Beauty quiets us in a noisy world, but it also helps slow us down. When humans work they reflect the image of a God who works. But we also image God when we rest, because God is a God who rests (Gen. 2:2–3). “The essence of being in God’s image is our ability, like God, to stop,” writes Peter Scazzaro. “We imitate God by stopping our work and resting.” And yet this is countercultural in a digital world where every moment can be optimized for productivity. The biblical notion of Sabbath challenges this mindset because it calls us to “build the doing of nothing into our schedules each week. . . . By the world’s standards it is inefficient, unproductive, and useless.”
Beauty and Sabbath go hand in hand. Both are extravagant. Unproductive. Unnecessary. Both are reflections of God’s abundance and reminders that the world is chiefly a gift to receive, not a prize to be earned. Beauty doesn’t have to exist. The fact that humans delight in sunsets, symphonies, and well-proportioned faces has no bearing on our survival as a species. Mankind’s pleasure in poetry and pecan pie cannot be explained by the Darwinian account of human existence. The only explanation that makes sense of beauty is that we are created in the image of God who relishes it; a non-utilitarian God.
Just look at the ten thousand species of birds in the world, or the four hundred thousand species of flowers; each unique in color, shape, and texture. Consider the diversity of spices—from cumin to cayenne to nutmeg and turmeric. God could have created the world so that humans only needed to eat a bland, gruel-like substance in order to survive, but he didn’t. He created thousands of edible plants and animals, from which millions of culinary combinations could be made. He created humans with taste buds to appreciate things like salted caramel gelato, buttermilk fried chicken, and lamb tagine. Just as he is a God who not only creates but pauses to enjoy what he has created (Gen. 1:31), so he created us with the capacity to enjoy. That’s why beauty exists.
When we refuse to observe the Sabbath and don’t allow space for the enjoyment of beauty, we implicitly signal a scarcity mentality that doubts the goodness of God. But when we do stop to rest, to feast, to “smell the roses” as they say, we display a contentedness and calm acceptance about the world and the one who holds it together—a confidence that however tragic and unpredictable it is, we can still pause for a party (or a nap).
Josef Pieper wisely compares the ability to enjoy leisure with the ability to sleep: “A man at leisure is not unlike a man asleep,” he writes. “When we really let our minds rest contemplatively on a rose in bud, on a child at play, on a divine mystery, we are rested and quickened as though by a dreamless sleep.”
This post is an adapted excerpt from my book, The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World (Crossway, February 2021).