Beauty as truth?

Why do we suffer? How does God allow it? Where is God when we hurt? These are typical questions of theodicy: the attempt to account for God’s goodness in the midst of evil.

It is tempting to make such matters into an intellectual puzzle, trying to fit jagged pieces together into a pleasing whole. The problem is that evil is more than a piece to fit in; it causes pain, loss, exasperation, disorientation, sorrow. Rational answers are no balm for the scourges of evil. Job knew this. It is why he dismissed his well-meaning friends, who were all too eager to explain the reasons for evil to him.

Sarah Clarkson confronted this challenge herself, both as a theologian who wanted to explore theodicy and as someone who, beginning in her teenage years, suffered from debilitating bouts of obsessive compulsive disorder.

Her ailment manifested itself in her mind, where she was beset by uncontrollable images of tragedy and violence that were not present to her senses. She saw terrible things happen to loved ones, she saw things fall apart, she saw darkness in the middle of the day. It was consuming and she suffered. She wanted to account for this evil. So she set about writing a theological book, but that led nowhere. She was trying to account for evil through explanation and reasons: Why? How? Where?

Then she changed her approach, both to writing and to encountering her suffering. She could not fully control what her mind conjured up. Just as uncontrollable, though, were the moments and images and experiences of beauty that she encountered in her life, both in large and small ways.

She came to see that these were two narratives vying for her allegiance: one narrative of darkness, another of light. One was the constant truth, while the other was the aberration.

She began practicing trusting the story of beauty: “My deep belief is that beauty has a story to tell, one that was meant by God to speak to us of his character and reality, meant to grip our failing hands with hope. We know God when we behold his beauty, when his goodness invades the secret rooms of our hearts. To believe the truth that beauty tells: this is our great struggle from the depths of our grief. To trust the hope it reaches us to hunger toward: this is our fierce battle. To craft the world it helps us to imagine: this is our creative, death-defying work. … Beauty and brokenness told me two different stories about the world. I believe that Beauty told true.”

Clarkson’s book, “This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness,” is a remarkable corrective to our persistent urge to “make sense” of evil and suffering. Her proposal is rooted in the deeply Christian conviction that God comes to us in Christ, entering into our lives and redeeming from within. The challenge, of course, is trusting in his goodness, oftentimes despite evidence to the contrary.

Clarkson herself testifies to this struggle: “Over and over I dismissed beauty as having any real bearing on my spiritual hunger or the larger story of my faith. Those instances of knowing seemed such small, ordinary things — powerful yet fleeting. And I had been trained by the culture around me, even that of my church, to dismiss such trivialities as imagination or emotion; art or music or the joy I felt in nature were frivolous things, pleasant in their way but incapable of bearing Truth.”

Her readable, delightful, illuminating book is also demanding. It is demanding not to read but to apply to one’s own life. Dare we trust the beauty that we witness, that we experience, that has come to us? Dare we believe that God’s beauty redeems darkness and suffering? Dare we pledge ourselves to beauty as truth?

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