The Inconsolable Secret

On essential natures; their goodness, and their foundation of the soul.

“Fūkeiga,” by Andō, Hiroshige, 1797-1858

Note: the next few dispatches here will outline a few of the larger elements that shape my thought on the nature of beauty and our relationship to it. I hope that you find these thoughts as compelling as I do. The below dispatch relates to the importance of what I have come to call natura in all things, which is one of the governing realities of beauty. Next week’s will related to the obscuring or degradation of natura by things hostile to it. This will, I promise, all very much be going someplace interesting.

-P

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In the late summer of 2017, my family was displaced from our home for two weeks as the Eagle Creek wildfire ravaged Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. Thanks to the bravery of many wildland firefighters, our home was spared, but over 50,000 acres of beautiful rainforest was burned, the fireline coming to the very edge of my family’s property.

I will take many memories away from that experience, but one of the most beautiful and unexpected came the following February. The winter rains had washed away much of the ash and charred topsoil from burned portions of the forest, and there, just before the flush of electric green that comes after a burn, I was astounded at the treasures that were to be found in the woods.

The surface of the ground glittered. Raw quartz crystals, banded agates (some as large as my fist), Oregon jasper, sardonyx like dark oil swirled in wine, and my favorite—translucent blood-red carnelians by the dozen. The treasures of the forest, having laid in the duff and loam for who knows how many hundred years, had come into the light. The fire had exposed what had been hidden.

In the next few dispatches here, I would like to present you with several ideas. They are, I believe, urgent and important. But before anything else, they are beautiful, and they all, in their way, are held within that image of ancient crystals glittering amid fresh ashes—the goodness that happens when some goodness is exposed by the difficult blessing of fire. 

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The first idea has two parts: the goodness of nature, and the nature of the soul.

“Nature” is a word we do not think enough about. Often, we use it to describe the living world when it is allowed to exist undefined by human will. A forest grows as the light and water determine, and we call it natural. The Latin root (from which we also draw the word natal) means simply “birth,” but from ancient times natura (“nature”) also reflected those qualities with which one was born; the contours of one’s essential being. Thus, it is the natura of stone to be hard. It is the natura of water to follow the path of least resistance, always downward. It is the natura of fire to move upward. Water that flowed uphill would be either a miracle or a horror, for it would be essentially and profoundly against its nature. So would it be if the mud moved about like wind, or if the fire was cold, or if the air clotted and fell like soil.

This natura is present in all living things. The natures of the elements are simple and easily described. Harder, but still recognizable, is the essential being of the oak tree (different from the fir or the cottonwood), or the nature of the cat (different from the fish or the dog). Much of being a human involves learning to exist in this world, so full of what the Book of Genesis calls “kinds.”

Each “kind,” from the rose to the raptor, has its essential way of being, a way which is, in the eye of the Creator, good. It fits and belongs in balance with all things, and shows forth uniqueness and perfection according to—and because of—its natura. This system, so resounding and complex, is the beauty and goodness of the world. All the natural processes of differention and evolution serve this creative purpose; all is under the loving eye of the Creator, who witnesses and guide the whole by means of gift, of calling forth with the eternal blessing: “be fruitful and multiply!”

This is all true of the human species, and specially true of the human species. For added to the overall natura of homo sapiens sapiens is the reality that because of our innate and individual personhood, each of us bear a natura that may manifest its uniqueness and “fit” in creation in a way that no one else can. The old encouragements of Mr. Rogers rise above therapeutic platitudes to become statements of eternal weight: “You are special. There is no one like you.”

This, in the words of C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory, relates to the “inconsolable secret in each one of you.” There is an inward knowledge that within us, within all people, rests an individual and staggering potential—to be us. To really be the real us. To live, according to our nature, as only we could, and by so doing to find that we fit into the whole tapestry, the whole woven picture of the created order. This is the way of things. This is to be in the way of things, of the way of things. This is the “weight of glory.” It is our response to this reality that Lewis says, is

the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

You, dear reader, know this feeling, do you not? You have brushed it at surprising moments in your life. It has leapt upon your flank, like a puma. You know, though you are not sure what to do with this knowledge, that you are something that has never been before, and will never be again. You notice, when you think about it now, that the moments that have most broken in and pierced you with this inconsolable secret, have been moments in which you encountered some profound natura.