Crooked Lines

I’m sharing some short nature-based spiritual reflections from my forthcoming book “Jesus Walks” I’m working on this summer. As you read these, try to imagine sitting at a park or by a lake on a perfect summer day. Enjoy!

When I consider the work of your fingers, what is mankind that you are mindful of them? (Psalm 8)

Setting: Find a place where both natural and manmade structures are visible. Spend a few minutes comparing the shape and lines in nature (tree trunks, rocks, lakes and rivers) with the shape and lines of the manmade buildings and structures you see. What do you notice? How are they similar? How are they different?

While carpenters and civil engineers, building codes and inspectors have good reasons for requiring straight walls and level foundations, the Creator of the universe seems to have other ideas. Humans prefer flat roads and level bridges and right angles and flush edges and symmetrical designs. Meanwhile, God delights in crooked lines and twisted branches and snaking rivers and sloping hillsides and asymmetrical formations.

Ancient Greek philosophers used the laws of math, like proportion, symmetry, and size, to determine if something was beautiful. As Aristotle wrote, “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree” (Metaphysics). According to him, a beautiful figure was one that was well-sized, well-ordered, and proportional.

Some Greek philosophical ideals found their way into Christian theology through the centuries, giving us notions of God as the perfect, First Cause or Unmoved Mover; a stoic Deity without change, above human emotions, existing outside of time and beyond the vicissitudes of our wild, ever-changing, imperfect human lives on this planet.

This conception of a God of mathematical perfection is hard to reconcile with the God who created a world so full of rough surfaces, crooked lines and oblong beauty. I find comfort knowing that after all my failed attempts at building a straight and level life, the handiwork of God’s creation all around me is constantly trying to remind me that God doesn’t create straight lines and he loves working with bent, crooked, and off-kilter things like me. That’s good news!

REFLECT & DISCUSS

How do you define beauty and perfection?
Do you prefer to color inside the lines or outside?
Do we find any perfectly straight lines in nature?
Spend time resting in the fact that God loves imperfect things and is a master at working with crooked material.