The Aesthetic Thread

I have come to see an aesthetic thread running through my life. It is there in my tastes in music, art, literature, food, and drink. The spectacular thing is that this thread resonates with my passion for God like the string on a violin.

Holy Longing marks my relationship with God. I have a passionate desire for intimacy with my Divine Lover that has its root in Eros and stretches for Agape. There is a bittersweet quality to our intercourse, my God and I. When I feel surrounded by God’s presence I feel joy and comfort, satisfaction and wholeness, but I also feel tears well up and a lump come to my throat. I rest in God’s presence and at the same time I mourn that I am not consummated and consumed in divine rapture. I have chosen words that may shock the reader with erotic connotations. This is appropriate because the holy longing I am describing is wholly a function of Eros. It is the divine spark and divine madness spoken of by philosophers and mystics alike.


Because of this foundational longing in my heart for the divine, my soul is stirred by aesthetic experiences that remind me of that relationship. Like the sent of a lover these qualities evoke in my soul the emotions and connection I have in God. They can serve as avenues into God’s presence and touchstones returning me to awareness of my love and position in God.

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The experience that has given me the most insight into this aesthetic thread is that of my search for great espresso. As I have gotten more into espresso I have found that there is a particular flavor profile for which I am searching. It has rumbling bass tone that dominates and wrestles with my tongue. It is a tough sensibility. I have come to see in this rumbling my desire to be mastered by the Divine. It cries with my soul, “Batter my heart three person’d God!” This flavor profile also has a clean fresh treble to balance and finish the experience in sweetness. It was a great epiphany to recognize that I taste God in that shot. How apt that baristas call the best shot they have ever pulled a god shot.

In music this quality has its expression in passionate, emotional digging in. I love to play the Bari Sax because it so effortlessly digs in with a growl. This is also why I love my jazz not smooth but rough. I love blues and the vocal turns of Ella Fitzgerald. Sing to me of the soul’s deepest longings! Lay down the boogie and play that funky music, please!

I love the bittersweet tang of Russian literature. Take this ending to a short story by Anton Chekhov. Aptly titled "A Dreary Story," it chronicles the thoughts of a dying man and focuses on his fatherly love for his ward, Katya.

A silence follows. Katya straightens her hair, puts on her hat, then crumples up the letters and stuffs them in her bag -- and all this deliberately, in silence. Her face, her bosom, and her gloves are wet with tears, but her expression now is cold and forbidding. . . . I look at her, and feel ashamed that I am happier than she. The absence of what my philosophic colleagues call a general idea I have detected in myself only just before death, in the decline of my days, while the soul of this poor girl has known and will know no refuge all her life, all her life!
"Let us have lunch, Katya," I say.
"No, thank you," she answers coldly. Another minute passes in silence. "I don't like Harkov," I say; "it's so grey here -- such a grey town."
"Yes, perhaps. . . . It's ugly. I am here not for long, passing through. I am going on today."
"Where?"
"To the Crimea . . . that is, to the Caucasus."
"Oh! For long?"
"I don't know."
Katya gets up, and, with a cold smile, holds out her hand without looking at me.
I want to ask her, "Then, you won't be at my funeral?" but she does not look at me; her hand is cold and, as it were, strange. I escort her to the door in silence. She goes out, walks down the long corridor without looking back; she knows that I am looking after her, and most likely she will look back at the turn.
No, she did not look back. I've seen her black dress for the last time: her steps have died away. Farewell, my treasure!

After lovingly developing these characters and their reliance on and love for one another this parting is a bittersweet ending to the story.  It is typical of Chekhov and demonstrates the peculiar Russian outlook on life that dwells in the space between longing and fulfillment.

Even the foods I love have this savory quality to them. Take the exquisite balance of flavors in a Greek meal. The refreshing taste of rice with white raisins, domadales: stuffed grape-leaves with their citrus tones, savory lamb, and buttery spanikopita.  What a God-filled meal!

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In art and architecture I find the aesthetic expression in the voluptuous curves of modernist design, the heroic images of art deco portraiture and the fashion of steampunk. The nostalgia that is evoked in me by the styles and sensibilities around the last century resonate with my longing for eternity. I find in those moments of nostalgia, a train whistle, the fragrance of spring blossoms, a thin place between the temporal and eternal, and it excites in me that which has been made eternal and longs for eternity. The expression of retro-futurism found in steampunk and the like are echoes of my search for God in the ancient practices of the Church and her mystics, while reaching to the future where God’s promises wait for me, all by experiencing God in the present through aesthetic avenues as well as intangible and apophatic avenues.

The great danger in aesthetics is that these experiences of food, drink, sights, and sounds, will become a sensual substitute for the reality they represent. When we turn to food to fill the holy longing, we become gluttons. Drink makes us addicts. Sights and sounds and pleasurable touch make us sensualists guided by the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes. But when our love is focused on the One who loves us best, these can be the aesthetic thread that connects us with the passionate reality that is God.