Within Boundaries
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote American poet Robert Frost. We fallen humans chafe against restrictions, and especially the perceived oppression of the Bible. “Being a Christian is so limiting,” we argue. We have forgotten that these are not walls of oppression, but of protection. I hope to show with the following passages that limitations, enclosures, and boundaries are critical to the flourishing of beauty, creativity, contentment, meaningful individuality, full potential, liberty, discovery, and even romance. Does that sound so contradictory? Let us see.
Most of what I will be sharing here are the writings of the wise who have gone before me. (By the way, Wendell Berry and G. K. Chesterton should be on the reading list of every high-schooler and those beyond!) This theme of flourishing within boundaries is one that seems to thread its way through much of my reading. In fact, it keeps cropping up.—Next Sister and Biggest Brother each had to write an essay on the subject for their SAT. Next Sister concluded her essay, “From what I can see, rules, limitations, and restraints do not limit our happiness, but, rather, attempt to further it. What influences our happiness is how we take those rules, limits, and restraints. Will we take them well or otherwise?”
We will begin our exploration with these beautiful words of poetry from the best Book.
A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse:
a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates,
with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,
Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon,
with all trees of frankincense;
myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spice:
A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters,
and streams from Lebanon.
—Song of Songs 4:12-15
Beauty within Bounds
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
—G. K. Chesterton
The most beautiful things are often the most structured.—A sonnet, a Baroque concerto, a masterful oil painting, an old dance. When creativity is unbounded by moral structure it becomes insane and ugly.—profanity passed as poetry; dissonance passed as music; shuffling and weird gyration passed as dance; so-called art that is shocking, obscene, or meaningless. Why? Because, as Thomas Carlyle expressed it, “the fine arts, once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.”
Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense... They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.
—G. K. Chesterton, Everlasting Man
Am I trying to say that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder?—that I can’t decide just anything to be beautiful ‘to me’? Yes, I emphatically am. If this bothers you, please read my previous post Daily Art: Musical Notes. Also, the following passage is wonderful.
I would go so far as to say that beauty is defined by God and by his original intentions of creation. And the subjective relativity that many see in Beauty and Truth is a post-fall view held by those whose hearts are not necessarily aligned with God’s heart. In a sense, their hearts are out of tune with the divine resonance....
The longing for the infinite and our longing for beauty is universal and, I believe, related. That is why it is so important to understand the objectivity of beauty apart from the subjectivity of our personal experiences of it. In a sense, it is not beauty that is subjective, but our response to it, which is a result of free will—those whose hearts are out of frequency with the fundamental frequency, whose hearts don’t beat as God’s heart beats. Because God is the author of beauty. And he is the inventor of the unspoken aesthetic within us that resonates with beauty.
—Manuel Luz, Imagine That: Discovering Your Unique Role
as a Christian Artist
Creativity and Contentment
In a materialistic age, creativity has become an expensive hobby, but real creativity is working within limits of time, material, and skill to produce something that is useful and beautiful. You don’t have to go places and spend money to be creative; be content and use what you already have. Now, that requires real imagination!
The construction and banking industries are eager to sell us the extra space we crave. The self-storage industry is booming too as more and more people find themselves with more possessions than they have room for. But might it be possible to find ways to live in the space we already have? To do so would require that accept the limits of that space and work creatively and contentedly within them. This is not an easy task when the premise of our culture is that limits are not compatible with either creativity or contentment.
Christian tradition on the other hand has been inclined to see limits as a necessary component of human flourishing. The limits imposed by dietary practices like fasting, by marriage, and by modest dress all contribute to helping people live in peaceable and fulfilling relationship to one another and to God. Perhaps the limits of our houses—limits of style or other sorts of limits—can similarly serve to provide us with specific arenas within which to live out our dependence on God and our interdependence on one another.
—Margaret Kim Peterson, Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life
The Bonds of Relationship
Our culture glorifies “self-actualization,” the realization of one’s own separate individuality. The precious relationships of husband and wife, parents and children, are compromised and even destroyed as individuals tirelessly pursue their own desires. More and more people are choosing not to marry or to have children because they fear the commitment, the limits, that those relationships would bring. We excuse, even celebrate, this brokenness. “I will be my own person!” is the triumphant cry, so different from the love that says, “I will lay down my life for thy sake.”
Wendell Berry deplores a society that pursues self-expression without regard to community. He asks whether we can actually separate ourselves from others, since our relationships with others form a large part of who we really are.
These ways of marriage, kinship, friendship, and neighborhood surround us with forbiddings; they are forms of bondage, and involved in our humanity is always the wish to escape... But involved in our humanity also is the warning that we can escape only into loneliness and meaninglessness. Our choice may be between a small, humanized meaning and a vast meaninglessness, or between the freedom of our virtues and the freedom of our vices. It is only in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth; it is only to people who know us, loves us, and depend on us that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are.
When we live within these human enclosures [marriage, kinship, friendship, and neighborhood], we escape the tyrannical doctrine of interchangeability of parts; in these enclosures, we live as members, each in its own identity necessary to the others.
—Wendell Berry, “Men and Women in Search of Common Ground”
Full Potential
In the following passage Wendell Berry remarks on the ugliness of a sunflower that is described tongue-in-cheek as having “realized its full potential as an individual.”—It is overgrown, rank, sprawling, unhealthy. Have you met a person like this?
Some time ago I was with Wes Jackson, wandering among the experimental plots at his home and workplace, the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. We stopped by one plot that had been planted in various densities of population. Wes pointed to a Maximilian sunflower growing alone, apart from the others, and said, “There is a plant that has ‘realized its full potential as an individual.’” And clearly it had: It had grown very tall; it had put out many long branches heavily laden with blossoms—and the branches had broken off, for they had grown too long and too heavy. The plant had indeed realized its full potential as an individual, but it had failed as a Maximilian sunflower. We could say that its full potential as an individual was this failure. It had failed because it had lived outside an important part of its definition, which consists both its individuality and its community. A part of its properly realizable potential lay in its community, not in itself.
—Wendell Berry, “Men and Women in Search of Common Ground”
Here Berry has presented a more personal application of the concept that real beauty is found in creativity within bounds. Our self-expression should be bounded by love for others.—self-sacrifice, humility, joyful submission, gentleness, compassion, forgiveness. Unfettered self-expression is destructive and ugly.—self-absorption, pride, rebellion, cruelty, vengefulness.
Liberty
There are those who would turn “the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and deny the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ” Jude 1:4. They reason that Jesus has set us free from all law, that we are free to do as we please. Christ will forgive all. The Book of Romans (indeed, all of the Gospel) is a brilliant and perfect explanation of the relationship of the Law and grace in the Christian’s life. “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin live any longer therein?” Romans 6:1-2.
When we were in bondage to sin, we were unwilling and even unable to do good. God’s Law was a burden, an anathema. Now we are free in Christ, free to do God’s Will, free to forsake self and love others, free to live and bear good fruit—not because God threatens us and prods us, but because we love Him so much that his slightest wish is our delight to fulfill. Obedience is not something we do gritting our teeth; it is something we seek, something we in which we take our purest pleasure. It may seem like an oxymoron, but the Gospel tells us of a “perfect law of liberty.” When we walk in the ways of God, we will find true and eternal freedom.
And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts.
—Psalm 119:45
But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.
—James 1:25
The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of is liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.
—G, K. Chesterton
They are free under authority, which is liberty; to be free without authority is license.
—Charlotte M. Mason
It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. This, which is true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.
—G. K. Chesterton, Manalive
Wild Discoveries
We live in an age of increased physical mobility (cars, airplanes) and increased mental-social mobility (internet, telephone), with the result that we know shockingly little about the places and people that actually surround us. Chesterton would say that one’s own family and neighbors are the most wildly exciting things because we don’t get to choose them. “We make our friends, we make our enemies, but God makes our next-door neighbor.” (See more on the subject under the heading “Providence and Romance.”)
If we were tomorrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known.
—G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
“On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family”
When more immediate resolutions to problems and needs are apparent elsewhere, we often fail to see the solutions that are under our very noses. Again, limits are a wonderful thing for discovery and creativity. In Chesterton’s novel Manalive, Innocent Smith explains that limits help us see what was always there but unnoticed. (The following is just a sample of a long, funny, and interesting passage on the subject. Please read the book!)
“Don’t you say a word against the ‘Swiss Family Robinson,’ cried Innocent with great warmth. “It mayn’t be exact science, but it’s dead accurate philosophy. When you’re really shipwrecked, you do really find what you want. When you’re really on a desert island, you never find it a desert. If we were really besieged in this garden, we’d find a hundred English birds and English berries that we never knew were here. If we were snowed up in this room, we’d be the better for reading scores of books in that bookcase that we don’t even know are there; we’d have talks with each other, good, terrible talks, that we shall go to the grave without guessing; we’d find materials for everything—christening, marriage, or funeral; yes, even for a coronation—if we didn’t decide to be a republic.”
—G. K. Chesterton, Manalive
Providence and Romance
So many want to decide their own destiny, and it is popular to say that there are no limits to what each of us can do. We certainly do try our limits in all areas of life!—But is the doctrine of God’s Divine Providence boring? Does it leave any room for romance, drama, and adventure? Actually, Chesterton argues that God’s Providence and our own limitations create the ideal environment for all three.
But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events. They are dull because they are omnipotent. They fail to feel adventures because they can make the adventures. The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect.
—G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
“On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family”
Do you see more clearly why the humanistic cry to remove all moral and social barriers is so utterly destructive? I’m continuing to ponder on this subject, and I’d love to know what you think!
For more about the beauty and fruitfulness that flourishes within limitations read my posts A Life That Bears Good Fruit, In Praise of Small Houses, The Largeness of Small Community, A Garden Inclosed, and The Well-Tempered Life.
Friday, June 10, 2011