Growing Old Ain't For Sissies

Number Fifty-nine
Hot Air

When we go to visit our daughter and her husband in Albuquerque, we get up in the morning, pour a cup of coffee, step out onto the patio and look up. There in the clear blue sky is a balloon. We feel something deep inside and often say, “Beautiful!”

I have been working on a book by David Bentley Hart, “The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth.” I say “working on” because it takes more than just reading – his sentences are sometimes 2 pages long and loaded with Greek and Latin philosophical and theological terms that require looking up.

In speaking of creation, Hart says,

“Because God is trinity, and creation a song shared among the Persons, God is the context in which the polyphony (Having many tones or voices) of being is raised up, in which even silenced voices are preserved, and promised a restored share in creation’s hymnody. As God is the ‘place’ of what differs, all distance belongs to God’s distance, all true creaturely intervals are “proportions’ and ‘analogies’ of his infinite interval, all created music participates in his infinite music…The Spirit is eternally turning the face of creation to the Father by conforming it to the Son, and thus creation is beautiful, and a gift restored.”

To put it simply, what we call beautiful is far more than skin deep – it is the music of eternity that we hear because we are made in the image of the Creator.

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“The heavens are telling of the glory of God;
And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.
Day to day pours forth speech,
And night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
Their voice is not heard.
Their sound has gone out through all the earth;
And their utterances to the end of the world.”
Psalm 19.1-4

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It is amazing how a thing both beautiful and useful can be assembled from a few scraps of fabric and a whole lot of hot air. JTC