The bearer of a mission

Here is just a little more from Erik Varden’s The Shattering of Loneliness, that I wanted to record here, because I suppose you could say beauty is one of the themes of this fog. Some of it perhaps needs more context to grasp the full import, but if I so I recommend you read the book:

"Beauty is the bearer of a mission. It is a call from a beautiful world, ‘beautiful and worthy of being protected by words against the swift erasure of our deeds’. (p 152)

...

… ‘beauty’ unmasks ideology - a beauty that is as much ethical as aesthetic. A radiance of beauty issues where we least expect it, in what seems ‘humble, grey, very poor’. To perceive it is to be changed. To share it with another, to reach it together, is to love; to love in this way is ‘no longer to belong to this world’. 

… Beauty awakens a man from the stupor of cynicism, conferring insight that no human life can be contained by an abstraction. It has an astonishing impact on the experience of time, which turns out to be, not an absolute value, but something relative and, yes, temporary: once alert to beauty, human beings find they are bearers of a greater reality that, when it catches an echo of itself in the universe, defeats times, introducing a dimension in which only the word endures. Beauty finally forges communion among people by indicating a universal realm in which individual solitude ceases although personhood endures. In that world, beyond life and death, love has its home. And that ‘there’ can be accessed ‘here’. We can meet eternity ‘now’. (p 153-154)

...

It is tempting to fall in love with the dream of beauty while keeping the reality at bay: near enough to satisfy our sensibility; far enough away to silence its demands. It is possible to recognise the ‘logic’ of longing while withholding a ‘logical’ response. To preserve ourselves from such enticing but ultimately dissatisfying vagueness of mind, we can recall that to ‘take note’ is only one aspect of awareness. 

A further aspect, no less important, follows on its heels: that of assuming responsibility for the thing perceived, to take care of it, protect it, and pass it on. Our performance in this regard will determine the integrity of our response to beauty’s call. It will show whether we welcome the Word our longing announces; whether we follow its music and risk a transformative encounter; or whether we choose to let the ‘other night’ remain ‘other’, a blurred impression to indulge at times of need, like a record of mood music for rainy nights. We are dealing, Athanasius reminds us, with matters of life or death.” (pp 156-157)