Whatsoever things are lovely
Redemption through the flower bed and how beauty saves the world
Beauty is why I’m here. It’s why I come back ever and again to other writers, to painters and poets. It’s why I own every book on my shelf, what I’m seeking in each trail, garden, animal, museum, every glance at the stars and passage of fairy tale. It’s what I pray to see when I look at another human being and so often fail to notice.
Beauty—and the hope of it—is why we’re alive. It’s why we keep going in the face of catastrophic ugliness. We plant ourselves and trust that it will blossom again, or we seek it in the hidden places of earth, sky, and spirit, climbing mountains to achieve it. We work the ground and garden it, suffering the lack of our own wood sorrel beside the roses—and still we kiss and bless and breathe the fragrance of both flowers.
Dostoevsky’s oft-quoted line, “Beauty will save the world,” is true. Beauty will, has, and is saving the world. Walt Whitman’s poetry knocks cracks in prison walls, and the Psalmist companions the dying in their beds. It will always be so.
Beauty evades capture, eluding the photographer shooting a pine forest through twenty-four millimeters and confounding the scribbler struggling to write a wall of rhododendrons on a sheet of paper. It won’t be taken prisoner, but it welcomes the gardener.
My grandmother was one such. I can’t think or speak of beauty without remembering her. She formed my first understanding of it and of its seekers. She nurtured and tended beauty in every facet of her life, in harp playing and piano playing, in opera singing and gardening, in love-labors for everyone she met. She was a woman pressed by sorrow and borne up by the transcendent. When the time came, almost twenty years ago, that she lay on her deathbed, looking out onto an unseen horizon, she described for my grandfather what waited for her beyond this world. Oh, look at all the beautiful flowers.
Beauty will save the world, because it will save you, me, the person you hate, the bitter old man living two thousand miles away, and the child living two hundred years from now. It’s what the saint sees when he looks at the leper and what a mother sees when she looks down at an infant who will never be able to feed herself. It’s what I saw in my grandmother’s wrinkled, spotted, musician’s hands, those hands I could pick out of a thousand.
The beauty we see, through disease and suffering, in symphonies and sunflowers, is not dependent on the object of our adoration. It’s due to our outpouring of love, and that’s commensurate with the Creator’s love, which we permit to flow in and through us.
But the practice of love is hard. There’s nothing wrong in beginning with rose, wood sorrel, or rhododendron. What’s planted in the flower garden cuts a road through ugliness and death past the boundaries of this world and beyond all earthly understanding.
I conclude with this audio of my grandmother playing the Scottish hymn “Abide With Me” on her harp. This is an old, live-audience recording, so please forgive the sound quality, and enjoy.
I cannot express how encouraging this is - and the recording is so incredibly beautiful. I love the rawness of the quality, so don't apologize. :) Thank you.