Envisioning beautiful things

Is it me, or are we all suffering more than ever, “groaning” along with all creation (Romans 8:22) under the weight of a fallen world that’s creaking “like a lodge in a cucumber field” (Isaiah 1:8)?

I had a friend who used to say, “Beauty is such a relief.” I have noticed that there are beautiful places I can go to in my mind that are an oasis from suffering. No one knows these places but me. And no one knows your places but you. Maybe it’s a piece of beautiful music, or a memory from childhood. There are a few bars toward the beginning of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 that slay me. And I love to be slain.

It is like C.S. Lewis said in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy about his own transcendent moments:

“… the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing. … almost like a heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country. … And at once I knew that ‘to have it again’ was the supreme and only important object of desire.”

This is not “escape,” unless by escape you mean leaving what is less real for what is most real—slipping the transitory and ephemeral for visions of what is permanent and solid and awaiting us. Come to think of it, these visions must be the “green pastures” where the good Shepherd “makes me lie down,” and the “still waters” that He “leads me beside,” and the “table before me in the prescence of my enemies,” those dark principalities and powers who seek to derail our pilgrimage (Psalm 23).

God’s counsels are always more than take-or-leave-it advice. When He says, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:2), He knows this is where your soul’s and body’s health is found. Above all, He is talking about perspective. And perspective is not a useless, abstract word but the conscious and deliberate placing of present sorrows into a larger picture. I never knew this about my husband before this week, but he told me that whenever the world wants to bog him down in grief, he consciously calls to mind the shining city described at the end of Revelation. He envisions it in all its tactile detail supplied by the angel who gave the vision to the Apostle John:

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month …” (Revelation 22:1-2).

Picture this when you find yourself weary and lifeless. This is not cheating; it is not illegitimate escapism. It is what we are meant to do, and the vision we are given to feed on “as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:19).