Daily Word of Grace # 31 (April 28, 2020)
The great English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) concluded his famous poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” When you see something truly beautiful and beautifully true you never forget it—whether it’s a breathtaking view from a mountaintop, or a new mom with her infant sleeping peacefully in her arms, or a sunrise over the ocean, or Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” (1889) at The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, or the first smile you see on the face of the love of your life. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—the combination of truth and beauty can cut through the hardness of our hearts and the protective walls of our minds and remind us that the beautiful truth is that we are loved by God, who is Beauty and Truth. The psalmist wrote, “One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple” (Psalm 27:4). At the Last Supper Jesus assured his disciples, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), and the next day he gave his life to atone for the ugliness and lies of the world, and of your life—and to reveal the beautiful truth of the never-ending grace of God. One day in heaven all of us will see firsthand the Beauty and Truth of our Savior, who is actually “all ye need to know.”
Love and Prayers,
Dave