“Each age has its own aesthetic needs…” I nodded when the audio guide made this observation on our weekend tour of the Frick collection. While I have no idea what needs this modern age requires, I nodded because I know that my own aesthetic need for beauty is as constant as a pulse, as life-giving as a heartbeat.
My husband and I found ourselves at the Frick last weekend, having escaped the chaos of our home for a short trip to New York City, where we planned to feast on art and architecture, good conversation and great food. When we arrived at the hotel, we immediately flopped onto our backs on top of the bed and sighed towards the ceiling. The room was simple, quiet, and devoid of anything requiring our immediate attention. We felt the generous weight of its silence.
As we lay there, I realized that what I’d initially seen as an opportunity to satiate my aesthetic needs with culture and beauty, was also going to be a blessed exercise in subtraction. We’d left behind two teenagers, a puppy with terrorist tendencies, thirty research papers to be graded, major home repairs, and living spaces stacked floor to ceiling with the contents of our basement.
Perhaps one of my deepest aesthetic needs is stillness. Subtraction. Silence.
As I’ve grown older, I feel the pull to establish these practices in my inner life, as my outer life fills with the complexities of middle age and its abundance. I realized a few days ago how quickly Advent will be upon us, and the thought came to me as an open invitation. During the abundance of the holiday season, Advent is an invitation to soul stillness and inner quiet. It is an open door to expectancy and waiting.
I need Advent to remind me that a hushed soul is not an impossible state of being. It is the promise of Christ’s coming that makes inner peace possible–this quiet knowing that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well (Julian of Norwich). Like all of God’s people across the ages, I forget the rhythms of his grace. Advent is a time for me to remember that peace is a person. Waiting is a soul-sculptor. Stillness is an invitation to the Spirit.
Advent is an antidote to this age’s aesthetic addiction to busyness.
I know I’m not alone in fighting this tendency to allow life to envelop me with a forced urgency. I know I’m not the only one who needs an invitation to enter into a season of peace and inner silence. Last year, I created a short audio series: Journeying to Bethlehem to help us enter into the Advent season. I haven’t changed a word in the series, but I’ve had a few requests asking me to release it again this season.
I’d love to offer this devotional series again, so beginning this Sunday, November 25th, Journeying to Bethlehem will land in subscribers inboxes every Sunday for the next five weeks. I hope this series will meet your own particular aesthetic need for quiet and beauty this season.
If you haven’t joined my mailing list, and you’d like to receive the audio series, sign up here. I look forward to journeying towards Bethlehem together once again.
