Beauty

Do you want to build a snowman?

The experience of building a snowman and enjoying the feeling of creating a "person" is one of the joys of being Canadian.  Places without snow have other advantages (...) but we get to create with this amazing material that just appears out of the sky.

Many of us have also experienced the feeling of having our creations destroyed by "the big kids".  This is a major policy issue at the local elementary school during winter.  The destruction of what was your creation is hard to deal with.  So much potential, gone.

Let us return to our examination of the universe.  We postulate a Creator, an entity who has a Mind and has created a universe and also the minds within it.  That act of Creation has echoes in our little snowmen, log houses, businesses, teams, et cetera.  We could say that we create because we have the nature of a Creator inside of us.  We are Its (His? Her?) snowmen!

Yet it is obvious to us that we do not live in an ideal world.  We are constantly under attack - from the weather, from random acts of destruction, from other people (other snowmen?) - it feels as if the system is not entirely for us.  Even though there are amazing resources out there, and we have won many battles (smallpox, polio, measles, tuberculosis, poverty), we are in a universe that has such potential, yet so often thwarts that potential.

So a story (meta-narrative) that would explain our experience of the universe would be valuable in interpreting individual events, and in predicting the kind of actions we should take in order to achieve success and avoid failure in our lives.  Empirically testing the results of that narrative would take lives or generations.  It may say nothing about the truth of the narrative, but it would give evidence of the efficacy of the story in aiding navigation of this universe.

So I return again to the story of the Creator.  The Creator builds an ideal Creation.  The Creation is made to host small Minds that reflect the creative character of the Great Mind that envisioned and created the universe.  In order to fully express the character of the Creator, the small Minds are embodied in the creation and given the freedom to act.  This freedom results in the loss of the ideal nature of the Creation, since not all free acts will follow a perfect path (as envisioned by the Creator, or as can be determined by examining the Creation).

The implications of such a story would be stupendous - it is an entirely different starting point than a naturalistic explanation of the universe supplies.  And indeed, it leads to a different kind of life - not a perfect life, but a life of beauty.

As you probably have figured out, the story that I refer to is chronicled in the Bible.  If you examine the historical record, looking for the impact of people who recognize this story and use it as a base for their behaviour, you will see selflessness, sacrifice, joy, faithfulness, community, and love in their stories.  And when the Creator gets personally involved with His Creation, the story just gets more beautiful.

God sees the beauty in each one of His creations.  He wants to see that beauty revealed and restored.  Rebellion against God's design leads to damage to His created beauty.  But, there are moments in everyone's life when they just can't help but display the beauty that is deep in their nature.  Treasure those moments, cultivate them in yourself and others.  We were created to enjoy that beauty, and to enjoy the One who imagined Beauty in the beginning.