Andrea

“Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Most people now are looking for a better place, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else.

There is no “better place” than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“There can be no such thing as a “global village.” No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

“I saw a star and its light was like something woven of hope and music, and the shimmer of it was a voice crying out to my spirit to keep hold, to take joy, and for a moment the whole of my suffering seemed unmade. The darkness became the false thing and the joy of that light, it was the truest thing I had ever known.

How can we believe what beauty speaks to us in the darkness of mental illness and cancer and abuse and death?

Because beauty calls to us with the voice of God.

We are answered not with argument or angry demands for obedience but with the presence of Immanuel, God here with us in the shadows. What beauty reveals is the intimacy of the divine in our grief. God gives us beauty, not as his argument but as his offering - a gift that immersed us in something that allows us to touch hope, to taste healing, to tangibly encounter something opposite to disintegration and destruction. Where suffering has made God abstract and distant to us, where brokenness leaves us with unanswerable questions, beauty allows us to taste and see God’s presence as he breaks into the circles of our inmost grief to remake the broken world.

Beauty offers us a theodicy of encounter.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness