The beauty of the familiar

There is a beauty in the familiar.

So much of what is pitched to us in art, music, culture, religion is rooted in novelty. The ability to shock whether in subverting beauty or normalcy or to surprise by mixing up expectations is what constitutes attractiveness. A new liturgy, an artwork that degrades some accepted form of past centuries or a piece of music that distorts. In all of it the core attraction is the shock of unfamiliarity.

But true beauty is rooted in familiarity. The look of your wife waking up beside you, the same face you have seen for year upon year. The buildings of the town you grew up in plastered with the same ads and windows but shot through with memories and the quiet awareness of days and weeks and years of life shared with them. The seasons of the year, new and old at the same time, familiar in the sameness of cold and hot, life and death. We recognize the falling leaf, the turning color but its familiarity is not boring; it is beautiful. If all the trees started dying and it had never happened before it would not attract us; it would terrify us. Fall is beautiful because we have seen it before we know what will happen.

There is beauty in seeing and knowing and feeling the same things. For the things that last have a depth, a richness that does not exhaust itself with a gasp of surprise. That depth is, in fact, beauty, the beauty of the infinite and the unchanging, glimpsed here in an unchanging world, in things that do not change but live with us and accompany us day in and day out.

Heaven will not surprise us with its beauty. It will feel like we have been there for a thousand years before, like we have always lived there, like we are at home.