Aesthetic Logic

My son just began piano lessons. He is learning about rhythm, melody, harmony, and plain old practice. He stops at the base of the stairs where the piano sits and plays simple lines, like Mary Had a Little Lamb. A beautiful thing that punctuates the day.

He is also learning—at a very subliminal level—to read and interpret signs. Musical notation is another language, full of signs, symbols, patterns. To translate it and play it is to employ what I call aesthetic logic, or the ability to receive and communicate the language of beauty.

As a culture, do we cultivate this aesthetic faculty of discerning patterns? The language of patterns lends purpose, meaning, and structure to life. I can’t state it better than Richard Rohr: “We have difficulty reading the meaningful patterns of our existence, and we remain unconvinced or even uninterested in our divine origins. This is a major crisis of meaning that results in a loss of hope and a lack of vision.”*

The Bible is full of patterns. Its logic is aesthetic. It wants you to read it for the signs, symbols, and the deeper reality to which those symbols point. There was a bird, hovering over the water of creation. There was a bird released over the water of the flood. There was a bird that landed on Jesus’ shoulder in the river. Do you see the arc, the rhyme, the pattern?

May the signs around me be illuminated by the signs You give. Amen.

*On the Threshold of Transformation: Daily Meditations for Men (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2010), p. 5.