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      Chapter 1: The Dream of Beauty

      “The teleology of the Universe is directed toward the production of Beauty.”

      – Alfred North Whitehead4

      I once defined Beauty as “that which glistens on the edges of our yearnings and lures us into the depth of things.”5 This definition was born of the marriage between process theology and my personal experience in the arts. Growing up a musician, artist, and dancer, I longed for a spiritual home that took account of the tender experiences of Beauty in this world. As a deeply religious person, I struggled inwardly to harmonize an all-good God with the realities of hunger, injustice, and war. The problem of evil and suffering hovered over my young life, eventually leading me to a religious crisis.

      After I discovered the God whom Alfred North Whitehead described as “the poet of the world,”6 everything changed for me. I read the Bible differently. I began to let go of the traditional God of the philosophers and embraced the relational God whose character is love and whose vision is Beauty. This story of God comes in many different expressions. But for those of us who find our religious identity under the umbrella of progressive Christianity and/or process theology, we see this God of love and Beauty unfolding in a special way in the compassionate ministry of Jesus. This divine image writes itself into our intimate lives as Deep Empathy—the very real Presence in whom we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). This God does not act unilaterally as an all-powerful Greek deity or a policeman in the sky. Rather, this God feels our pain and transforms our suffering with all the creative energies of a divine Poet.

      Whitehead also suggested that Beauty is God’s vision for the world—the very dream of God. What does this dream look like? How can we define Beauty (with a capital B) in this divine and cosmic sense?

      Intense Harmony

      Our culture often uses the word “beauty” in the shallow and rigidly narrow sense of glamor or prettiness. That long-standing distortion has some philosophical precedence in the aesthetic works of two eighteenth-century philosophers, Edmond Burke and Immanuel Kant.

      Kant, in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, developed Burke’s idea of relegating beauty to the realm of the feminine, while suggesting an even higher category of finer feeling called the “sublime,” which was understood by the male sensibility alone.7 Kant and Burke spoke of the sublime as the feeling one has when gazing at mountain peaks, raging storms, and night. The beautiful was limited to the gentler beauties of flower beds, grazing flocks, and daylight. Naturally, the

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