This post is a bit autobiographical. When I look back on the shape of my life, one of the things that stands out to me is how much my intuition for what was beautiful played a role in my becoming who I am now. I will send down three probes into my past so that you can follow them and see what I mean.
Probe 1: Spiritual Awakening
The first probe reaches early in my teen years, and it watches me obsess over the cosmic scope of Mahler symphonies. It watches as I read short biographies of composers by lamplight into the early hours of the morning. It observes how as I was learning to play the Bach cello suites, they provided a kind of grammar for me to express what was deep within me while I awakened to existential questions of meaning and spiritual significance. It observes me writing music obsessively, angrily drowning out the noise of interruptions from family or friends. It observes a loneliness in me as I search of other artists while finding close to none. It notes how my search for meaning and community was shaped by my perception of what I found beautiful.
In one sense, because I’m an artist, my eye for what’s beautiful doesn’t surprise me. The host of the Creative Pep Talk podcast, Andy J. Pizza, points out that the rise of secularism has meant that a smaller percentage of people are relying on explicitly religious categories to give meaning to their lives. In this vacuum, he points out that many young people are turning to the symbolism of art to find the meaning that more traditional religions provided for people in the past. I haven’t fact-checked his claim by hard demographic numbers, but my experience resonates with his broad observation. Before I settled in a faith tradition, my art provided a sense of purpose and spiritual fulfillment.
Probe 2: Deconstruction and Reconstruction
The second probe reaches into a season of my early thirties. I had recently come from a vibrant community that shared my Christian faith. Moving to a new country without that faith community around me felt like getting the wind knocked out of me. Moreover, I was surrounded by many people who were much more secular in inclination, and that change was difficult for me. It felt harder to establish rapport with others and talk about deeper things. In my new context, I found that scientific and sociological explanations for things were a popular way of finding a story to live by. And socially, I found many people finding community by means of shared interests, art being chief among them. In many ways, I felt a pull to leave behind my Christian faith. If science, or sociology, or shared interests could provide what my faith used to provide for me, why cling to it?
Ultimately, it was my intuition for what was beautiful that kept me tied to my faith. For instance, when finding scientific explanation for something (I’ll just randomly say plate tectonics), my knee-jerk reaction was to say, “Well, now I know the mechanism.” It sort of made the magic in life go away. But then there would always come a second phase. I would say to myself, “But these mountains are so staggeringly beautiful! I can’t even believe they exist!” There was a kind of dogged sense that wouldn’t go away that the mechanism didn’t exhaust the meaning. The beauty in the mountains told a deeper story. Similar things happened to me when I encountered secular anthropology or secular biblical scholarship. My initial reaction (with biblical scholarship, for instance) was to feel, “Well, now I know the mechanism.” But there would always come a second moment when I would look at the final shape of the Hebrew Scriptures and think, “But it’s so stunningly beautiful! I see a coherent story that I can’t unsee!” For me, beauty felt like a clue to the meaning of the universe.
Probe 3: Finding Vocation
The third probe follows closely on the heels of the second, helping me find a sense of vocation. My experience of beauty in this world felt like seeing into a dimension most people were unaccustomed to peering into. As a musician, it seemed like a natural step to use my craft as a composer and performer to help others glimpse this dimension of reality. As an illustration, in the scientific world, there is a technique called multispectral imaging. It’s when a telescope takes pictures of galaxies and makes it visible to human eyesight. The telescope takes colors outside the human spectrum of sight and assigns it colors that we can see with our naked eyes. That concept in many ways sums up my sense of vocation as an artist. It’s to help people see what is really there, but hard to see. It feels like a natural response to the beauty I’ve seen, to help others see it.
There is a lovely story of the young Albert Einstein learning about the magnetic fields after his father gave him a compass, and later realizing that if you look carefully at the world it’s possible to catch sight of the deep structure of reality that is “deeply hidden.” That beautiful little phrase captures what I feel called to as an artist: to uncover the deep structure of reality that remains deeply hidden. Art has a way of helping others see this deeper dimension of life. I feel grateful I can use my life work for this purpose. It is a way of bearing witness to the beautiful God who made this beautiful world.
Conclusion
I am curious how your own story might converge or diverge from my own experience of beauty. The category of beauty is slippery and multivalent. So I do not assume my journey is prescriptive for others. Still, it has shaped me into who I am. And I would not be surprised to find others who share some experiences in common. How has a search for beauty shaped your story?
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