How Does Your Garden Grow?

All beauty speaks of Thee.
—Edward Grubb

I received a letter from an old friend some months ago in which she wrote of her daughter and a few things they share in common: “Both of us are loners, enjoying the quiet, thoughtful places in our days . . . both of us [enjoy] devouring words and color, deep friendships, worshiping our Lord, appreciating his gifts . . . and we both like children’s stories and outrageous laughter. Her garden is her delight, and it speaks of every part of her character. The first time she really sensed God’s presence many years ago was in her garden. A memorable time!”

I’m an old man now, but a young gardener, and my garden, such as it is, is my delight as well. There, I too sense God’s presence in ways that I cannot explain. “To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

I ask myself, “What is this beauty I see? Why am I moved in its presence?”

Beauty has been defined as “things that please us when seen.” But why do certain things please us? No answer satisfies me. Perceptions of beauty, I suppose, are instinctive, intuitive, and inexplicable. I know beauty when I see it, and that’s about all I can say.

The pleasure of beauty, however, is transient. All of us, I believe, have had the experience of finding something exquisitely beautiful and then discovering one day that it no longer pleases us. Beauty is not an end in itself but points beyond itself to something better and more beautiful. It “leads and lends to further sweetness, fuller, higher, deeper than its own.” [1]

English poet William Coleridge made the same point in an essay in which he recalled the reaction of two tourists admiring a waterfall. One thought it merely “pretty,” the other “sublime”—so awe-inspiringly beautiful that it evoked reverence, which Coleridge defined as “a synthesis of love and fear.” The only adequate response in the presence of beauty is to kneel.

Ancient philosophers understood this idea and described beauty as one of three “transcendentals,” goodness and truth being the others—self-evident forms or ideas that lie behind all that we know in this world.

Early Christian writers drew a more complete picture. Truth, goodness, and beauty, they concluded, were eternal ideas in God’s mind, which He spoke into being, as He did in the beginning. [2]

There is a logical order to the three, they said. Truth manifests itself as goodness, which in turn is beautiful when seen. Our perception of the three, however, is the other way around: beauty leads us to goodness and goodness to truth. Those who know the value of beauty will be led to goodness and those who love goodness will be led to Truth—to God himself.

William Penn wrote, “We cannot doubt of this when we are told that the Invisible Things of God are brought to light by the Things that are seen; and consequently we read our Duty in them as often as we look upon them, to him that is the Great and Wise Author of them, if we look as we should do.” [3]

God has filled the world with beautiful things, yet they are all imperfect goods. Beauty is not absolute, but points above and beyond. Those who look “through” beauty find that their hearts are lifted up to the One who is the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty and who is himself true, good, and beautiful beyond all imagination.

An afterthought . . .

It occurs to me now that the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is an old face that radiates the love, tranquility, and joy of Jesus. “They sparkle like jewels in a crown. How good and how beautiful they are!” [4] Where truth and goodness flourish so does beauty—the beauty of holiness.

Ancient writers understood this connection between human goodness and beauty and coined a word, kalokagathon, a contraction of three words: kalos (beautiful); kai (and); and agathon (good). Kalokagathon doesn’t appear in the New Testament [5] but was used by early Christian writers, Ignatius, for one, who wrote, “None of these things escapes your notice, if you are maturing in faith and love towards Jesus Christ. For these are the beginning and end of life: faith is the beginning, and love is the end, and the two, when they exist in unity, are Godlike. Everything else that contributes to moral beauty (kalokagathian) follows from them.”[6]

This idea of moral beauty intrigues me as I age, for moral beauty is like flowers that, for all their loveliness, wither away. We’re amazed, as we look in the mirror, how quickly and thoroughly whatever portion of “good looks” we once possessed has faded. The beauty of holiness, on the other hand, is “unfading.” [7] That encourages me a good deal.

There is other encouragement here: Through the beauty of holiness we may become the means by which others are drawn to God, who is the source of all goodness and beauty. Peter puts it plainly, “Live such good [beautiful] lives among unbelievers that . . . they may see your good [beautiful] deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Peter 2:12).

How can we have this amaranthine beauty? “Faith is the beginning,” Ignatius said. It is the product of humble dependence upon God. We must ask Him for it every day. “The Lord takes pleasure in His people,” Israel’s psalmist said, “He himself will beautify the humble.”[8]

Thus an old chorus has become my prayer,

Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me
All his wonderful goodness and purity
Oh, Thou Spirit divine, all my nature refine,
Till the beauty of Jesus be seen in me. [9]

[1] William Thackeray
[2] Early Christians borrowed the ancient philosopher’s term logos (word), for this idea. The term signifies (1) the divine mind from which all ideas originate; (2) the ideas created by that mind; and (3) the communication or speaking of those ideas, hence “the divine Word.”
[3] fruits of solitude
[4] Zechariah 9:16, 17
[5] Kalos, however, does appear in the New Testament and is one of Peter’s favorite words.
[6] Letter to the Ephesians 14:1
[7] 1 Peter 3:4
[8] Psalm 143:4.
[9] T. M. Jones