The Beauty of God Burns but Never Consumes
Christie Purifoy
12 min read ⭑
I am a dinosaur who still prefers paper newspapers. I admit, they often pile up unread until we roll Opinions or Sports into a baton to feed the fire in our woodstove, but I would never cancel the subscription. For a while, I even had two newspapers tossed onto the end of my driveway every Sunday morning, but the big-city paper I loved for its book reviews and a real estate section capable of inspiring daydreams of lives I might have lived stopped showing up. After far too many calls to complain about missing papers, we canceled our subscription. Now about once a month I stop by the fancy grocery store after church and buy a thick, big-city paper folded like a blanket. I bring it home, and I curl up in bed for the afternoon with both papers tucked in around me.
It isn’t the content I can’t give up. After all, I could easily skim an opinion piece on the glossy mirror of my phone. What I can’t give up is the comfort of a habit that has worn deep grooves in me since childhood. I love the soft feel of the paper. I love how the sections lie scattered and rustling across my bed as I turn over to nap instead of read. I even feel a nostalgic fondness for the smeared black ink on my fingertips. When I was a child, my father would sometimes toss our small-town Sunday paper onto the bench seat of the station wagon as we four kids piled in for the drive to church. Eyeing that paper, I knew there was a very good chance my father would say, “Yes, all right,” when we met him after Sunday school, begging him to let us skip “big church” and head to Shipley Do-Nuts instead. My father loved to pair the front page with a jam-filled kolache as much as I loved the comics and a cream-filled chocolate glazed.
We were a dutiful, churchgoing family, despite our fondness for sweet baked goods enjoyed warm before the after-service crowds arrived. My mother volunteered at vacation Bible school. My father served as an elder. I was a firstborn daughter who wanted to please them both, but break through the thin icing crust of my heart and you’d find that what I really wanted was the donut shop. Church, though it pained me to admit this even to myself, was boring. I accepted that boring things could be good for me. I could paraphrase the relevant verses from the Bible: do not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing. Also, where two or three are gathered in my name, I am with them. My parents were big advocates for memorizing Scripture; I was their first disciple, and so to church we (mostly) went.
Elena Helade; Unsplash+
One year, when I was about 9, my parents horrified their dutiful firstborn daughter by suggesting we skip church. It was Christmas Eve. From my adult vantage point, I look back and assume my parents were tired and overwhelmed and probably wondering how late they’d need to stay up in order to wrap our gifts and fill our stockings. Maybe my mother was thinking about setting her alarm clock relative to the size of our turkey, but when they suggested we skip the candlelight Christmas Eve service at a church I’ll call Grace Community, I gasped. What in the world could they be thinking? The candlelight Christmas Eve service was the single moment out of the entire year when not even a cream-filled chocolate glazed and a wedge of fresh newsprint could tempt me away from the pew. On Christmas Eve, church wasn’t boring. It was beautiful.
B.T. and A.T.
Last spring, over the weeks of Eastertide, I was introduced to the writing of Thomas Traherne in a class at my church. I told my friend Jack, our instructor, that my life would henceforth be divided B.T. and A.T.: before reading Traherne and after. We laughed together, but I meant it as more than a joke. From the first lines of Traherne’s poetic religious meditations known as “Centuries,” I was captivated. No wonder C.S. Lewis claimed that Traherne’s prose style was “almost the most beautiful … in English.” Reading Traherne feels like time travel. His voice is so direct, so intimate, it is as if we are face to face with the man himself. Right at the start, he insists that Love is at work in this meeting of writer and reader, and he promises to fill this book “with those truths you love without knowing them.” Such boldness! He seems to think he knows us better than we know ourselves: “… though it be a maxim in the schools that there is no Love of a thing unknown,” he goes on, “yet I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the centre of the earth unseen violently attract it. … Do you not feel yourself drawn with the expectation and desire of some Great Thing?” Reading his words, I was like a girl with a lit flame in her hand. Yes! I do feel this. I have always felt this.
When I wasn’t reading the comics or the back of the cereal box as a child, I was reading a bright yellow Nancy Drew mystery. If someone had told me the true-life story of the Anglican clergyman Thomas Traherne, I would have known exactly how to title it: “The Secret of the Mysterious Manuscript.” In a story fanciful enough for a convertible-driving, teenage sleuth, the book we now know as “Centuries” was plucked from the bargain bin of a London bookseller one wintry day more than 200 years after Traherne composed it around 1674. The mystery of who had authored these eloquent meditations took a few more years to solve, but eventually the voice of a poet priest who had lived and died in obscurity was resurrected.
Traherne’s work had been forgotten because he died young, before most of it could be published, but perhaps also because “Centuries” showed no interest in the sectarian controversies shaking the church in his day. Though his own vocation was entangled in the violent conflict between Parliament and Crown, he chose to write a book about delight. If he had joined more of the bitter public arguments, he might have been better known during his lifetime, but I think he would not then speak so directly to us 350 years later.
In “Centuries,” Traherne tells the story of everything so that the whole is a song set in the key of joy. His tone is passionate but childlike. In his telling, the glory of God is unavoidable. It fills everything, is visible everywhere, and I, his reader — like Adam alone in the garden — am the greatly beloved inheritor of all I see. The eye becomes the central organ of Traherne’s meditations, and seeing is the most spiritually transformative thing we can do. We may be weak, we may be beset with trouble, but if we would only open our eyes and see as God sees, we would be happy. Even in our sorrow, we would know happiness because the beauty we see daily in creation is only the beginning of the beauty God has prepared for us. To know God as he is, Traherne insists, “is to frame the most beautiful idea in all Worlds.” When church attendance was a duty I did not especially enjoy, I would have been shocked to know that an intellectual clergyman from the age of the Puritans named enjoyment as one of our chief religious duties. Because God created a beautiful world, Traherne says, “nothing can please or serve Him, more than the Soul that enjoys it.”
Do You Remember?
Church became more enjoyable when I joined the high school youth group. Our Sunday morning class always included donuts, and we sat together, rather than with our parents, during “big church.” Last summer, someone from those youth group days reached out in a direct message on Facebook. He had hoped to see me at a reunion in the hometown we had both left years before. His message sparked a conversation filled with do you remember? and was it really like that? I discovered we are both raising our children in the church but in traditions very different from the one we first received at Grace Community. He also told me how he attended a service at our old church the morning after the reunion. “It was different than it used to be,” he said. “And that made me sad.”
“Different how?” I asked.
“I felt manipulated,” he told me. “Like the music and the sermon were all aggressively aimed at making me feel something.”
I thought about this for a long while. I have had similar experiences in churches, times when my inability or unwillingness to be emotionally swept off my feet made me feel cut off from whatever was happening during the service, but it only now occurred to me that I could not recall ever feeling that way in the church of my childhood. Had I changed? Had that church changed?
When I imagine my life in the church, I picture a baby bird continually nudged out of its nest. I never chose to leave a church, but cross-country moves for school and work have repeatedly forced change upon me. With every move, I looked for a church that felt familiar as habit, but I never found it. Instead, I have flown from one expression of Christian worship to another. Over time, my journey became more intentional, and I often indulged in self-congratulatory reveries about how “far” I had come. But for the first time in a long time, I could see something deeply good in the church I had left behind: to me, our Sunday morning services had been boring, but boring now appears rather comforting, even appealing, in its plain simplicity. In my memory, we sang the same familiar hymns and praise choruses week after week. The sermons were always long, but no one required that I pay attention, and so I doodled on my paper bulletin, instead. Sometimes I sat to my father’s left and fiddled with the plain gold band of his wedding ring. Or I would hold his Bible, fanning out the edges to see the gold that glinted there.
“Remembering the church of my childhood, I have remembered beauty. ”
As a child in that church, I was acquainted with truth; I was a witness to goodness, but I was hungry for beauty, glimpsing it only here and there in gilt-edged paper and polished wooden pews. The candlelit Christmas Eve service was uniquely beautiful, but I do not remember feeling as if anyone were putting on a show or working hard to cultivate the emotional atmosphere. Instead, as the lights dimmed and our voices joined to sing of a silent and holy night, the beauty of our shared worship seemed to reveal some deeper beauty in our midst. The word I would use today for that moment is transcendent. Back then, I thought our church gatherings were meetings. I thought we went to learn and to keep each other accountable in our behavior. I thought we went to church because the Bible told us to and that it was somehow good for us, like my daily Flintstones multivitamin. In other words, I thought church centered on me. But on Christmas Eve, with the sanctuary cloaked in darkness, a warm flame dancing in my hand and my own small voice joined to a hundred others, I experienced something I had no language for, as if my eyes were only now, finally, opened. As the Spirit enlivened our ritual and our song, we were ushered together into the presence of a living God, and I never wanted to leave, not even for presents or stockings or the cinnamon rolls I knew were rising on the kitchen counter back home. I had met the God St. Augustine called “beauty so ancient and so new.”
Christmas Eve and Candle Wax
I once heard an Eastern Orthodox priest describe his journey from a childhood in an American evangelical church to his embrace of the ancient Orthodox tradition as an adult. For several years he had worked as a lighting technician for everything from big rock concerts to large church worship services. Over time, the differences between the two seemed to him to shrink until both were revealed to be carefully planned productions executed in order to elicit certain emotional responses. Searching for something more authentic, he traded the kick drums and fog machines for incense and icons. I have a great deal of sympathy for his choice. History was always my favorite subject in school, and I am partial to Christian worship that is deeply rooted in the wisdom of many generations. These days I worship with liturgy and choir and organ and every Sunday we light candles and while I have no interest in relitigating the role of certain instruments or musical styles in the worship of the church, I do wonder if some of our churches missed the signpost labeled Beauty. Could that explain my friend’s experience in our former church?
As an adult, I reminisced with my mother about my fondness for the Grace Community Christmas Eve candlelight service. By then, even my mother had moved cross-country and left our former church behind. I was misty-eyed with nostalgia when she began to laugh. “What is it?” I asked.
“I thought you knew! But maybe you had already moved away? I’m only laughing because I recall how they did away with candles at the Christmas Eve service when we had new carpet installed in the church. Some of the ladies were concerned about messy candle wax.”
When I gasped, my mother — still laughing — said, “Well, I guess clean carpet is beautiful, too.” But I can’t help wondering whether that small decision to turn away from a burning beauty we can never fully control was more significant than it seemed at the time. Forgoing candles likely helped keep the carpet clean, but I suspect much more was at stake than the carpet.
I think one of the reasons I have always loved classic detective mysteries — books and films — is because they so often take place in and around the church. It’s no wonder my favorite detective Benoit Blanc movie mystery is the third installment, “Wake Up Dead Man,” which takes place primarily within the severe, neo-Gothic beauty of a traditional stone church. At one point in the film, the priest and the detective talk about that architecture. The skeptical detective admits he feels “the grandeur, the mystery, the intended emotional effect,” but says “it’s like someone has shone a story at me that I do not believe.” The priest’s response surprised me, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The Father Jud character isn’t offended. In fact, he agrees: “You’re right. It’s storytelling. This church, it’s not medieval. We’re in New York. It’s neo-Gothic 19th century. It has more in common with Disneyland than Notre Dame. And the rites and rituals, costumes … all of it. It’s storytelling. You’re right. I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie, or do they resonate with something deep inside us that’s profoundly true, that we can’t express any other way, except storytelling?”
Open Your Eyes and Look
Rich conversations are almost impossible to have via direct text message, but if I could catch my old friend on the phone, or better yet, sit with him at a table, I would ask him if beauty, and not just showmanship or stagecraft, can also leave us feeling manipulated. Golden icons and colorful stained glass are beautiful, but machine-made fog is kind of beautiful, too, and that kick drum kicking in really does make me feel something. What is a church to do? If worship is distinct from entertainment, where does that difference lie? I’m not sure what my friend might say, but I can almost hear the fictional film priest telling me to open my ears and listen. Father Jud might ask, What story do I hear when voices join in song, when sunlight pours through colored glass, when a vaulted ceiling draws my eyes up and up? And I can certainly hear the voice of a nearly forgotten, 17th-century clergyman telling me to open my eyes and look. Really look. Traherne would likely tell me to forget the speck, pull out the log and look. God’s world, Traherne insists, “is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it.” Church should be a place where we see it, because if we give beauty half a chance, it will draw us as surely as Earth’s gravity. And it will shape us, too.
When we go to worship God in a church, we might feel something. We might be moved to laughter or tears. But I think the better question to consider is how our worship forms us. Does it tell a story or paint a picture in keeping with the wild wonder of the world we inhabit? If our eyes are seeing and if our ears are hearing, then no matter the musical style, no matter the architecture, we will “worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness” (Ps. 29:2, KJV), and we will be changed by that encounter.
Beauty that manipulates does not deserve the name. It is pretty or sentimental, and it points only toward some neat answer in a box. It is the means to an already mastered end. It is as clean as carpet where no one is allowed to walk or eat or live. True beauty is a reflection, but what it mirrors is so vast, so mysterious and so alive that it exists in no box. It is the living ground of everything. A transcendent moment in church is a gift, but it’s a gift I’ve decided we do not need to chase or engineer. The transcendent moment pulls back the curtain and shows us what’s true. Having encountered the Beautiful One, we can rest even in every ordinary, nontranscendent moment. After all, some days are cloudy, but do we ever forget the sun?
Remembering the church of my childhood, I have remembered beauty. I have remembered those candlelit Christmas Eves, but I have remembered other things I now count as beautiful, too: the ease of simplicity, the comforting grooves of a habit and even the joy of doing our duty before heading to the donut shop. The beautiful God known by St. Augustine and Thomas Traherne will draw us like moths to a flame, but this beauty is easy and gentle. It burns but never consumes.
Christie Purifoy is a writer, gardener and photographer who loves to grow flowers and community. After earning a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chicago, she traded the classroom for Maplehurst, an old Pennsylvania farmhouse. She is the author of the memoirs Roots and Sky and Placemaker, as well as Garden Maker, a book of garden essays and photographs. Christie hosts the Black Barn Garden Club, an online community for gardeners of every level, and each Wednesday she joins her longtime friend Lisa-Jo Baker on the Out of the Ordinary podcast. Together with many others, they also gather at the Black Barn Online, a virtual space where art and faith can take root and grow in community.