches that God “can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason. [CCC 36].” Since we were created “in the image of God” (cf. Gen. 1:27) we share in the divine intellect. That means we can understand our own creation by God and what God is telling us by means of his creation. While we may have obstacles or doubts in coming to know God through reason alone, God’s revelation enlightens us.
Reason allows us to speak about God within the human limits of language, even if our words fall short of the true mystery of God, who is infinitely greater than his works of creation.
CCC 41 says:
All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfections of creatures - their truth, their goodness, their beauty all reflect the infinite perfection of God. Consequently we can name God by taking his creatures’ perfections as our starting point, “for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.” (Wis. 13:5).
My first “mature” encounter with God was not found in a book, or in a church. My first knowledgeable contact with God was in nature. His Beauty won me over—long before I ever understood the Bible, sacraments, doctrine, or Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Today, I experience all those things as well, being equally awed and inspired by them. But for me, God first used his Beauty to lead me to his Truth and to his Goodness. And my heart remembers that every day.
Want to read more? Try these:
CCC 341:
The beauty of the universe: The order and harmony of the created world results from the diversity of beings and from the relationships which exist among them. Man discovers them progressively as the laws of nature. They call forth the admiration of scholars. The beauty of creation reflects the infinite beauty of the Creator and ought to inspire the respect and submission of man’s intellect and will.
CCC 343:
Man is the summit of the Creator’s work, as the inspired account expresses by clearly distinguishing the creation of man from that of the other creatures.
—Pat Gohn is a wife & mother celebrating 27 years of Catholic family life. Her Catholic writing, podcasting, and ministry life are found at PatGohn.com.
Resources:
- Introduction to this series
- Latest in this series
- Read the Catechism online
- Catechism of the Catholic Church
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