XXII - The Beauty of the World

We have in these last few weeks been in some of the most beautiful places on Earth. I say this with authority having grown up in Swansea. (Before the scoffers and antagonists guffaw, I would refer you to the beaches of Gower, which I stand by as being as beautiful as any in all the East or West Coast of Australia, South Africa, the Cote d’Azur and other places I have lounged upon, but just spoilt a little by the unremitting disaster that is Welsh weather.) It is a cliché that people find God in the grandeur of nature (and spiral off into bad poetry and worse photography), but I thought I would interrogate this a little from my recent memory of tea and coffee plantations straddling the arbitrary line between Tamil Nadu and God’s own Country of Kerala. 

It's actually been quite a nice contrast our having moved from Hampi and Mysuru, famed for their archaeological remains and palace respectively – man-made beauty – to the gorgeous backwaters and mountains of Kerala – which bring India a new level in God-given beauty. It’s become a personal cliché for Rhiannon and I that we say very often: the banal but true “India’s a lot bigger than we imagined”. But it's also a lot more varied in geography, in people, in culture (we have moved from Hindi to Malayalam to Tamil – concentrating mainly on the words for animals) than is suggested by a single country – and that’s with all the bits lopped off since partition. There are still some universals – wine is outrageously expensive – literally London prices (when you can go out for a nice meal for about £2 here), so I haven’t touched a drop since arriving. I’m reminded of Archbishop Gore who gave up drinking during the First World War as many did in solidarity with all who were in danger on active service. As recorded by Alan Wilson, he spoke at a meeting: ‘”All my life I have been accustomed to a liberal supply of generous wine. My doctor told me that to give it up suddenly at my age might prove dangerous.” When he added slowly: “I have never experienced the least inconvenience from not taking wine”, the teetotallers cheered loudly. Gore went on: “Many of my teetotal friends assured me that I should experience greatly improved health, and marked clearness of mind.” Again he added impressively: “I have never experienced the slightest benefit from not taking wine.” The audience at first responded with a horrified pause, then roared with laughter.’ I’m with Gore. Drinking less and sleeping more just seems to give me bad dreams. For someone who habitually sleeps very little, it feels like the revenge of REM.

But, as I was saying, it’s the variation that has struck me. In my mind’s eye, India was Rajasthan: hot, dry, busy, big, impressive, with cluttered streets. Even Rajasthan has great variety though from the Thar desert to Ranthamborne which jumps straight out of the Jungle Book. Here in the South, though, it’s a different climate. Humidity has shot up past 90% and the superfluity of water, the mountains that carry you, praise God, above the humidity, the range of animals and birds, the rice fields, the coffee and tea, the jungle and mystical Banyon trees that right now creep up to the back of the house we’re staying in. It makes you feel like Swansea and Barcelona could be next door to each other, yet all of this is India, and, although we originally planned to, we will not make it this time to the Himalayas and the exciting scenes of the origins of Buddhism and Darjeeling Tea in the North. 

But we will all have found those places where we have been moved by beauty in nature, that has felt like a religious experience, and perhaps not least from a mountain top surveying the vastness of what drops beneath us. My most vivid experience of beauty in nature was a moment I’ve told in sermons and most recently camping here a week ago around a campfire with other travellers. I’ll save the details, but very concisely I was climbing the highest mountain in Queensland, alone without a phone, in the rainforest, got soaked, covered in leeches, bloody and naked (again sorry [except for shorts and walking boots]), walked into a storm on the side of the mountain before descending the route which was no longer a path; lost the route; and miraculously recovered it to spend an awful night in a tent at a 45 degree angle on tree roots, letting in water, clutching a water bottle – which, as Rhiannon made me tell the group, – I had filled with my own wee to stay warm. 

But this is not my vivid experience of beauty in nature. (Though it was an experience of unlikely salvation.) That came in the morning when the dawn sunlight pierced the canopy in single beams lighting the forest like a storm of divine arrows. I cannot describe it any more than that, except to say that it was the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen and for a very forlorn peregrine soul, alone on the edge of a mountain, it was inspirational. 

But it’s the far-reaching views we most often think of. After getting to the top of that mountain seeing the Bush spread out for hundreds of miles in all directions; watching the dawn at Mount Sinai illuminate an endless desert; I was once harangued by a sergeant for extolling the beauty of the Yorkshire moors on a ten-mile run out on the Catterick training area (but what else is a padre for?); seeing the misty valleys of North Wales emerge from Mount Snowdon, alongside a café and small train. These are places where the soul can breathe and possibly believe in a Creator. (I think there’s a plaque in the café on Mount Snowdon.) And there is philosophical precedent. Martin Buber speaks of the three ways of the soul experiencing transcendence as being in the worship of a religious community, a genuine meeting of souls in relationship, and in nature, and he even starts with nature so perhaps there’s something in this even for the not religiously minded.

I think at the very shallow end of this is the feeling of sharing a platform with God. Being very high up you can see a long way. There’s a sense of power in this. All those hills in Rajastan with forts on them. (Rhiannon is sick of forts and temples and won’t go to them anymore.) All of them with zigzags driveways and spikes to stop elephants charging down the door, which actually feels rather preposterous, but I am not a maharaja. And people are always going up mountains in the Bible. Sometimes for bad reason – the high places – nothing good ever comes of that. Often for good, like Moses receiving the Law or Noah resting his ark on Mount Ararat (and who doesn’t have a mental picture of a boat see-sawing on the triangle point of a cartoon mountain?) And often a good place to go just before dying – like Elijah who asks for death before hearing the still small voice of calm – or Moses overlooking the Promised Land on Mount Pisgah; or even after death where Jesus allegedly levitates away (no etymological relation to Levi), and Jesus has previously given his sermon on the mount and been tempted by the devil on the mountaintop. Anyway, you get the picture. Being high gives a sense of grandeur which might convey a sense of transfiguration (also on a mountaintop). ‘Tis good Lord to be here’, as the favourite hymn goes.

Inversely, the mountaintop can convey a sense of transcendence by an awareness of our own smallness. This sets us on a straighter path, particularly as any deflection from our own importance prepares the ground for us identifying with and respecting the life and beauty that is around us, alongside the virtue of humility – the central Christian virtue. This accords more easily with Buber’s account since we are viewing the natural world not as something beneath and outside of ourselves; but alongside and as something of which we are a small part. The relationship becomes not instrumental (what can I get, use, enjoy from this) but integral (I find in you peace, a place of protection, a cause to fight for, a family to be a part of, a home to return to).

This brings us to the third form of transcendence which is in our connectedness. We all learn about weather systems at school; in the last few weeks we’ve visited a lot of dams and their relation to the waterways, the production of power, the creation of wetlands, to irrigation, to canals and rivers. Then there are the food chains which with the great variety of birds and animals here are more pointed than the genial wildlife of the UK. Without launching into the Lion King’s “Circle of Life” (we did see the recent prequel in a luxury cinema in Mumbai and Apollo still worries about “white lions”), elevation can bring about a certain sense of being part of something bigger. Perhaps because the nature of beauty is affective in making us want to be connected with what is beautiful – when we see the beauty of creation we are perhaps more likely to realise that it is something of which we are a part and with that to gain a sense of meaning. I am not a lonely soul in isolation, but a small part in a giant tapestry of love and life, death and sacrifice, courage and determination and all those other things that make stories make sense.

In this we arrive at a final sense of transcendence we might experience in nature, which is also the basis of all understandings of God and the divine. And that is to do with sense-making. The question “Do you believe in God?” is never the right question. Along with the entire Christian tradition, my response would be “I do not believe in a thing called God”, which is what the question seems to be asking. The right question is something more like, “Do you think there is meaning and purpose in this world and in your life?” The person of faith will answer “Yes, amid the bafflement and darkness I hope and yearn for what is good and true.” The Christian will say specifically, “Yes, and that meaning and purpose is love, which I’m trying to inhabit in my life”. So when the Christian looks out from the mountaintop the experience may be something to the effect of how this world is put together by and with love, in which each part is of value and has meaning; and of how it is put together for love in which each part might find happiness, connection and a place. 

Of course you might also be doing it to look awesome with your awesome friends in your awesome Instagram stories; but without the encouragement of a Christian community (until now – we’ve just arrived in a Christian community, where trying to play badminton in intense humidity against teenagers has reminded me of my age), without the benefit of a large cool glass of Sauvignon Blanc, I will enjoy my glimpses of the divine in the new friendships of strangers and the richness and beauty of the world in which we find ourselves.