Cultivating Beauty is How To Force Back the Darkness

What beauty is teaching me about finding hope and purpose

My first week of my first year away at college, I went to Target and bought decorations for my dorm room. I bought imitation ivy to pin to the walls and artificial flowers that matched my quilt. I probably spent about twenty dollars, and afterward I felt very guilty, which is probably the only reason I remember this inconsequential event.

My particular brand of youthful idealism centered around sacrifice. I had already wrestled greatly with the decision to spend the time and money to attend college when people were dying (literally and spiritually) all over the world. But I was an intensely practical young woman, so I was convinced by my parents’ argument that I would be more useful for the kingdom of God with a higher education. 

However, decorations for my room? Totally superfluous. A child was starving to death in Sudan while I bought plastic ivy. Making my room beautiful felt excessive, extravagant, and therefore, selfish.

Though stewardship is still important to me, I had a lot to learn about beauty. Contrary to my youthful pragmatism, beauty is not purposeless. God created beauty; it reflects him, and my instinct to cultivate it is a part of his image in me. 

Planting hope

I go to my garden in the evenings when my work is finished and the air is cool, and I am soul weary. The news of the day had crept out of dark corners like fire ants, biting, leaving welts: the bombings, the deportations, those starving children in Sudan. The heaviness of a friend with chronic illness or a husband who left, or my worries for my children, are like stubborn weeds that spring up unbidden, refusing to release, spreading, sucking up the life around them.  

But then I notice tiny green filaments pushing up through dark soil, and with it comes an inexplicable surge of hope. Each successive day brings something new to see, to examine, and I water and watch as fragile stems metamorphose into poppies, gladiolas, daisies, black-eyed susans. The sunflowers stretch and peek over the fence. Lillies open their mouths and sing, faces to the sky. The hummingbirds and bees dance in a delighted frenzy of indecision. And suddenly I am no longer so heavy. 

I dig my fingers in deep and pull out the weeds at the root, while somehow the exquisite detail of the purple larkspur seeps into my soul. As I force back what’s dead and lifeless to make room for Eden to flourish, suddenly the world doesn’t seem so dark. 

Is transcendence a lie?

Like many, I loved the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt for its fascinating (and devastating) look at what a screen-based life is doing to our children. One impact is how screens kill our sense of awe, which, he argues, is part of what makes us human. Haidt is an atheist, so he explains that our need for awe developed this way: 

“Humans evolved in nature. Our sense of beauty evolved to attract us to environments in which our ancestors thrived, such as grasslands with trees and water, where herbivores are plentiful, or the ocean’s edge, with its rich marine resources.” 

With all due respect to Haidt’s intelligence, this makes no sense to me. If nature is beautiful for the sole purpose of attracting us to places that will sustain us, then why do we find the night sky so awe-inspiring? Or Bryce Canyon? Or Carlsbad Caverns? Some of the most beautiful places in the universe contain zero resources to sustain human life. 

But there’s more: Anything truly beautiful evokes awe precisely because it’s transcendent; it points to something beyond the physical world. If nothing beyond the physical world exists, if humans are just accidentally evolved bags of meat who happen to be attracted to flowers or oceans purely because they are food sources, then awe doesn’t exist. It’s just an illusion. 

After all, bees don’t stop to smell the roses. Dolphins don’t pause to watch the sunset. Gorillas don’t paint landscapes that stir emotion. If transcendence is just a chemical reaction in my brain that serves no greater purpose than survival, then beauty is a lie. This means my flowers may bring me joy and peace, but not because they point to some purpose and power that is bigger than myself, but because I am only deluded into thinking there is. Illusions mean nothing at all if they don’t reflect something real. 

We all know AI can’t substitute

It’s becoming all too common to see a photograph, a piece of art, or read a poem that initially evokes a spark of wonder, only to discover that it was created by AI. Suddenly I feel disappointed, let down, even disgusted. 

Yet tucked away carefully in my cupboards are the early pieces of art scrawled by my children. They are nothing but circles and lines and dots scattered haphazardly across a piece of construction paper, but as that child once expressed to me with great animation, imbued with meaning and purpose.

Somehow, I know instinctively that nothing is truly beautiful if it was created by a soulless machine. But when created by a transcendent being? Suddenly, it is a treasure. Beautiful things are beautiful because they reflect the inherent goodness and value of their creator.

The revelation of beauty

All you artists and poets out there are nodding your heads. You’ve known this your whole life and are wondering why it took me so long to understand. But for a linear, right-brained, ultra-practical person like myself, this has been an ongoing revelation. 

In one way, my college-aged self did get something right: Beauty is superfluous. We don’t need it to survive. Humans could eat, breathe, stay alive perfectly fine without visiting Yosemite, contemplating Van Gogh, or planting flowers. But just as a bird knows instinctively how to build a nest, we know instinctively that our bodies may be fine with just the physical, but our souls crave the transcendent. It’s what makes us human. And in that way, beauty is as necessary as air. 

Yes, my purpose in life is to bring glory to God, and that includes the practicality of caring for the poor and speaking the Truth and sacrificing comfort for the sake of the kingdom. Indeed, even beauty becomes ugly when it is self-serving, aggrandizing, focused on status, pride, prestige. 

But in a world that was born perfect but crushed by evil, planting flower seeds, spreading color on a canvas, transforming sand into glass, and sculpting words or notes into feelings is a way of fixing what was broken. Cultivating and creating beauty preaches to our souls that hope is coming, that evil will one day end, and that merely surviving is not what we are meant for. For now, the flowers don’t last, but One Day, they will. 

Photos by Gil Medina from my garden