Scolded By A Flower: The Nature Of Beauty

On the way to work this morning hustling through traffic and studying music for the weekend on my car stereo my heart was lifted in a moment of worship that seemed very transcendent and I was feeling the glow of God's grace. Suddenly, a memory came flooding to my mind which held me firmly. This memory unchained a thought that I have found locked in the margins of my heart since I was a child, but always very present and very much in the core of my humanity.

I remembered a time when I was three or four years old and I held a flower of some type. I think it was a carnation. I had seen them before and there had always been a fearsome beauty to flowers when I really looked at them. To describe my feelings for them, I would have to say that I felt an amazement, an almost disbelief of what I was looking at. I had a deep sense of wanting to know how the lacy overlapping swirling petals were connected. What made it work? What was at the heart of this thing that held such sway over my heart and mind? This day I would find out.

I was determined to get to the heart of this puzzle. I can see that I was a conceited little man to believe I could ascertain how the flower became so beautiful. I began to open this flower and carefully pull at the petals to reveal, once and for all, what made it all tick. But after my exploration, the flower seemed to disappear and all I held in my hand was a bunch of bruised leaves, petals and a stem. The thing, when broken down, had left me with nothing but a deeper question. The wilted petals were beautiful in themselves, but they held nothing of their former beauty. The center of this formerly stunning vortex of texture and color seemed to pull me in. It demanded that I find out what was behind this beauty. My supremely finite understanding yielded no resolution. There had to be an answer!

At the time, I tucked the question into the sidebar of my life, and waited.

After remembering this moment earlier this morning, my heart searched for other times in my life when I could sense this same pattern happening. I think looking at the stars and being blown away with the immensity of the heavens, seeing a snow-capped mountain for the first time, and later when I moved to the West Coast and experienced the ocean, I had that sense again. Through the years the study of these things has taken the mystery away from what they are in concrete terms, but again, I was left with the question of beauty. When disassembled, these are just gaseous orbs in space, chunks of rock, and large bodies of water, and they seem to be nothing important or transcendent in and of themselves. The swirling vortex just got bigger.

My thoughts carried me to adulthood.

I thought of seeing the beauty of a woman and taking my wife to be my bride. Again, in my conceit, I thought that maybe I could get to the center of the question by becoming intimately involved with her. As I got to know her, I felt I might understand the heart of beauty, at last. As I truly got to know her and lived our lives together through the joy and the stress, what I realized is that if we break each other into our parts we find that we are both deeply flawed people with very little value in and of ourselves.

As we had our three babies and fully embraced our role as parents, the breathtaking beauty of a child becomes dampened by the crying, the diaper changes, the temper tantrums and the responsibility to give them stability in the home. I can look at each of my kids and see their personalities, physical attributes, talents, shortcomings, victories and outright failures and quickly lose heart. Are my wife and I really in charge of creating a place where the beauty of their lives will be set on the path to find ultimate fulfillment? The challenges are too great for us...I know that.

In the past I have looked at people that have some type of genius, the kind that overwhelms me with its depth, complexity and beauty. I thought that if I could just learn about them or talk with them, maybe I could find out what is the seed at the center of it all. Whenever I have really studied someone or even gotten to know them, I ask a thousand questions and after all of them have been answered I come to the stark and disappointing realization that they don't have any clue that what they are doing is special. They feel like an idiot many times, just like I do. They are simply living out the beauty that was given to them. There is nothing physical that can fully explain the beautiful. I think I believed that if I discovered what was at the heart of their genius, I could nurture it in myself. Finding out that smart people, talented people, funny people and creative people have been given these gifts and they show themselves in a dazzling array with little to do with their control (I didn't say development) made me feel a little jealous, like I couldn't ever be as special as I wanted to be unless I was lucky enough to get the magic gift.

More recently after experience has shown me where some of my own strengths were hidden, and have been led to be able to use them in ways that have effected people’s lives. I looked to myself with the question of beauty. I riddle myself with all of the same questions that I wanted to ask others.

"Okay, buddy! You have broken down natural beauty, beauty in your loved ones and the beauty of talent and genius in mankind. What about you? You have unexplained areas that have touched others. Where does it come from? Did you create it? Did you form it? Did your incredible scope (ha) and great competence (ha ha) allow you to move situations around so that your talents would be used and appreciated by others? Why are you so special that you would get to do what you love? Crystallize for me, what allows you to know how to do what you do so automatically? Where exactly does talent lie? Is there any intrinsic value to you or your actions on this earth? "

I break myself down. I am that little carnation being pulled apart by my own little short stubby, drool-covered toddler fingers. I quickly discard sepal, petals, stigma and stamen. This time it's different though. More intense.

I look past the leaves, past the bruised, wilted stem. This vortex, this funnel cloud which has swept, shaken and stripped me of long held assumptions, held me weak and speechless and at times pulled the air out of my lungs, was finally going to yield an answer.

A tiny voice from the wilted, sad looking carnation cries out to me in a decidedly chastening tone.

"I am a flower! I have beauty, and I am of great value! Look at me, but gaze too deeply and you will lose sight of my beauty because its source is elsewhere! I am not the end; I am only a witness, a reflection, a darkened window. Stop this unending dissection! Settle this in your heart! You can never possess me or my beauty. If you try, I will become an ugly thing. I cease to reflect the Beautiful One when I become the focal point. Those who falsely think they are not made things and try to steal this beauty instead of reflecting it are foolish and have cut themselves off from what makes them valuable. Simply grow, bloom, and humbly show yourself as the flower you are meant to be, our Father will do the rest."

So, without rebuttal (who can argue wth a flower), I endeavor to enjoy the beauty that God has placed in nature, in the people I meet, and the people He has placed me with; while happily reflecting the unique beauty that He would like to share through me to those He wants me to touch.

I think that is a life worth living!

(Ref: Matthew 6:28-29, Romans 8:21-23, Ezekiel 31:9-10, 16-17, Luke 12:25)