A Look Beyond

"Beauty calls with a siren's voice, and our longing to abandon all and chase after it is almost overwhelming. But we find that beauty is like the rainbow's end: It beckons but eludes. It's a shimmering soap bubble that disappears in our grasping hand. In the presence of beauty we are like a child with her nose pressed to the window of a toy store. We look and yearn, but we find a barrier that prevents the full experience of what is before us. As much as we long to immerse ourselves in the beauty we see, we can't do it. Even at the most intense moment of ectasy in our experience of the symphony, the sunset, the painting, or the embrace, we realize that what we really long for is yet beyond. These wonderful things are only the images fo the real object of our desire, and that object remains as elusive as ever."

"In beauty we hear the chords of the supernatural reverberating within nature. Beauty invites us to see within nature and art that greater reality in which everything has its origin. Beauty in its fullness remains elusive to us because it emanates from a dimension that is closed off to us. We live within nature---a nature so fallen that it taints all the beauty that shines on it from the dimersion of the supernatural. Yet beauty breaks through the cloud of the Fall and bathes all nature with a glory that declares the transcendent source of all things. The glimpses of beauty that invade our world are tangible evidence that beauty in its fullness does exist. And that taste of beauty underscores the promise that we can ultimately ascend to that dimension and find the true object of our desire. But not yet. For now is our place in the world, where we have tasks to be done and duties to be performed before we can abandon all and pursue the beauty that so tantalizes us."

---The Search for Certainty by Josh McDowell and Thomas Williams

WOW
That was the coolest thing I have read in...ever