How delightful it is to go for a walk wearing my new Enchroma glasses! Even the color of the sidewalk is beautiful. Even the whiteness of a white car, the blackness of a black one, the brilliant star of the sun on a piece of broken glass in passing, not to mention the flowers and the fine details of greenery, dirt, bark, and leaves.
What a mistake it is to denigrate the senses and the body! I can understand social inhibitions about sex, because of the reproductive, emotional, and health consequences. But still, sexual fascination and pleasure are among God’s greatest gifts, as are the colors of the world, as are the human abilities to invent devices such as hearing aids, glasses, telescopes; and skills, such as painting, writing, composing and playing music, and writing, that enhance sensory perception and deepen one’s gratitude for the givenness of this rich treasure: seeing all those colors, hearing all those pitches, feeling the rhythms, loving the sight of a naked woman, caressing and being caressed, sexual play, tasting delicious food and drink.
Food and drink, like sex, can bring problems. And I suppose we can think of bad art–bad painting, bad sculpture, bad architecture, bad music, bad writing–as ways of doing things with colors, shapes, sounds, in depictions, descriptions, and compositions, that cause disgust rather than delight in the gifts of God. Similarly, even some healthy bodily functions can provoke disgust, and the body cannot escape sickness and pain, decrepitude and death. But it is only because the simple pleasures of life and health and our senses revealing the beauties of the world are so heavenly that the loss of them in sickness, decrepitude and death are so regrettable. And it is only because truthful art is such an apt expression of gratitude for God’s creation that dishonest and ugly art is such a waste of time and effort.
An appeal to experience gives us every reason to expect that although death means leaving this world behind, it is not permanent unconsciousness but rather transformation into or recovery of another life. So, death is a limit on what one can achieve in any given lifetime, but there is no limit on how many lifetimes one will have. Death will be a return to that state of being one had before birth, and that state of being was one that turned into one’s life. Life is a gift, and it is everlasting, and it comes with the beauty of all these colors. It would be wonderful even without them, but here they are, purely for delight.