Loving the beauty of the world, Loving God

by Ashtyn Adams

Mark 12:28-31 (NRSV)
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” 29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

I come back to the twelfth chapter of Mark quite a bit as a divinity student. Here, Jesus is engaged in debate and dialogue with different religious groups and people of varying theological perspectives. The tension can feel reminiscent of what I experience in a classroom, and sometimes it’s nice to think that Jesus also cared about the details, and knew the ins and outs of religion. He is the good student quoting the Shema from Deuteronomy and the love-your-neighbor ethic from Leviticus. Yet, more than anything else, these passages are an important place of humility for a divinity student. I am the Sadducee who needs to hear the correction from Jesus, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!” or the Pharisee from this passage who needs to keep first things first, the Love of God and neighbor. I can’t help probing even that great commandment though, and if I am to love God with my mind, then an investigation into what this love looks like, especially in the Climate Crisis, is warranted. ​

I find the work of Simone Weil to be refreshingly insightful and thought-provoking. In her essay, Forms of the Implicit Love of God, Weil says the commandment ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God’ infers that the love in question is not just a love we can give or refuse when God takes our hand, but that there is “also a love preceding this visit, for a permanent obligation is implied.” The preceding love has a different object besides God but is ultimately “destined to become the love of God. We can call it the indirect or implicit love of God.” God is really, though secretly, present through these three forms of implicit love of God: religious ceremonies, the beauty of the world, and our neighbor. These three indirect loves are what she considers preparations for the soul, and once we have these to a high degree, then they well up and are taken together to make a single love of God. It is only then that we actually receive a personal visit from the divine.

We cannot love God, therefore, until we have love of the beauty/order of the world. This form of implicit love will be my focus, although it is a complement to the other loves. Weil writes, “By loving our neighbor we imitate the divine love which created us and all our fellows. And likewise, by loving the order of the world we imitate the divine love which created this universe of which we are a part.” This idea is not new to Christianity, but rooted in ancient thought. Primitive Christianity’s close ties to Stoicism exemplify this idea, especially in the writings of Saint John and the school of John. It is important to recognize that creation justice has preceded the environmental movement by millennia, and we now must seek the essentials we have abandoned. We must, “awaken to what is real and eternal.” Weil poignantly asks, “How can Christianity call itself catholic if the universe is left out?” If we cut ourselves off from intimate relationships with the world, the answer to her rhetorical question is that we can’t call ourselves Christian. We can’t love God.

One of Christ’s commandments we forget is to contemplate and imitate the lilies of the field and birds of the air. Another time he says to imitate the distribution of rain and sunlight. Although our sense of beauty can often be distorted, it remains rooted in the heart of each person and is the commonest and easiest way to approach God. It, Weil writes, is “the beauty of the world by which we can allow God to penetrate us,” it is, “Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter.” I really resonate with this idea. Our culture tells us to hustle, equating our worth with our productivity. We have no skill for attention. If we cannot attend to a lily or bird, how can we attend to our friend in need? The climate migrant that shows up to our church? Our communities as they face devastating loss due to environmental disasters? Spending time and admiring the hand of God in creation cultivates an eye for us to see the hand of God in all aspects of our lives. We must tune out the voices that tell us we are wasting time and realize something much greater is at work in us. Another critical observation of Weil’s is about the ease of salvation. She first quotes Aeschylus who says, “That which is divine is without effort,” and then adds that “there is an ease in salvation more difficult for us than all efforts.” Salvation, as when Moses held up the Serpent to the Israelites in the desert, is found in the effort of looking and listening. This is difficult for us to accept, us who prefer to take. Yet, salvation is not a muscular or violent effort of the will, but rather one of attention and consent, like a fiancé saying yes and accepting her lover. We try to complicate things, but Weil simplifies it for us. “Only beauty,” she writes, “is not the means to anything else. It alone is good in itself, but without our finding any particular good or advantage in it. It seems itself to be a promise and not a good. But it only gives itself; it never gives anything else.” Can we attend to something which will not give us something else, or are we trapped in a utilitarian frame of mind? Where are we looking and how is it shaping us? Will we slow down to contemplate and listen, so we may imitate the lilies?

If we cannot attend to a lily or bird, how can we attend to our friend in need? The climate migrant that shows up to our church? Our communities as they face devastating loss due to environmental disasters? Spending time and admiring the hand of God in creation cultivates an eye for us to see the hand of God in all aspects of our lives. 

There are two saints I have in mind who I think embody this notion well. First, Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), a wealthy Italian merchant who gave up his life of comfort and founded the Franciscan order of friars. He is well known for his care for lepers and outcasts and negotiated peace during the Crusades. However, his devotion and love of God overflowed into his belief that all God’s creatures deserve compassion, often preaching sermons to animals and performing miracles on creatures ranging from wolves to lambs. St. Francis shows us how to bless the created order, how to posture ourselves towards our “sister birds,” and how to recognize that creation is a character in this story of redemption we are caught up in. Most notably, St. Francis is the first person to receive the stigmata, the phenomenon where a person bears all or some of the wounds of Christ on their body. St. Francis demonstrates Imago Dei as Imago Christi, the image of God being the image of suffering love. The stigmata is an outward sign of the indwelling of the crucified Christ, that it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me (Galatians 2:20). St. Francis’ faithfulness and implicit love of the beauty of the world invites the question, where are our wounds, what are we willing to give up so that others may flourish and know their loveliness? It also invites questions about our liturgical practices. If we are not preaching to, praying for, and blessing the plants and animals around us, then we fail to live out Christ’s radical hospitality. How we pray and sing not only reflects our beliefs but shapes what we believe. If we want to learn to love God, we must reform our worship practices to include love for the beauty of the world.

A second compelling example of this implicit love acted out in our society is Dorothy Day, who is well known for her activism for labor and workers' rights and for co-founding the Catholic Worker newspaper and movement in New York City. One of my favorite stories highlights Day’s Christ-like foolishness. When one supporter of the movement donated an expensive ring, Day regifted the ring to a homeless woman who had come to the house for a meal rather than selling it to buy food for the poor. When asked why she did this, she responded, “Do you suppose God made diamonds only for the rich?” Practicality was always the wrong question for Day, and she dismissed the ideals of industrial society that promoted “usefulness” and “effectiveness” but failed to treat God’s children as beloved. Her witness is vital for our world which worships the false religion of capitalism, which tells people to indulge their greed and believe that infinite economic growth is possible in a finite world. We treat the people and planet as commodities to be quantified and consumed rather than to be respected or loved. The climate crisis is a structural problem that must be combated without demonizing the people who are caught up in the systems. Day’s belief in God drove her to pay more attention to the world around her rather than depart from it, to believe each person worthy of dignity and that God was present in all people. Her gifting of the diamond illustrates that love for the beauty of the world is something we must ensure all people can experience. She famously said, “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.” Our acceptance of climate change will strip, particularly the poor and vulnerable, of the opportunity to know God and God’s love in the beauty of the world. ​

The implicit love of the beauty of the world swells up into a single love of God in St. Francis of Assisi’s and Dothory Day’s lives. However, Simone Weil’s own life is also one of political activism and solidarity as she spent years suffering with and caring for factory workers. Weil wrote and demonstrated that love for the beauty of the world is difficult, “It is real; it offers resistance to love,” but ultimately, “It is this country which God has given us to love. He has willed that it should be difficult yet possible to love it.” Possible is the keyword. It has been done by many in the cloud of witnesses, and it can be done by us. If we nurture a love for the beauty of the world, we can know that “the longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation.” This is how we love Christ, not in the abstract, not only in the classroom but in the tangible, material world. If we can first notice the ground beneath us, bless the trees around us, imitate the lilies beside us, then and only then will we begin the lifelong attempt to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. ​

This is how we love Christ, not in the abstract, not only in the classroom but in the tangible, material world. If we can first notice the ground beneath us, bless the trees around us, imitate the lilies beside us, then and only then will we begin the lifelong attempt to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. ​

If this attempt is one of looking and listening rather than taking or willing, then Mary Oliver, poet and patron saint of attention, has some fitting words:

What can I say that I have not said before? 
So I’ll say it again. 
The leaf has a song in it. 
Stone is the face of patience. 
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
​and the leaf is singing still.

The leaf sings, the stones show us patience, the river has a story for us. This is the world God created out of love, for love. The Creator’s heart beats through it all. The test of our faith will not be whether we love Jesus, but whether we can love the things God loves, beginning with the Earth, and rightly understand our place within it. Because love is not some finite good that can be used up, the more we love, the more love there will be. This is an implicit love of God that needs to be made explicit to us, particularly the religious who claim to love God, yet are so far removed from the world of the Bible and early Christianity that we miss the foundations. Yes, we are busy, but our productivity is not the measure of a good life. The Japanese theologian, Kosuke Koyama, talks about the 3 mile an hour God, the average time it takes for a human to walk, the average time it must have taken for Jesus to walk from place to place. If Jesus is God, then love has a speed, and it’s a slow speed. We mustn't spoil the wonder with haste as J.R.R. Tolkien says. God has something for us in the beauty of the world. Yet, our sixth mass extinction might prove most of us atheists at worst, and hypocrites at best, who claim to love God, but don’t, not really. Simone Weil, St. Francis, Dorothy Day, and Mary Oliver are just a few leaders to help us re-envision our love for the beauty of the world, Christ’s love for the beauty of the world. What are we losing by making this gifted, Beloved world uninhabitable? What does it reveal about our so-called love of God? ​

Resources:
Books
Weil, Simone., and Janet Martin Soskice. Waiting for God. London: Routledge, 2021.

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Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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