One of the most memorable lines in English poetry appears in John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the poet has his imagined Grecian vase speak directly to the reader, saying “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

That vase was on to something.

Beauty is not just... well, nice to look at. It’s important in a larger sense, because it points toward truth.

I live in Southern California, and my church, St. Michael’s by-the-Sea is named quite literally: you can see the Pacific Ocean from the church campus.

One particular morning I arrived at church as usual, pulled into the parking lot, got out, grabbed my purse, slammed the door shut, all on automatic pilot. But as I glanced at my watch I realized I was a few minutes early... and I was feeling sleepy. Instead of heading over to the church, I took a moment to lean against my car, take a deep breath of the salt-scented air, and look out toward the coast.

Glancing up, I saw a spectacular cloudbank, looming in sculpted piles against the canvas of a bold blue sky. Sunlight played across the clouds; the highlights were bright white, with deeper creases a threatening steely gray; a fine gray haze drifted across the face of this massive cloud formation, adding a sense of life and motion to an otherwise still scene.

All this, in a single glance - a painter might spend hours trying to capture the scene, and call it his best work. All this beauty, lasting at most for a few hours - and then, another vista, just as spectacular, in a different way. Each day - each hour! - gives us the artist's work of a lifetime, free of charge, ever changing. We can’t hang on to it. A photograph wouldn’t capture the essence of it, not the same way that the eye apprehends it.

All this beauty, totally free of charge, gratuitously lovely.  

However, the real miracle isn’t the beauty of the clouds and sky, but rather our perception of their beauty. If we were just animals, what would be the point of appreciating the sublimity of a wisp of cloud caught in a ray of misty sunlight? We might “read” the weather to judge whether it’s likely to rain or not, but we would not be struck in our hearts by the sense of divine presence in nature.

Any animal can look up and see the sky; we human beings alone see it for what it is: beauty. The heavens do tell of the glory of God: of His reality, of His status as Creator, and of our relationship to Him. We are made in the image of our Maker, and in our own aesthetic response we discover that He is an artist, the artist of all creation.