TRANSFIGURING THE CHAOS AND DEFORMITY

TRANSFIGURING THE CHAOS AND DEFORMITY


If we modern people thought of our world as a garden, if we gardened more, then I think all the other creatures and things that grow in the ground would be so much better off. Beauty CAN save the world! But that depends on how much we love beauty and seek it in our lives.

Gardening in not only making the world around us beautiful once more by letting beauty transform us. Gardening grows from our deep longing for salvation, so that beauty fills our lives. "Beauty," writes Berdyaev (The Destiny of Man), "is God's idea of the creature, of man and of the world... The transfiguration of the world is the attainment of beauty."

In my garden, I take hope from Jesus' promise to the repentant thief on the cross that he will be with his Lord in Paradise. I know that the sweat of my brow and tears of penance bring Paradise near in my backyard. For a garden is a profound sign and deep symbol of salvation, like none other, precisely because a garden was our first habitation, and God has deemed it to be our final home. Beauty is the aim of life. God imagined it so. God spoke the Word, and his invisible Image of Beauty became a visible garden. "The fertility of the earth is its perfect finishing," writes St Basil of Caesarea, "growth of al kinds of plants, the upspringing of tall trees, both productive and sterile, flowers' sweet scents and fair colors, and all that which...came forth from the earth to beautify her, their universal Mother" (from Hexaemeron, homily 2).

Beauty will transfigure the chaos and deformity of our wounded world into the peace and harmony of a cosmos that God, from the beginning, proclaimed to be good and beautiful.


Vigen Guroian
The Fragrance of God, pp 84-85
2006 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids, Michigan
050809