It have to say it. It is beautiful here.
Maybe to people who are from this area in Massachusetts, saying it is beautiful here sounds like someone who is still in a honeymoon phase. And it’s not to say that this place is picturesque in every way. There are rundown areas and the city proper is struggling. We aren’t quite in the mountains to the west or the slopes to the north. But there are hills, and trees, winding roads, and old brick homes. And the way autumn comes to New England is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It is this area’s crowning jewel.
For a long time when we lived overseas, I would have a hard time seeing everyone’s exclamations over autumn. Then, I got over it and settled into the very teeny tiny tastes we would sometimes get, and it was enough.
Now I am here, and I think about my friends in far off places who are still living that life we left, and while missing autumn is the least of their worries I still think of them. There was something beautiful in its own right when we made do with the less than extravagant fall days we were given. Money can’t buy you happiness, and neither can the “successive autumns” George Eliot once famously wrote about, though I understand the sentiment.
I sat in my backyard this morning, with the smoke of a fire my dad had built (another perk of our new life: regular visits from grandparents) curling slowly up into the morning skyline. The smell of the bed of crusty leaves we sat in the midst of was only second to the smell of woodsmoke— one of my favorite scents in all the land. It was the stuff of my dreams. It was so many things I have longed for and missed that sat dormant in my lived experience for so many years. A chilly autumn morning around the fire does not satisfy all my deepest longings or make my life whole, but my goodness it is a gift. One that I am gulping down in deep, lung-filling breaths on a daily basis.
Sometimes beauty makes life bearable. More than bearable. Beauty fills in the cracks of what seems so broken. Beauty infuses our lives, lifts us up, allows us to soar at times even when there is so much to lament.
I mentioned The Ethics of Beauty in an earlier post about books I’m currently reading. Many of you mentioned the book’s expense and wondered how I got my hands on one. Yes, it is a hefty sixty dollars and it was a birthday gift (given to Josh, but now I’m reading it?). So there you go. It is a long and dense read, and I’m picking my way slowly through it. I’m intrigued by the differences within Eastern Orthodox faith and the emphasis placed on certain modes and ways of being that counter some of the deficiencies in our western Protestantism. So while I would differ on theological points, I’m open to learning and being challenged about my own ways of seeing God and the world.
And I do often wonder at how little our Puritan heritage has left us in the way of understanding God through the senses. In true Enlightenment fashion, we have become a people who look to our rational nature, our ability to think, in order to know. I know I’ve heard this kind of teaching throughout my life: that the way a man thinks is the way he lives, that it can’t just be head knowledge, but must make it’s way to one’s heart (implying however that first comes the right way of thinking).
In Patitsas’ exploration of how the pursuit of Beauty (as in the ancient trio of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness) is of first order if we want to be rightly ordered beings before God, he looks at Vietnam War veterans and the attempts by modern psychiatry to bring healing to those suffering with PTSD. To summarize a lengthy and in depth conversation about trauma and healing in general, the point I came away with was this: all trauma “starts with a feeling that the moral order has been betrayed.” This disorienting event then causes the person to see and experience the world through this ugly, moral-order-upending event. They no longer trust or believe in Goodness.
BUT, Patitsas argues, in contrast to modern psychology’s theory of changing one’s thinking about an event, and “getting it out” through talk therapy… “the Orthodox way is Beauty-first, while the traumatic event… is an experience of anti-Beauty, of ugliness-first. To live governed by trauma is to live governed by an experience of ugliness, which unless we can incorporate the Resurrection into this gruesome crucifixion, cannot lead to health. Trauma is the exact opposite of Beauty-first: it is ugliness, first, middle, and last.”
Now, lest I have misguided you into thinking that by Beauty I mean merely the aesthetic experience of things like fallings leaves and changing autumn colors, I believe that the deep reality of “Beauty” Patitsas is speaking of is really the love of God. The gospel, he says, begins with God calling us, reaching out toward us, not us reaching out to him. And it is on some level, or to one degree or another, that we believe the opposite is true and thus live in a present hell, or a future one if we so choose. To understand that Beauty must come first, is to understand that we must know the love of God, and that enables us to experience Goodness, and then believe the Truth. That is his theory anyway, so far as I understand it.
Perhaps I’ve left you far behind by now, wondering what happened to the autumn bliss road we were on and how this Beauty-first book has anything to do with it. I’m not entirely certain myself. I know that in some way, the beauty in the world tells me a deeper story and it’s truth of the God who is there, who creates with such loving distinction and care, who fills us with longing and kindness, and wonder and appreciation. It only becomes a story we can make sense of through the written Word of Truth, but it is a deep telling all the same.
I think of that other story I’m still reading with Quinn, Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. In Frodo’s Middle Earth, he is experiencing a traumatic undoing of goodness in the world. There is much to be afraid of, to worry about, and yet he and his friends and the wise Gandalf have some deep sense, some underlying knowledge that there is a moral order for which they can and should fight. They should not give up. What lifts them beyond the impending doom, and reminds them of this truer story? So often it is beauty— of nature, of friendship, of love.
This week my mom and dad came alongside not just to visit but to help. My dad trimmed out bookshelves, built shoe benches and hooks to tidy our entry area, and planted some trees. My mom made pie, and more pie. She sewed a cushion that needed mending, took Zoë for countless walks. I did what I could to take them into the surrounding area, to drink in all the ways this place is transformed for these few precious October weeks. And as much as I believe they love me no matter what they do for me or make for me or even how they treat me, the beauty of the work of their hands is visceral. I look at it with delight. Does it make my house perfect? Or undo all the frustrations of family and home life? No. But it does help me rise above it a little more. It does make this place more than bearable, even loved.
I think I am just saying I am thankful for these beautiful autumn days. For every golden leaf glinting in the morning sun, for every musky edged whiff of smoke, for every deep hued line of trees in the distance, for every time I curve into the drive with the sound of crunching leaves underfoot, for every feeling it elicits and every mournful longing it causes to rise. This is a form of beauty that makes my soul sing and we all need to sing that song sometimes.