Why Beauty?

In thinking about the beauty of this season, one has to wonder why beauty? Why did not God just make a nondescript tree with brown bark and lackluster leaves? Why the Bradford Pear with its gorgeous white blossoms? Why not just a plain vanilla night sky? Why the dazzling sunsets we see in Texas (and in some places here in Nashville)? Why the five senses?

In her chapter in the book The Christian Imagination by Leland Ryken, Luci Shaw writes of "Beauty and the Creative Impulse". She says, "When the world was created, it might have seemed to have been enough to have it work. To include beauty seems unnecessary for a mechanistic universe. We have been given a sense of the beautiful which can be regarded as gratuitous. Which it is--a gift of pure grace. And our creation of beautiful things links us with our Creator. God was the first Quilter of prairies, the primal Painter (night skys, ferns, thunderheads, snow on cedars), the archetypal metal Sculptor (mountain ranges, icebergs), the Composer who heard the whales'
strange, sonorous clickings and songs in his head long before there whales to sound them, the Playwright who plotted the sweeping drama of Creation, Incarnation, Redemption, and the Poet whose Word said it all." Wow!

And as for the trees: Genesis 2:9 RSV "And out of the ground, the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food."

Thank you God, our Creator for Bradford pears, and cherry trees, and apricot blossoms, and the peach.