This Beautiful Truth

1. Suffering Challenges Our Understanding of God's Goodness

Those words haunted me: ah, they do still. They severed what had been my last line of scrappy but radiant trust in God’s love, in beauty, that held me sane throughout the dark episodes of my childhood.

Inadequate explanations. The author's journey through mental illness (OCD) began with a profound sense of bewilderment and the inadequacy of conventional theological answers to suffering. Phrases like "God's will" or "everything happens for his glory" felt hollow and even cruel when confronted with the intimate destruction of her mind and the pain of loved ones. This intellectual approach to pain often makes God seem distant or even complicit in evil.

Personal crisis. At seventeen, a severe onset of OCD plunged the author into a world of intrusive, terrifying images, making her question everything she believed about God's goodness and presence. This personal crisis highlighted how suffering can unravel faith when God is perceived as an abstract concept rather than a compassionate, present being. The experience revealed a "rival story" to the world's beauty—one of brokenness, guilt, and despair.

Theological struggle. The author's theological studies initially presented God as a client needing legal defense against human anguish, further alienating her. She struggled with theories of sovereignty and determinism that seemed to attribute suffering directly to God's intention, leading to a profound sense of betrayal and fear. This intellectual wrestling, however, eventually paved the way for a more experiential understanding of God.

2. Beauty is God's Tangible Answer to Our Deepest Pain

God’s answer to Job’s suffering was just . . . beauty, and it was so thorough and true that Job was satisfied.

Experiential truth. The author discovered that beauty is God's "theodicy"—not an argument, but an offering, a tangible encounter with His goodness that transcends intellectual explanations. These "knowings" were sudden, profound moments where nature, music, or art broke through her despair, offering a visceral sense of hope and love.

• The lilt of a Celtic song healing the world.
• A blazing sunset making her feel whole and loved.
• The gleam of apples on a table promising joy.

Beyond reason. In a world that often dismisses imagination and emotion as trivial, the author learned to trust these moments of beauty as direct communion with her Maker. She realized that God speaks not just through words or doctrine, but through the potent language of image and experience, allowing her to "taste and see" His goodness in the midst of her brokenness. This challenged the modern tendency to reduce God to a collection of facts.

Incarnational reality. Beauty, in this context, is not an escapist fantasy but a revelation of God's incarnate loveliness. It reminds us that the material world, once made sacred by Christ's embodiment, is "crammed with heaven." These moments of grace immerse us in something opposite to disintegration, allowing us to touch hope and taste healing, proving that God is present and actively working to restore the broken world.

3. Righteous Wrestling Leads to Authentic Faith

To wrestle with God—to grip him like Jacob with hungering, angry hands—is the work of every person born into a fallen world.

Necessary struggle. The author's initial breakdown led her to a pine glade where she wrestled with God, much like Jacob. This intense, honest grappling with anger, bewilderment, and accusations against God's goodness was not a sign of failing faith, but its very beginning. She realized that doubt, terror, and anguish are not marks of sin, but integral parts of a genuine spiritual journey in a fallen world.

Beyond neat answers. Her wrestling revealed the inadequacy of "pat theological assumptions" that try to neatly package suffering. She found that God did not offer explanations or rebuke her anger, but rather met her in her anguish, making her struggle a "holy thing." This encounter taught her that to grip God with all her fear and doubt was not the end of faith, but a deeper engagement with a mysterious, loving Beloved.

Defying despair. The author learned that the real risk to faith is not to wrestle. When she stopped wrestling, she became susceptible to false ideas about God—a menacing, distant deity who used suffering to control. Her experience in a Polish art museum, contrasting a golden age with the horrors of war, mirrored her own internal galleries of beauty and pain, forcing her to choose which story to believe and to actively fight for hope.

4. God's Love is Incarnational, Healing in the Ordinary

God is the Lover and Maker, the Friend and Creator, and he makes himself known in the tastable, touchable wonder of his world.

Sacramental world. The author's experience at a garden feast, after a period of intense intellectual struggle and spiritual starvation, revealed God's love in a tangible, ordinary way. The taste of strawberries, the warmth of human affection, and the beauty of the summer world became a "sacramental" experience, demonstrating that God is known not just through abstract thought but through the senses. This challenged her ingrained belief that such "trivialities" were separate from spiritual truth.

Beyond intellectualism. Her pursuit of theological "facts" in Oxford, hoping to find God like a solution to a science experiment, left her empty and broken-hearted. She realized that "knowing" God is not merely intellectual assent but a profound, embodied experience. The Eucharist, in particular, became a pivotal moment, revealing Christ's body "broken for you" as the ultimate act of love, making God's goodness palpable and accessible.

God's self-giving. The author understood that God doesn't just give beautiful things; He gives Himself. This self-giving, rooted in Christ's incarnation, makes all of creation sacred again. Our physical existence, our homes, our relationships, and even the food we eat become avenues for experiencing God's love. This realization allowed her to move beyond a negative understanding of salvation (escaping hell) to a positive one: God actively reclaiming and transforming every aspect of our broken lives.

5. Community and Hospitality Create Outposts of Heaven

In her generosity, in her offering not just a warm bed and good food and conversation but also the way she led me to dwell deeply within the beauty of the island, to be quiet and untroubled, I had been sheltered.

Refuge in belonging. During a period of deep depression and feeling like a "thundercloud of a soul," the author found refuge in the unexpected hospitality of a woman on the Isle of Skye. This experience of being welcomed, fed, and cared for, without expectation, quietly dismantled her sense of isolation and failure. The hostess's home became an "outpost of the kingdom of heaven," demonstrating God's love through tangible acts of kindness.

Homemaking as defiance. The author realized that God is a "homemaking God," and that creating spaces of welcome and beauty is a defiant act against the forces of evil and disintegration. This work is not just for artists or saints, but for all who are "indwelt by the living Spirit of the Creator." It involves:

• Ordering and nourishing the earth.
• Creating spaces where new life and love can flourish.
• Offering hospitality to the lost and lonely.

Incarnational presence. The presence of Christ in our lives empowers us to reclaim fallen circles of existence. Just as Jesus made the earth a home again wherever he went, we are called to embody God's loveliness in our own lives and spaces. This transforms our ordinary rooms, meals, and relationships into sacred places where others can "taste and see" God's reality, making our lives a shelter for the sorrowing.

6. Time Can Be Redeemed Through Sacred Rhythms and Celebration

This was what I mourned as I sat in the red light of a Holy Saturday sunset, bereft of fellowship, liturgy, prayer, and most powerfully, of celebration.

Time's unraveling. The author's OCD often stripped time of meaning, turning it into a "torturous thing" filled with dread and disconnected minutes. The COVID-19 lockdown, with its enforced solitude and suspension of normal life, brought back this sense of time as a "vast, unformed space" threatening to smother optimism. This experience highlighted how suffering can disconnect us from a sense of purpose and a hopeful future.

Hallowing time. Her discovery of Anglican liturgy revolutionized her devotional life, teaching her to hallow time. Daily services, chanting psalms, and following the church year's rhythms transformed time from a vacant space into a "created space in which God's goodness danced." This liturgical cadence tethered her individual story to the larger, eternal narrative of Christ's life invading the world, offering a "fruition of illimitable life" rather than an endless series of identical moments.

Celebration as defiance. True celebration, rooted in a larger hope, becomes a radical act against brokenness. Like Lila in Marilynne Robinson's novel, who learned to imagine a hopeful future, the author found that shaping her hours to receive Christ—through family prayer, limiting internet use, lighting candles, and making feasts—transformed her lonely days into "kairos," God's time. This intentional living defies nihilism and reclaims time as a place where God's kingdom continues to invade the broken world.

7. Tangible Love Defies Isolation and Remakes the World

Love turns loneliness backward and remakes the world.

The pain of touch. The author's mental illness made her fear touch, believing she might contaminate others and preferring isolation as a shield. Her deepest fear was that her brokenness made her unlovable. This self-imposed isolation, though a defense mechanism, intensified her loneliness and prevented her from receiving the very affection she craved.

Mother's embrace. A moment of profound terror during a night of OCD-induced dreams led her to call her mother, who, without hesitation, got into bed with her and held her. This physical act of love, a "powerful grace," broke through her isolation and fear, cleansing her and allowing her to hope again. It was a visceral experience of love's power to shatter the "closed horizons of suffering" and make God's love imaginable.

Love's embodiment. The author realized that God's hand often comes "clothed in the skin of another." Her future husband, Thomas, met her confession of mental illness with simple acceptance and a steady gaze, saying, "I love you. You don't have to do anything to earn that from me or be anything different than you are." This tangible, unwavering love, rooted in God's own affection, encompassed her brokenness and renewed her belief in her worthiness, demonstrating that love is a "vast thing far greater and sweeter" than she had feared.

8. Art and Imagination Rekindle Hope and Vision in Darkness

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending . . . is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.

Vision in despair. During her twenties, trapped in a limbo between dreams and disability, the author found herself unable to draw hope from the world. Art, however, became a powerful agent of rescue. A painting like Jules Breton's "The Song of the Lark" offered a vision of a weary girl transfigured by beauty, rekindling her capacity to believe that such a song could break into her own bleak days. This experience demonstrated how art can cut imaginations free from despair.

Art as theology. The author realized that art, story, and music are not frivolous but "powerful agents of vision," capable of communicating deep theological truths nonverbally. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, for instance, became a "book that turned darkness into light" for her, reflecting her inner struggles and offering a world where courage and beauty defied evil. This imaginative encounter renewed her capacity to see God's beauty in His Word and world.

Creative calling. Inspired by writers like Denise Levertov, the author understood that beauty calls us to create. This is not just for "artists" but for all who are remade by love, partnering with God in healing the world. Her own struggle with self-doubt and the fear that her brokenness would mar her creations was challenged by the realization that sharing her inner visions is an act of obedience and generosity, offering hope to a hungering world.

9. Sainthood is a Hidden Life of Fidelity, Transforming Suffering

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.

Suffering's invitation. The author's illness became the crucible in which she understood the call to sainthood. Like Job, whose righteousness in suffering defied Satan's claims, her pain invited her to a deeper faith—not because God willed it, but because it offered a chance to engage with His radical goodness. Sainthood, she realized, is not about great strength or visible achievements, but about making space for God's goodness to fill and transform darkness.

Hidden glory. Sainthood is often a "hidden glory," found in quiet souls faithfully working in difficult, ordinary lives. The author's "tante" (aunt), Gwen, exemplified this by moving from a sophisticated life in Vienna to care for her mother with Alzheimer's in a forgotten town. Gwen's home, "Eben Haus," became a "halcyon space"—a place of peace and goodness amidst storms—because she cultivated it with love and artistry, demonstrating that "diminishment is not a word Gwen ever met."

Fidelity and legacy. Gwen's life taught the author that true sainthood is about fidelity—to God, to place, and to people. It's about opening oneself wholly to receive God's goodness in whatever circumstances, transforming limitations into opportunities for radiant love. This quiet faithfulness becomes the "soil for the stories of our children and our spouses, our neighbors and our friends," making God's love tangible and leaving a legacy of hope that mends the broken world.