The above painting is by my middle son,Jon. ( For more examples of his art go to www.jonwhiteart.com ). Its title is Find Rest. As a dear friend of mine has said its colours are “restoratively beautiful.”
We need beauty in our lives, and we need rest. There is a hunger for both. Beauty summons us to a life and truth outside our own. Of course beauty can’t feed our empty stomachs or put money in our bank accounts. But it does satisfy our souls - which are bigger than our bodies (as I think
Aquinas meant when he wrote that our bodies are contained within our souls). Beauty draws us out of ourselves to worship, for everything that is beautiful leads us to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, immeasurably beautiful in themselves.
And when we still ourselves to take in Beauty we see that we are not easily “at rest”. We are rushing here there and everywhere. We find silence difficult and irritating. We are constantly on the move looking for the next thing to motivate or satisfy us.
But rest is found in God. He bids us come to him and find it. He bids us learn of him. Resting in God is likened to being like a weaned child lying content in her mother’s arms in the Psalms. Resting is nestling in the firm embrace of the everlasting arms that won’t go. Hence in Hebrews the writer talks of the “rest of faith”.
As Bruce Springsteen ( and Augustine) remind us - everyone has a “hungry heart”. Hunger for beauty and rest; hunger for the eternal.
Find rest.
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