Without this beautiful river

David James Duncan writes about catching his first native trout in the Deschutes River:

By the time you hold the native in your hands it is you who has been caught; you who shines, and feels like silver; you who came, long ago, from water; you who suddenly can’t live without this beautiful river.
“First Native,” from River Teeth

For those of us who aren’t fly-fishers, what is this beautiful river that we can’t live without? This is something I get endlessly confused about and have for years and years. Therefore, this post is probably not going to make any sense. But I will go on. I will get it out of my system. What are blogs for?

I know the good Christian answer to my question is Jesus. Everything good is good because of him and everything beautiful is beautiful because of him. I love the spiritual:

You can have all this world,
Just give me Jesus.

I think it is beautiful because of the melody for sure. I think if the words have anything to do with it, it is because of the heartbreaking descent on the word “world,” which is beautiful because it is so sad. It reminds me of the rich young man who came to Jesus and went away very sad because of what he was asked to give up. It bothers me that the very beauty of the song hinges on this thing that is explicitly being renounced. Unless beauty is not considered part of this world.

It seems to me that there are many beautiful things in the world to inspire passion of the type that David James Duncan is talking about. I think that it’s possible there doesn’t have to be a renunciation of these things. Sometimes in my trajectory through the atmosphere I am grazed by Christian notions that seem to legitimize the world to some extent. I have heard things like this: the world is originally good, but historically corrupted, but slated for restoration at some point. These are attractive notions to a lover of this world.

I recently read an essay by a guy I’ve never heard of that seems to deal with some of these questions about beauty and God. It is a pretty vague piece, but it seems to approach the whole question from the other side as the one I am presenting now and comes to an intriguing conclusion:

I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God.

I’m not sure I understand the rest of his essay. But it interests me precisely because of the angle it comes from. Among Christians, there is so much talk of “only Jesus,” whenever anything else is mentioned that might seem to be given idolatrous importance, that one begins to associate Jesus with the idea of nothing. Nothing can satisfy but Jesus. I am not disagreeing with this, God help me. But you can’t just expect a human being to arrive at a helpful knowledge of God when the only way you can describe him is abstract and negative. This is possibly why the beauty of the world is important.

I think I will stop here before I say anything completely blasphemous. Except one more thing: I can’t stand the word beauty. Why does it have to be such an ugly word?