Beauty

Today Hallie and I were talking over our chicken tenders, and I mentioned to her, again, how much I adore the book I'm currently reading: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. I told her if anyone I knew decided to read it and discuss it with me, I would feel uncomfortable and vulnerable, as if the contents of my very soul were being explored and analyzed and judged.

But one particular passage from the book has stayed with me for far longer than any of the others, and for that reason I feel the need to share it:

"When Sabina was working in the student brigade, her soul poisoned by the cheerful marches issuing incessantly from the loudspeakers, she borrowed a motorcycle one Sunday and headed for the hills. She stopped at a tiny remote village she had never seen before, leaned the motorcycle against the church, and went in. A mass happened to be in progress. Religion was persecuted by the regime, and most people gave the church a wide berth. The only people in the pews were old men and old women, because they did not fear the regime. They feared only death.

The priest intoned words in a singsong voice, and the people repeated them after him in unison. It was a litany. The same words kept coming back, like a wanderer who cannot tear his eyes away from the countryside or a man who cannot take leave of life. She sat in one of the last pews, closing her eyes to hear the music of the words, opening them to stare up at the blue vault dotted with large gold stars. She was entranced.

What she had unexpectedly met there in the village church was not God; it was beauty."

When I read those words for the first time, I was in the passenger seat of my mother's car riding towards Winston-Salem on highway 52. For a small portion of the journey from Mount Airy to Winston, it appears as if Pilot Mountain has been placed right in front of the highway. It looks like a barrier, like if you were to keep driving, you would eventually drive right into the mountain. And when I read the line "it was beauty," for the first time, something inside of me clicked so intensely that Pilot Mountain really could have been blocking the road, and my mother really could have crashed our car into it, and I really would not have even noticed. My thoughts would still be consumed by those words.

I blame this on the religious conflictions I have struggled with for as long as I can remember.

My parents and I moved here from Florida when I was four years old, and one of my very first memories is spotting a huge white bus in the parking lot of our town's Lowes Foods store. Of course, I was intrigued by a vehicle so large, and my one true wish became to sit on its broken leather seats and look through its tinted windows.

Luckily for us, the people who were responsible for the bus noticed my fascination and explained that it was a church bus.

They offered to pick me up on Sundays, and of course my parents had no objections. I was thrilled.

I rode to church with those people every sunday for nearly twelve years.

My mind is filled with memories of the bus: memorizing Bible verses for one-dollar bills, crawling on its floors and coming home with my "pretty white tights" covered in black dirt, listening to various bus workers read Bible stories from a children's book, spilling my Sam's Choice soda all over the floor, getting in trouble for dipping peanut butter nabs into my Dr. Thunder. And at one point, I even remember "giving my life to God," and "getting saved," as my church called it.

I had tried many times before; I would ask God, beg him even, to take my soul away from me and use it for something better. I would sit uncomfortably in my pew and watch sobbing people of all ages get on their hands and knees and ask for forgiveness and permission into Heaven.

This had never happened for me, as much as I longed for it to, and for years I wondered what exactly I was missing spiritually.

Redemption eventually happened for me, too, though.

My salvation took place at a movie theatre on July 23rd, 2007. The preacher at this particular youth conference had just given a sermon that finally seemed to reach me deeply enough for me to actually give my whole entire life away to God.

I remember being pulled to the alter, which was really a stage, and praying to God like I never had before. I remember weeping and being overwhelmingly overjoyed and feeling so complete.

It wasn't long, though, before these feelings began to fade. Doubt haunted me, and I would always run from it, using my spiritual experiences as evidence for God's existence.

How could I have felt a spiritual stirring overpowering enough to make me literally cry without a supernatural being causing it? It simply didn't make sense.

And even now, even though I have considered myself agnostic for nearly a year, none of those spiritual experiences have made sense until today.

That was, until I read the line "it was beauty."

As my mom continued to drive down highway 52 towards the mountain, I put my book down and thought of all the songs that make me want to weep simply for how lovely they are. I thought of all the books and movies that have moved me because of their beautiful love stories. I thought of the trees in Autumn and how wonderful it is to get my feet soaked in puddles while running across a rainy campus under my best friend's umbrella. I thought of how she understood what I meant when I explained my feelings about the book. I thought of how Anne Frank was still able to believe people were good at heart after experiencing something as horrendous as the holocaust, after living hidden in an attic for so long. I thought of the boy who once said my face was something worth living for. I thought of how rare but beautiful my mother's laughter is.

It was as if all at once, all of the world's beauty had fallen right into my mom's Oldsmobile. I felt so enlightened, so complete, and so happy. Even more, these feelings were not unlike the ones I had experienced in that old movie theatre the night of my salvation. They were proof that perhaps a God does not have to be behind spiritual experiences. Maybe, like Sabina, what I experienced that night was merely beauty.

And really, what isn't beautiful about love that never changes, forgiveness, community, happiness, meaning, and goodness? And even more importantly, why can't these things exist even if God may not?

The lovely things in the world - best friends, Autumn, music, mountains, love - should always be something worth sharing and appreciating, whether a higher power asks us to or not.

Of course, I am still unsure about my beliefs in God, and I probably always will be, but life should be beautiful no matter who you are living it for.