Beholding the Grandeur: How the Stuff of Earth teaches Us to Long for Heaven
I stepped off a cliff into the sickening emptiness of open air. What had been the firm ground of the knowledge of my future and my place in the world had suddenly been snatched out from under me, and I found myself in that split second of suspension before gravity does its work and begins its inescapable pull downward. In the still of my room, I sat paralyzed by my own dread, the gaping void of the unknown waiting to devour me. My heart crouched, huddled and hugging its knees in fearful sadness, not daring to look up and behold the vast meaninglessness that seemed to await me.
I shook my head to scatter away the shadows, even if just for a moment, and went through the motions of preparing to leave my little room; lacing my boots, making my bed, turning off the lights and locking the door. The dull ache of my own emptiness left me feeling half-conscious, as I dragged my feet down the stairs, along the hall, and out the door. As I shut it, I turned around to face the day. My eyes strained to keep up with the persistence of brightness now bearing down on me. Even in the heavy gray of the half-clouded sky above, everything beneath burned with the chromatic potency of life. The jade of the verdant landscape around me cast itself into a shock of amber and scarlet in the leaves above me, defiantly wrestling to break free. All around, those which had already liberated themselves from the last desperate grasp of summer gathered in a gentle carpet under my clomping boots.
I pounded up steep inclines sheltered by shepherding trees, narrow entish guardians hovering watchfully above me. Over time, they would disperse, off to care for some other arboreal labor, leaving me out in the open of rolling green meadows. There, the wind whipped my hair and bit at my ankles, and the chafing cold seared my face with delicious fierceness. I pressed on, one foot in front of the other, until the rhythm began to draw away the fear, removing me from the void of my uncertainty and placing me in the immediacy of the here and now. In place of the ostinato of fears repeating themselves endlessly in my head, gentler melodies of birdsong and rippling water shooed the pounding rhythms away.
I marched on, until, at last, when I stopped and stood still, the silence no longer frightened me. Within it was not the violence of entropy, nor the terror of emptiness, but rather an overflowing stillness, a tranquility rooted in complete submersion.
The act of entering into nature with my sorrow and confusion, allowing those things to flow out into the dynamic life present in creation, brought me into the awareness, through nature’s own image, that underneath the sheen of brokenness in the world is ever the in-breaking light of glory, remaking it day by day.
The Master Hand behind the Veil
Creation is the first frontier of the senses. Behind every sensory engagement we have in the world is the order and sensibility of the created world itself. Behind music, there is the harmonic resonance of sympathetic frequencies echoing in the melodious sounds of nature; behind visual art, there is the expressive multitude of colors, patterns, and figures at every level, from the cosmic down to the atomic; behind culinary inventiveness, the earth produces a bounty of nourishment more extravagant than the wildest of taste buds might imagine.
What we create and what we engage with creatively is always a response, an imitation flowing out of the creative activity already present in the warp and woof of the universe. This is because the whole of creation is the first act of creativity, the first and most primal work of art.
“Nature bears the hallmarks of a creator whose cosmos isn’t only orderly; it is beautiful. It is brought into being—and sustained—by the one who is the image of the invisible God. ”
Nature bears the hallmarks of a creator whose cosmos isn’t only orderly; it is beautiful. It is brought into being—and sustained—by the one who is the image of the invisible God. In this sense, it bears the imprint of God’s image in its very form and flow. This vitality, this beauty, this structure and intention reveals to us something of God’s nature, something of who He is. And this revelation of Himself through nature is meant to be grasped, to be understood, and to be responded to in praise. The beauty and the order of the universe are made manifest by the beholding of that glorious expression. The pinnacle of God’s creative act is the element within creation which sums up in itself the whole glorious interplay of the multiplicity of the cosmos beyond it: humanity. In each of us is the capacity to not only express the glory of creation, as part of the created order, but to offer it back in praise to God as the source of that glory.
Microcosms and Masterpieces
One of the prevailing concepts in the philosophy of the ancient world is the idea of microcosm and macrocosm. This concept describes the interplay between a small thing, a microcosm, which fully expresses the essence of a much larger thing, the macrocosm. The microcosm is something that has all the same characteristics as its larger counterpart, but on a scale that can be more easily and readily understood. Many of the fathers of the church embraced this idea and integrated it into Christian thought. For them, the universe was the great macrocosm, which expressed in large scale the motions of God’s activity in creation; and yet they envisioned humans as a microcosm of the universe. The fourth-century Cappadocian father Gregory of Nyssa imagined humans as an actual miniature cosmos in themselves. When humanity considers its own design, the beauty and structure and meaning in itself, its capacity to reason and to love and to experience goodness, it begins to comprehend, unlike any other aspect of creation, the larger work of God in the whole of the universe. According to the fathers, we are God’s unique and summarizing expression of the artistry of creation.
“When God creates, He does so with no reference point but Himself; everything that ever has been or ever will be comes from Him.”
Ephesians 2:10 tells us “we are God’s handiwork” The Greek word for “handiwork” in this verse is poiēma. It is a version of the word poiesis, a concept in Greek philosophy which implies the bringing of something into existence which didn’t exist before. A similar Latin term often used in the Christian tradition describes the way that God created the world exnihilo—literally, “out of nothing.”
When we as humans create something, our creative process is always referential of the world as we have experienced it. We cannot paint unless we use materials already in existence to portray colors and textures already present around us. We are able to make music only by ordering notes and rhythms according to the rules of consonance and dissonance, harmony and melody, already present in creation. When God creates, He does so with no reference point but Himself; everything that ever has been or ever will be comes from Him. The created world is imagination at its most infinitely pure, creativity at its most generative and expressive. Creation of the world ex nihilo is more than merely a task which God completes; it is His magnum opus, His tour de force.
It is no accident, then, that Paul uses the word poiēma to describe humans. For there is another essence of the word poiesis; it is what gives us our English word poetry. The New Living Translation expresses it a bit more directly: “We are God’s masterpiece.” The whole of the cosmos reveals the infinite creative genius of God as a poetic expression of His very nature; and humans are the ultimate triumph of that poem. Our capacity to know God through our senses is rooted not in an indulgent desire in ourselves but rather in the plenitude, the overflowing generosity, of a God who expresses His own image by creating the world and by designing us as the pinnacle of that creation. Our engagement with the tangible world is not meant to be something trivial but rather of the highest consequence. We are unique because, unlike the rest of the created order, we can comprehend creation as a beautiful work of art from the mind of God; and because of this, we are meant to engage with creation as an act of praise, returning the beauty and glory of creation to the one in whom it has its source.
Taken from Sensing God: Experiencing the Divine in Nature, Food, Music, and Beauty by Joel Clarkson. Copyright © 2020. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Joel Clarkson is an award-winning composer, author, and voiceover artist. He has written music for film and TV, the concert hall, and the church, and his compositions have been heard by audiences around the world. In addition to his musical pursuits, Joel is an Audible-award nominated narrator, particularly known for his work on S.D. Smith's bestselling children’s fantasy series, The Green Ember. Born to American missionaries in Austria and growing up singing and speaking alongside his family, Joel’s whole life has been suffused with both music and spirituality. He received his undergraduate in music composition from Berklee College of Music, and his master’s degree in theology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Joel remains in St Andrews where he is currently pursuing a PhD in theology.