The Beauty of It, Which Nobody Mentioned

The weather comes in off that headland faster than anybody who is not from there expects, and Bryony is not from there, and she is a mile and a half from the car.

There is a chapel about two hundred yards up the path. It is one of those small stone ones with a slate roof and a stone bench outside, and there is a sign saying it is open from Easter until the end of September, and it is the fourth of September, and the door gives when she leans on it.

Inside it is eleven feet by twenty and completely plain.

Eight pews. Whitewash. A slate floor with two hundred years of feet worn into it in a curve. A wooden table at the front with nothing on it. And one window, at the east end, with clear glass in it, looking straight out at the sea.

She stands in the doorway with rain running off her hood and stops dead.

It is the most beautiful room she has been in for years, and it is not decorated at all. There is nothing in it. It is beautiful the way a well made plain thing is beautiful: because every single decision in it was made properly by somebody who cared, and because none of them were made to impress anybody, and because the sea is doing the rest.

She sits in the third pew from the back with her wet coat on.

Bryony is forty-two and she has not been to anything for eleven years. She has nothing dramatic to report about that. She simply stopped, and the stopping was mostly about one word.

She grew up under it. Holy was the word that meant a certain kind of face on a certain kind of person. It meant severe. It meant a long list of things that were not good enough and a general atmosphere of being weighed. She has never once had a bad thing done to her by anybody in that world and she would defend most of them, and the word still lands on her chest like a wet coat.

And here is what she is sitting in the third pew realizing, with the rain going sideways past a clear window.

Nobody has ever once in her whole life used the word beautiful about it.

Serious, yes. High. Pure. Demanding. Awesome, in the proper sense. She has heard all of it and none of it is wrong. But not beautiful, not once, and she is sitting in a room that is unmistakably both.

You know that list of adjectives. Yours might be shorter or gentler. But run it now, honestly, and see whether the word beautiful has ever once been in it.

The phrase exists, and it is used four times

Here is the line, and I want you to notice that it is not a modern softening of anything. It is a very old phrase in a very old psalm.

Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name; worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.Psalm 29:2

The beauty of holiness. Those two words are joined, in Scripture, on purpose, by a Hebrew poet, and the joining happens four separate times: here, and in Psalm 96, and twice in Chronicles when the singers go out in front of the army.

Four times, and you have never once heard it in a sentence anybody said to you.

You have been handed half a vocabulary, and the other half was written down long before you were born. That is the written word and not my consolation in a wet chapel, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from a psalm about thunder and lays it in a room eleven feet by twenty with the rain going past.

Now, what kind of beauty. Because this is not a psalm about prettiness, and if you read it as prettiness you will lose it again by Thursday.

Psalm 29 is the loudest psalm in the book. It is seven verses about the voice of the LORD, and in it that voice breaks the cedars of Lebanon, shakes the wilderness, divides the flames of fire, and makes the hinds calve. It is enormous and it is not remotely safe.

And the line about beauty is at the top of it. Verse two. Before all the thunder.

So the beauty being described is the beauty of something immense and completely in order. It is the beauty of the sea out of that window, which is not pretty and is not tame and is the most beautiful thing on that headland. Severity was never wrong about the size of it. Severity was wrong about what the size of it feels like when you are actually standing in front of it.

Nobody had to make it beautiful

And here is the part I would want somebody to say slowly to you, in a plain room, with the rain outside.

Nobody has to add beauty to holiness. It is not an improvement project, and this message is not a rebranding.

The beauty is already in the word. It was in the word when David wrote it and when the singers walked out in front of Jehoshaphat's army singing praise the LORD, for his mercy endureth for ever, which is one of the four times the phrase is used and probably the strangest use of it in the Bible.

This is yours, and the beauty was in it before anybody described it to you badly, and it is already settled. Psalm 29 says the beauty of holiness in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who moved that psalm is the one making it a present fact in a woman in a wet coat in a third pew.

Let me guard it, because you are going to need this guarded if it is going to hold past the parking lot.

I am not telling you the serious people were wrong. They were not. Holiness is high and it is demanding and there is a proper trembling that belongs to it, and a version of this word with the weight taken out is not more beautiful, it is only lighter, and lighter is not what you came in out of the rain for.

What was missing was not seriousness. It was the other half of the sentence. You were given the size of it and never the beauty of it, and a thing that is enormous and not beautiful is simply frightening, and you have been frightened of a good word for eleven years.

And nobody in that world is being taken apart here. Most of them were handed the same half. Somebody, generations back, dropped two words out of a psalm, and it traveled down the line like a family trait, and there is no one in this chapel to blame for it.