Beauty Is A Reason

A ruler once sent men out to find him a faith.

They went a long way. They stood in serious places and listened to serious people and came home with reports, and most of the reports were the kind you would expect: this one has these laws, that one forbids that, this one made no impression on us at all.

And then they described a building in a city on the water, where they had gone in and stood at the back while the singing was going on and the light was doing whatever the light does in a place like that.

And what they wrote was not an argument. It was this: we did not know whether we were in heaven or on earth.

That is not a syllogism. Nobody could examine it. There is no premise in it you could contest and no conclusion you could refute. It is a report from a body that walked into a room and came out changed, and a whole people turned on it.

Now come and sit with somebody in this century.

He has been argued at about God for fifteen years. He is not hostile. He has been the polite man in the kitchen at parties for a decade and a half, holding a glass, while somebody explains the fine tuning of the universe to him, or the historical reliability of the manuscripts, or the moral argument, or the problem of evil from the other side. He has read some of the books. Both sorts.

And here is his honest position, which he has never said to any of them: not one inch. Not one single inch in fifteen years.

He has been persuaded of things. He has conceded points. He has thought several arguments were rather good. He has never once been moved.

And he has concluded from that, sadly and without drama, that he must be the sort of person this is not for.

Then last winter he was in a town he did not know, waiting for a train, an hour to fill, and he went into a building because it was cold. And there was one small window at the far end with the late sun coming through it, and it was on the stone floor in colors, and he stood there for eleven minutes and did not think a single thought.

And walking to the station he found he was almost angry, because something had happened, and it did not count.

It did not count because nobody had proved anything to him.

You are allowed to come in by that door

Here is what I want to say to you, and I want to say it as gently as I can, because you have been made to feel slow by people who love you. None of this is my opinion about your temperament: it is what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been drawing you the whole time.

Beauty is a reason.

Not a decoration on top of the real reasons. Not a soft way in for people who cannot manage the hard way. It is one of the actual doors, and it is the one you have been standing in front of for fifteen years with your hand on the frame, waiting for somebody to tell you it is a legitimate entrance.

Look at where the psalm goes when a man in real trouble tells God the one thing he wants. Armies are camped around him in that psalm. It is not a serene poem. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that particular ask into a hunted man's mouth.

One thing I have asked of the Lord, this is what I seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in His dwelling.Psalm 27:4

To gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.

That is his one thing. Not to have his questions answered, which he certainly had. Not to win, which he badly needed to. To look at something. And the looking is named as the entire ask of a man under siege.

Now hear the other half, because I will not build this on a false quarrel.

Nothing in what I am saying is against the arguing. The reasons are good reasons. The people who spent their lives on them did honest and costly work, and some of them went to a great deal of trouble so that a faith could be spoken about carefully. If you love that, love it. If it moved you, thank God for it.

But you are not required to be moved the way somebody else was moved.

The envoys did not come home with a case. They came home with eleven minutes of light on a stone floor. And nobody in that story ever said to them: yes, but on what grounds? What is written puts the glory of God in front of eyes rather than in front of arguments, and the Holy Spirit has never needed grounds to reach anybody.

You are allowed to be drawn rather than convinced. That is a permission, not a rule, and I am not making it into the new correct way to come to God. I am opening a door that has been in front of you the whole time and telling you that you have never once been forbidden to walk through it.