Canvas

As I was leaving work today, I looked to the west and saw a beautiful sunset. My first thought was "this is so beautiful it ought to be a painting." But why should I somehow think that the sky is a canvas somehow unworthy of such beauty?

Consider that a painting is but the application of soluble dyes to paper or parchment, a limited perspective that cannot capture the intricate detail of a single sunset. Is it more amazing that we can create such small works of art (even a mural with the surface area of a city would be dwarfed by the size of a sunset), or that such beauty can be painted in the very air itself?

Imagine that you had the freedom to move about a single sunset and examine it from the infinite perspectives from which it exists. Here, behind a tree; here from on a roof; here from above the clouds. If you turn around, you see the colors that light the sky painting the whole horizon. How could a two-dimensional canvas ever show such magnificence? And yet, these colors change moment-to-moment as the sun rises and sets every day.

Should a sunrise or sunset be less valuable because we know that it comes through the refraction of light as it hits the atmosphere in our locality at a sharp angle, preferring the red end of the spectrum instead of the normal blue? Or should we celebrate that the Universe is so designed that the sky has been painted twice a day since the beginning of the world with a unique display never again to be seen?

I once had the marvelous experience of flying from Salt Lake City to Reno as the sun was setting - a flight chasing the sunset. As the plane left the terminal, the sun was dipping behind the mountains. As we rose, the sun reappeared, brought back from our new perspective. Not until we began to circle for descent into Reno were the last colors of that sunset fading, such that by the time I emerged from the airport night had fallen.

As the flight went just so much to the south that I could not see the sun itself suspended in the sky, I got to watch clouds change ever-so-slowly from a dazzling orange to a soft pink, fading in the background to darkness. I considered myself amazingly fortunate to see such a thing, and yet most of the people on the flight closed their window shades, hiding from the beauty that was out there whether or not they cared to see it.

Only a few children on the other side of the plane noticed, reminding me of something I read in C.S. Lewis (who I believe was inspired by G.K. Chesterton in this): that we see repetition as mundane and so we attribute a deist's clockmaker to the role of God - one who sets the Universe on its course but does not take part, whereas perhaps to God daisies are not all alike because of simple genetic repetition, but because God loves those daisies and like a child amused at a trick says "Do it again!" That sin hardens us to the simple pleasures and that "our Father is younger than us, for we have sinned and grown old."