Letter #103: It's Giving Divine

Does God have an aesthetic?

Señor Dad,

I’m sure you remember a night several years ago in Miami, where we were visiting my sister Faith for New Year’s. (You will know Faith from her other celebrated role as “your daughter”; although you and I are not related, she is both your child and my sister. It’s really very simple.) Anyway the reason I’m sure you remember this evening is because you wrote about it at the opening of The Truth and Beauty.

As we looked out from our porch at the fireworks, you said you were having a hard time understanding how you were supposed to act in your daily life as a Christian. I replied that maybe you were reading the Bible like a treatise on philosophy, trying to extract a series of moral axioms, when what you really should be doing was getting to know a guy, namely Jesus.

I return to this subject now, because last week we ended up talking about God’s will and how to discern it amid the circus act of history. The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that “life is just one damned thing after another.” But some things seem, to us at least, like load-bearing points on the timeline. (For what it's worth, I actually think Toynbee would have agreed.)

The Trump assassin’s near-miss was our case study last week, but I’m sure everyone reading can come up with other private examples. More generally, since no culture is without its fortune-tellers or its astrologers, the sense that we can read God’s handwriting on the face of events seems to be inescapable.

But not all handwriting is God’s. The Bible’s pretty down on soothsayers, and T.S. Eliot wrote that to “riddle the inevitable / With playing cards” or “fiddle with pentagrams” was a means more of diversion than discernment. If the divine message really were simple enough to be spelled out in star charts, it’s hard to see why it couldn’t just be spit out in plain English.

So I have some sympathy for the guys in John’s Gospel who were wary of the voice that came from heaven: the scientists of their day, like the scientists of ours, would have assured them there must be a natural explanation. The safe bet was, it was thunder.

Only that time it wasn’t. And this is why I come back to that midnight in Miami. The difference between sham discernment and the genuine article must lie in learning to pick God’s image out from a lineup, to tell his handwriting apart from random scribbles.

If I can put it this way, it's almost a matter of artistic taste: C.S. Lewis writes at one point about “one’s sense of style—of the divine idiom.” It’s like God has what the kids call an aesthetic.

Half the time I wonder whether “knowing Jesus” is just a catchphrase. But then, maybe the person we meet in the pages of the Gospel is recognizable elsewhere—and maybe his sheep can learn to know his voice.

Or is this all too squishy?

Love,
Spencer