BY AARON HANSON, Headmaster
Mirus Academy, Ellsworth, ME
With the celebration of Thanksgiving upon us, it is appropriate to reflect upon that for which we are thankful. This type of reflection is often tracing back over what the Lord has given to us over the course of the year and lifting those gifts before the Lord with deep prayers of gratitude. This year, though, as I continue my study of Beauty, I am considering what giving thanks looks like when it is directed at what has not been given to us.
Let me explain. People encounter beauty in a variety of ways and those encounters may be different over time. Let us take a beautiful sunset for this example. Some will go through the evening commute and take no notice whatsoever of the sky or the arrangement of colors displayed. Given the American pace of life, this would likely fall on most of us, most of the time. Others, may notice the sunset and remark, “Oh, how beautiful!” and smile as they drive onward. They may be warmed with the sense that our skies are ever changing canvases that the Lord uses to display his beauty. Still others, a far rarer set, will be overwhelmed by the beauty they see and remain in a state of speechlessness. In a very real consideration, their senses are overwhelmed. The colors and play of light are too vivid to be quantified into words, let alone into proper categories in the mind.
This sense of awe comes because there is a real and acknowledged ignorance of how to make sense of the immense beauty they are beholding. This is often what we refer to as a sense of wonder, for it produces a halting, a deep bewilderment. In some way, this stupor produces in those that have beheld the beauty a sense of longing for something more. In essence, beholding the beauty has exposed a wound inside the beholder that he had never been conscious of before. This is good for the soul, for it makes it unsettled for anything but that which will satisfy and provide balm for the soul, which is Beauty itself.
Yet, there is one remaining category of interacting with beauty. On the outside, it looks very similar to the previous category in that the beholder is stunned by the beauty and a deep longing is felt within his heart. However, this longing is a different species of longing than the wonderer. The wonderer’s longing is produced by a degree of ignorance – he has caught a faint whiff of something divine and he extrapolates that more of that scent would be a far greater good. This last category, which is the rarest indeed, let us call the Recallers (technically – anamnesis).
There are those, who, when encountering beauty, seem to have a longing not simply for something that they deduce must be greater than what they are witnessing, but rather that the longing is a form of recalling a deeper encounter with true beauty somewhere in the past. They understand that true beauty is not something you stand apart from, but rather something that you enter into as it enters into you. It is a union. It is as though one were drinking in the water in which he swims. The water is both inside and all around him. Beauty both consumes and is consumed by the beholder. In actuality, beholder is not an apt term either, for beholding implies a passivity that does not exist for these participators in beauty. As Lewis is often quoted in this regard, “We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
What does all this have to do with Thanksgiving? It is simply this: we should give thanks for what we do not have. The Lord has given us beauty so that we recognize it as such, and so that it produces a yearning for that which we do not have. We are not yet unified with the beauty we see. But there is also a deep secret place inside of us that presents a unification with that beauty as though it were a memory – a memory of a place we have never been. It is this absence— the awareness of what we do not have— that should produce in us the greatest of thanks, for it continually drives us into the arms of Christ. We know it is found in Him and this great discontentment is the greatest gift He could give us for anchoring our hearts to His.
BY AARON HANSON, Headmaster
Mirus Academy, Ellsworth, ME
Originally published as “Mirus Memo – Week 13”
