If anyone happened to be near the fountain which Scripture says rose from the earth at the beginning of creation … he would approach it marvelling at the endless stream of water gushing forth and bubbling out. Never could he say that he had seen all the water … In the same way, the person looking at the divine, invisible beauty will always discover it anew since he will see it as something newer and more wondrous in comparison to what he had already comprehended.
Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs
I frequently (every other moment) need to be reminded to look for the divine. The only time I feel I don’t need such a reminder is when I have a paintbrush or pencil or print block or camera in my hands, and I am ‘in the flow’. At these times, my looking for the Divine is made up of looking at the world about me with a slow, contemplative mind’s-eye view. Then, I might, just might, make enough room for beauty to come to me, and to receive it from the most surprising of places, people or things.
David Hockney is inspirational in his insistence on the need to search and notice, to be curious about everything the present moment offers; that looking is vitally important. When he was interviewed in 2023 about his ‘immersive’ exhibition ‘Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)’, he said,
“I do look closely at things … The world is very, very beautiful if you just look at it but most people don’t look … I can look at puddles in the rain and get great pleasure out of them. Most people think it’s just raining don’t they? … I say I live in the now. It’s the now that’s eternal isn’t it? … The world is very very beautiful if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much. They scan the ground in front of them so they can walk, they don’t really look at things incredibly well, with an intensity. I do.”
Making room to search for the Divine in a similarly intense way is a life-long commitment.
Making room so that I can recognise the beauty of God when I see it is a life-long practice.
Making room so that I can understand that I am part of the beauty of God, because God sees me as beautiful, is another thing entirely.
I take great comfort from Curt Thompson’s observation in his book The Soul of Desire that, ‘God sees us not as problems to be solved or broken objects to be repaired but beauty on the way to being formed’. I am ‘God’s Work of Art’, as the writer of Ephesians assures me. My God is a maker, a former, a creator, a poet, a carpenter, a potter, a performer. I am learning to see beauty in everything God keeps shaping. I am learning to let that beauty sink into me and transfigure me ever more into the ever-changing beautiful image of God.
In the courtyard where I watch it fall, the rain comes down at several different speeds. In the middle it is a delicate and threadbare curtain (or a mesh), an implacable but relatively slow descent of quite small drops, a never-ending languid precipitation, an intense fragment of pure meteor. A little away from the walls on left and right heavier drops fall separately, more noisily. Some look the size of a grain of corn, others a pea, others almost a marble. On the parapets and balustrades of the window the rain runs horizontally, while on the underside of these obstacles it hangs down in convex lozenges. It streams in a thin sheet over the entire surface of a little zinc roof directly below me – a pattern of watered silk, in the various currents, from the imperceptible bosses and undulations of the surface. From the adjoining gutter, where it flows with the contention of a deep but only slightly inclined stream, it suddenly plunges in a perfectly vertical, coarsely braided stream to the ground, where it breaks and rebounds in shining needles.
Each of these forms has its own particular speed and gait; each elicits a particular sound. The whole thing is intensely alive in the manner of a complicated mechanism, as precise as it is random, a clockwork whose spring is the weight of a given mass of precipitated vapour.
The ringing of the vertical threads on the pavement, the gurgling of the gutters, the tiny gong beats multiply and resonate all at once in a consort without monotony, and not without delicacy.
And when the spring is unwound, some of the gears continue to function for a while, getting slower and slower, until the whole machinery stops. Then, if the sun comes out again, the whole thing is erased, the brilliant apparatus evaporates: it has rained.
Frances Ponge, Rain
all the water ever seen. (iPhone image)
image into ikon 