A look into Christopher West's Eating the Sunrise

Why do you seem to have an unquenchable thrust for beauty? Why do you feel unsatisfied when taking in the vast expanse of the Grand Canyon? Questions like these and more are answered in Catholic Theologian, Christopher West’s, recent book, Eating the Sunrise. You may think, “What a ridiculous name for a book!” After reading this book, I promise it will make perfect sense. West, who is looked upon as the premier teacher of Theology of the Body, got the idea for the title from one of his students: “What kind of creatures are we that we experience hunger not for physical sustenance, but for beauty? Putting words to this profound cry of his heart, a student of mine once marveled, 'I don’t only want to behold the beauty of a sunrise. I want to eat it.' What an outstanding statement that perfectly sums up the longing of the human heart! In these next few paragraphs, I will give you a look into the first chapter of West’s wise text so that, maybe, you will be compelled to read it yourself!

West begins by detailing the beauty of his redbud trees in bloom. Their beauty “seduces” him, he says. But once those blooms die and fall to the ground, West laments their fleeting beauty. “Every year those brilliant dots of color try to seduce me. It’s as if they want me to feel how drawn I am to their beauty. But I’ve learned not to Fall for it. I’ll give their calling colors a quick nod, a minimal acknowledgment('Aren’t they pretty?'), but part of me doesn’t want to let the beauty in. Part of me doesn’t actually want to feel it. Because if I feel it, then I have to face my waking aching–that painful cry of my heart for…for…for what?” Employing a deeper introspection into his longing, West answers his question. He wants a beauty that lasts, one that never fades away like those redbud trees. But the problem is that those redbud trees could never fulfill his desire. They awaken his desire, but once they fall away and die, West feels crushing pain. So he’d rather keep that desire hidden and stuffed away than face his desire for infinite beauty. 

But what is beauty, anyway? Karol Wotjyla, the future John Paul II, answers and paints the mystery beautifully: “Everything that is beautiful draws us to itself. It delights us. There is a certain unique sensitivity to beauty in the human soul, a kind of musical string that vibrates when a person meets up with beauty. Beauty delights and attracts. And because it attracts, this indicates that there is something else beyond it, which is hidden”. As a violinist, I resonated with the image of the musical string that vibrates sympathetically with the tone of a note. It’s very true. When we encounter beauty, we can’t help but be moved to the depths of our soul. And in the hiddenness of beauty, says West, “we glimpse the deepest truth and meaning of the cosmos: it’s essential truth is it’s sacramentality–it’s ability to symbolize and communicate the absolute beauty that lies beyond it.” Sacramentality means that everything in the world communicates and reveals something beyond itself. But what? Beauty is everywhere, but in “this dispersion of beauty, no beauty is beautiful in the absolute sense. God alone is absolute beauty.” So when West admires his redbud trees, it awakens in him a desire for God Himself. 

The good news is that our God is a loving God. He is love Himself. He longs to quench our thirst for infinite Beauty. This is the good news of the gospel: Infinite Beauty became flesh to become nourishing food for us to eat. Catholics know well that in the liturgy of the Eucharist, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is represented and He is present on the altar through transubstantiation(the same appearance as bread, but a different substance of Christ’s body). So, we as Catholics have the amazing privilege of receiving Christ into our very bodies, and we become more like Him. “The King seems to refuse nothing to the Bride!” says St. Theresa of Avila. 

St Theresa is an example of someone who sees the world in a very contemplative light. “The Latin com + templum means roughly “to see within the temple”--to see the world as a temple, if you will; to see all things in a sacred light”. As West says, contemplation allows one to “recognize all that is true good, and beautiful in this world–from redbud trees to supernovas, from butterflies to buffalos, from wine itself to the wonder of the human body–as so many many signs of ultimate Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.” In and through contemplation, one is able to see these signs split open and reveal glorious divine secrets. He calls this kind of contemplation “a divine sense of humor”, meaning one is able to laugh will the sacraments all around us. Here, I’ll insert a good quote in the book from Fulton J. Sheen:

“A person is said to have a sense of humor if he can 'see through' things; one lacks a sense of humor if he cannot “see through” things…Our Lord has a divine sense of humor, because he revealed that the universe was sacramental. A sacrament, in a very broad sense of the term, combines two elements: one visible, the other invisible–one that can be seen, or tasted, or touched, or heard; the other unseen to the eyes of the flesh. There is, however, some kind of relation or significance between the two. A spoken word is a kind of sacrament, because there is something material or audible about it; there is also something spiritual about it, namely its meaning. A horse can hear a funny story just as well as a man. It is conceivable that the horse may hear the words better than the man and at the end of the story the man may laugh, but the horse will never give a horse laugh. The reason is that the horse gets only the material side of the “sacrament,” namely, the sound; but the man gets the invisible or the spiritual side, namely the meaning.”

West’s redbud trees are a kind of sacrament. When the petals burst open, revealing their lush and vibrant colors, they reveal a message to us incarnate-spirits. In the beginning, the Lord God made various trees that are delightful to look at, and Jesus Himself asks us to ponder what their beauty might be trying to reveal. “There’s a promise of eternal fulfillment foreshadowed in the beauty of creation,” says West, “The Eastern Church calls this experience of glimpsing uncreated beauty via created beauty theophany(theos - phainein in Greek means “to show God”).”

I’m sure you can think of times in life when you have experienced theophany. For me, I immediately think of my days as a cross-country runner in high school. For some reason, when I would go out on distance runs of the neighboring town at my school, it felt like I was running in a different dimension. The trees, sidewalk, sky, and passing cars all melted together to carry me to someplace higher. I never wanted to stop running when I felt it. I could have spent forever chasing that sunset. But alas, I couldn’t and that’s where the pain comes in. I also moved away from where I graduated high school, so the Virginia aura on my runs was no more. So I just have to accept the ecstasy I felt on those distance runs are just memories I can’t experience again, and I tuck them away safely in my heart..unless…

“You will not be unhappy; the desire of your heart will be fulfilled, what is more, it is already being fulfilled,” chime West’s redbud trees. But West says, “if I’m to learn to laugh with the sacramentality of those shimmering colors(to delight in them, yes, but more so, to delight in what they point to; to rejoice in their promise), I have to learn to weep with them too. As Joseph Ratzinger observed, we all experience that ‘primordial sensation which Nietzsche expressed in the words, ‘All joy wills eternity, wills deep, deep, eternity.’...What is glimpsed in [some moments] should never end. That it does end…is the real sadness of human existence.’ So, to authentically experience the joy of laughing along with the redbud trees, West says he has to feel the pain of their annual deaths – to let it break him. 

However, since Christ conquered death and sin, sadness, a byproduct of original sin, will not have the final say. We will rejoice in the end. “Weeping and laughing, pain and joy, dying and rising are written into creation itself. If I want to pass over to the lasting beauty and fulfillment to which those precious petals point, like them, I must be willing to fall to the ground and die.” This doesn’t sound desirable at all. We humans do not naturally prefer pain to joy. We fear death even more. But there is no way to circumvent suffering–or more strictly speaking, the cross– to step into eternal glory. (West expands on this point in the last chapter of the book - so you will have to read it yourself!)

What we have just covered can be summarized in three key points, as it is in West’s book: “1. We are made to slake our thirst at the fountain of infinite Beauty; 2: finite beauty is but a sign (theophany) of infinite beauty; 3: and to reach that everlasting Beauty, we must pass over from the sign to the reality signified via a painful dying that promises a glorious rising again.” We must treasure the fleeting beauties of this world rightly; meaning we recognize them as merely a sign of infinite Beauty lying beyond. If we don’t, we will expect the sign to satisfy our hunger, instead of God, which is how we sin against Him. 

Let’s back up a bit. What is this hunger we have called exactly? We know it is a universal hunger that has divine origins. As the Catechism says, “God has it in the human heart in order to draw man to the One who alone can fulfill it.” It is called eros, a borrowed word from the Greeks. Many are surprised to hear this because eros is how we get the word “erotic”. But as West says, “if we are to understand eros correctly…we must never confuse it with another Greek word, porneia.” The current culture in which we live has twisted the word erotic to conjure images in the mind of pornography upon hearing the word. But that is a gross misunderstanding. As ancient mystical writer Dionysus the Arepagite says, “Eros has its primal roots in the beautiful and the good: eros exists and comes into being only through the beautiful and good.”

We must also remember that the devil never gets his own clay. Everything that God created was good. The only thing the devil can do is twist it and contort it to his liking. The good news is that Christ came into the world to untwist the disfigured clay that the devil and sin caused. West often says that eros serves as the fuel that can take us to the stars but, “there’s an enemy who doesn’t want us to reach those stars, so his goal is to invert the engines of our desire.” Our post-fall condition is to cling to the finite, begging it to supply us with what the “Infinite One” can only provide us. But Christ comes into this mess to re-direct our engines to the stars. And the best part is that on our journey to the stars, we leave nothing behind. Because of Christ’s bodily assumption, everything is destined to be divinized. So in the end, we leave nothing good in this world. And indeed, we too, are destined to be divinized. Divinization means "to participate in the everlasting Beauty of the divine Life, the divine Ecstasy, the divine exchange of Love among the eternal persons of the Trinity: this is the true height to which eros is meant to launch us; this is the definitive goal of human life, to become 'partakers of the divine nature."

So there you have it, that is a glimpse into Christopher West's new book. If you want to discover how the sexual difference - "male and female he created them"- is a theophany of the Beatific Vision, buy West's book here: https://shop.corproject.com/products/pre-order-eating-the-sunrise-meditations-on-the-liturgy-and-our-hunger-for-beauty-paperback?srsltid=AfmBOooGNPXFJMSu0H8nAaQ07vKHCJtCbnlSkU6DAHmhRiNB9kFdU5hv