Post 149.
Beauty is imprinted on children as we first experience the world. An infant beholds the world in awe with untainted innocence. Children hold on to an enchanted environment through play, especially outdoors. Thinking back to my childhood, hours were engaged playacting with toys in the grass, watching the clouds form figures, or listening to birds, crickets, and the wind. I did not have an idyllic childhood, and basic needs were not always met, but innocent to the extensiveness of society’s depravity, I spent much of my time in oblivious awe. With age both innocence and awe degrade—the work of Satan in the world—and we gaze, feel, and listen deeply less to the beautiful things God has immersed us in, and attend more to the ugly.
Gradually, children notice parents fighting and offensive language; schooldays filled with long hours indoors, testing regimes, discipline and failure; violence and drug addiction. Today children are distracted from awe by unwitting adults providing addictive technologies—the screen replaces the universe and the child’s senses are blunted. As these addicts age, they would prefer the simple numbness of videogames, social media, and artificial intelligence to experiences with other people or the natural world. People and nature are both complex, hazardous, and sometimes vicious. But they are also where living beauty is unearthed—in the thoughtful eye of a beloved, a song of waterfall deep in the wood, a hug, a pink sunset, or a discussion on a favorite old novel. All these things that bear awe in young children gradually vanish in the face of years spent living in the social world in which we find ourselves and later partake in. We learn to fear that which inspired awe and admire that which is simulated.
A word I seldom write or speak, but which seems fitting in the context of awe is sublime. Simply stated in my understanding of it, the sublime refers to those great beautiful things that are both attractive and frightening. An example that was used when I first heard the term was the Grand Canyon, which I visited nearly a decade ago. Standing near the ledge—even if you’re ten feet from the ledge—a fear inserts itself your gut as you look at the vastness of God’s creation, knowing your own smallness. You are aware that a wind gust, if it had a fraction of the power of this canyon, could fling you to your death, not dissimilar to the fear of the bully that schoolchildren realize after being flung into a locker, choked, and given a bloody lip for the first time or, to use a contemporary example, finding lies mixed with half-truths about you on classmates’ social media account receiving hundreds of likes. Here you are, tiny and powerless to do anything to stop your defenselessness. While there is no beauty in school bullying—an essential part of school which drives us away from awe—the sublime is both attractive and frightening. We want to behold with all our senses the breeze, the birdsong, the rock, the space of the canyon. We search for the river at the center and for animals in the distance. We move our attention from the vast to the minuscule and back again. When I visited the canyon, this experience is disturbed by my wife admonishing me to back away from the ledge, perhaps not grasping I left ten feet between me and it. She is having the same experience further back.
As people age, maybe we are less likely to spend hours in awe than in fear. The recipe of the sublime goes sour when we mix in too much fear. We fail to rise to the Beauty we might know.
Daniel J. Shevock
Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dicken%27s_works_(1890)_(14779159911).jpg
Beauty is imprinted on children as we first experience the world. An infant beholds the world in awe with untainted innocence. Children hold on to an enchanted environment through play, especially outdoors. Thinking back to my childhood, hours were engaged playacting with toys in the grass, watching the clouds form figures, or listening to birds, crickets, and the wind. I did not have an idyllic childhood, and basic needs were not always met, but innocent to the extensiveness of society’s depravity, I spent much of my time in oblivious awe. With age both innocence and awe degrade—the work of Satan in the world—and we gaze, feel, and listen deeply less to the beautiful things God has immersed us in, and attend more to the ugly.
Gradually, children notice parents fighting and offensive language; schooldays filled with long hours indoors, testing regimes, discipline and failure; violence and drug addiction. Today children are distracted from awe by unwitting adults providing addictive technologies—the screen replaces the universe and the child’s senses are blunted. As these addicts age, they would prefer the simple numbness of videogames, social media, and artificial intelligence to experiences with other people or the natural world. People and nature are both complex, hazardous, and sometimes vicious. But they are also where living beauty is unearthed—in the thoughtful eye of a beloved, a song of waterfall deep in the wood, a hug, a pink sunset, or a discussion on a favorite old novel. All these things that bear awe in young children gradually vanish in the face of years spent living in the social world in which we find ourselves and later partake in. We learn to fear that which inspired awe and admire that which is simulated.
A word I seldom write or speak, but which seems fitting in the context of awe is sublime. Simply stated in my understanding of it, the sublime refers to those great beautiful things that are both attractive and frightening. An example that was used when I first heard the term was the Grand Canyon, which I visited nearly a decade ago. Standing near the ledge—even if you’re ten feet from the ledge—a fear inserts itself your gut as you look at the vastness of God’s creation, knowing your own smallness. You are aware that a wind gust, if it had a fraction of the power of this canyon, could fling you to your death, not dissimilar to the fear of the bully that schoolchildren realize after being flung into a locker, choked, and given a bloody lip for the first time or, to use a contemporary example, finding lies mixed with half-truths about you on classmates’ social media account receiving hundreds of likes. Here you are, tiny and powerless to do anything to stop your defenselessness. While there is no beauty in school bullying—an essential part of school which drives us away from awe—the sublime is both attractive and frightening. We want to behold with all our senses the breeze, the birdsong, the rock, the space of the canyon. We search for the river at the center and for animals in the distance. We move our attention from the vast to the minuscule and back again. When I visited the canyon, this experience is disturbed by my wife admonishing me to back away from the ledge, perhaps not grasping I left ten feet between me and it. She is having the same experience further back.
As people age, maybe we are less likely to spend hours in awe than in fear. The recipe of the sublime goes sour when we mix in too much fear. We fail to rise to the Beauty we might know.
Daniel J. Shevock
Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dicken%27s_works_(1890)_(14779159911).jpg
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