GOD IS FIERCE BEAUTY

  Recently, I saw a picture from the Hubble telescope of the Orion Nebula. My jaw dropped. I could not believe this stunning, wild beauty--the coils of colors, the explosion of light, the deep darkness beyond which only threw everything into greater relief. Suddenly the words came into my mind--God is fierce beauty.

That's how God talks to me. As Annie Lamott would say, "God is such a showoff." What I felt inside were not my words. I can tell. The cadence and weight of God's words are always different from my thoughts. It is something I have found true over many decades when God talks to her stubborn-hearted daughter.

That gave me furiously to think, as Poirot would say. Often we see pictures of the blonde Mary with a blonde baby on her lap, (not Semitic, as she was), angels flying about, and swimming in an air of serene holiness. Or we see paintings of lambs (we all know what happens to them!) looking rather cheerful--seeing as they do not know their end--and pastoral. But the other side of the serene, calm paintings of God and her world, is the hawk I saw in Florida once, a long snake dangling from his beak.

 Or, the barred owl who lit on our fallen tree in the brushy meadow 4 days ago, hunting for food. She tilted her head from side to side, slowly, obviously listening. Several times she leaned forward, as if to take off, then settled back on her perch. Suddenly, she swooped down on huge wings to the ground, plucking a mouse out of its hiding place and flying off with it dangling from her mouth. She ate it in 2 gulps. 

And what about the pride of lions chasing a wildebeest who had gotten separated from the protection of the herd (or it could be hyenas working in tandem or wild dogs), and one leaps onto the flanks of the wildebeest, raking it, and bringing it down in a clatter of hooves, its eyes rolling in panic. 

What about that? I know "nature is red in tooth and claw" but do you suppose that God finds joy in this rather bloody death? It is her creation, after all, and creatures are constantly being born, growing up, dying, or being killed before their time. Sometimes I think that God holds the threads of this world in her hands, as Atropos  did in Greek mythology, seeing where one twitches and something ceases to be, feeling another thread as someone is born. Perhaps it all feels completely right and natural to her.

I am reminded of the time 54 years back, when after a year of study in Oxford, England, attending Evensong at New Church, beginning to read the Bible (which I had long scorned), and talking with my friend, Kathy--a passionate believer--that Rick and I went to hear "St. John Passion" at Christ's Church Cathedral. We went in non-believers; we came out believers. When I prayed the following day--feeling very shy and uncertain, should I kneel, should I put my hands together?--God answered with a thunderbolt of light which pierced my body like a spear. I fell to my knees. The tips of my fingers glowed for the next week. (See the statue of St. Teresa of Avila by Belini in St. Peter's Cathedral for a comparison.) God came in fierce light to me then.

I think if we do not look straight at this beauty, we miss something essential about this world, our universe, and our lives. If we can embrace this and not get stuck on the rather sentimental portraits of God and her minions, we can see that death is fierce--and embrace it. Those of us who have given birth know that it is damn fierce. I celebrate that. Even planting a garden, as I do each year, shows us that the seeds contain their own destruction within, and one day a strong rainstorm will come, or sleet, and the dried stalks will fall, only to be buried and nourish the ground again for next year's crop. 

Our very bodies are formed from of a fierce beauty, if only we could see that. I praise this God who created thunderbolts, formed the wild seas crashing onto the shore, made high winds to blow, and showers her creation with love and danger. Because danger makes us grow and sentimental beauty does not.