Andrea

“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

“But when we create our own God and our own world, what we are really doing is to deify our own lust. We are then bound to hate our fellow-men, as obstacles standing in the way of our wills.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology... Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer?”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

“The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture.”
― Nancy Pearcey