Pain in Beauty

I’m sitting here listening to Itzhak Perlman’s moving performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto, and something about it is so beautiful it almost hurts. The gorgeous, rich tone of the violin converses with the orchestra’s wandering melodies and powerful chords. It explores an incredible range of emotion and expression, from the sweeping heights to the dark-chocolate lows, from the sweet sparkling high notes to the gritty trills. It makes me want to weep, throw myself on a grassy lawn, breathe in the scent of pine trees, and fall peacefully asleep in the sun on the floor at home with my dog napping beside me.

This kind of beauty is painful. Why? Perhaps it is painful because it doesn’t fully satisfy; it leaves me longing for more. Or perhaps it gives me a glimpse of something too beautiful to attain. Beauty awakes in me a longing for perfection, and at the same time I have a sense that I am unworthy and incapable of attaining it.

It is not only music that causes this almost painful enjoyment of a moment. Standing outside on a beautiful fall day with a view of a hillside covered in bright orange leaves backed by a brilliant blue sky, I feel a warmth from the sunshine; pleasure is almost tangible – and yet just out of reach. Drinking a mug of hot chocolate on a cold day after ice skating . . . running through a grassy field early on a summer morning . . . a warm hug from someone I love . . . All these are like little tastes, glimpses into true beauty. And yet they are not the full experience.

Sehnsucht – a good German compound word meaning “an intense longing, yearning, craving, or missing.” C.S. Lewis called it “inconsolable longing” in the human heart for “we know not what.” It is “a longing for a far off country, but not a particular earthly land which we can identify. Furthermore there is something in the experience which suggests this far off country is very familiar and indicative of what we might otherwise call ‘home’.” The little longings in music, art, nature, and daily life are indications for my greater longing for God.

After spending an extended time in prayer, either alone or with one or two other people, there’s this feeling of knowing God better. He’s closer somehow; He has revealed Himself in some way that I didn’t understand before, and now I see Him in a new light – the same as He was before, but more fully there. I experience God. And yet I never know Him fully.

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” – 1 Corinthians 13:12

The Brahms may be painful because it is a dim version of the “face to face” reality of Heaven, and as I hear it I want the real thing. Some people appreciate music because it can express what is; I like it for the way it can give a glimpse into what was, what could have been, and what will be.

“For [Aristotle], as for other Greek philosophers, music was the most ‘imitative’ of the arts. By ‘imitative’ Aristotle did not mean that the artist or composer copies nature, but that he must ‘imitate things as they ought to be.’ (Frank Gaebelein, The Pattern of God’s Truth).

When I hear the Brahms or when I run through the woods on a fall day, my heart turns toward the promise of knowing God in His full beauty, and I long for that!