Beauty is transcendent

So, my girl, Kate Kromann, posted a link to this really amazing dance instructor and choreographer and I just got a chance to watch it now. SO glad. Kate Jablonski is a 22-year-old college student at the U of I at Chicago. The feeling that I get watching her choreography reminded me of something I recently read in The Prodigal God, which was a quotation of C.S. Lewis...





Beauty is transcendent, it points towards home.

I look at her work, I look at these dancers and I am in awe of their Creator, who gave them the capacity to do and create.

Longing for home…

“There is a German word – Sehnsucht – that gets at this concept. Dictionaries will tell you that there is no simple English synonym. It denotes profound homesickness or longing, but with transcendent overtones. The writer who spoke most of this “spiritual homesickness” was C.S. Lewis, in his famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory.” He refers to many similar experiences like those described by Steinbeck and Knowles and then he says:

‘Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this was a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we though the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself. . . . Now we wake to find . . . [w]e have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken in. . . .

Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.'"

- excerpt from The Prodigal God, Keller