Interview Insights Editor William Greenway Interviews
David White “The Spiritual Significance of Beauty” Your essay leads off with a beautiful remembrance of the boyhood joy you took in baseball. Do you still love baseball? I do! I enjoy watching and really get jazzed around College World Series time. What inspired you to focus upon beauty? When I was young, I was introverted, shy. I was drawn to baseball and also painting and music as ways of being seen, heard, and known in the world. The deeper I got into art and music, the more I began to recognize that there’s something beyond the mere resonant frequencies of strings, there’s an inarticulable depth and meaning. I had a guitar teacher who had synesthesia, an unusual blending of the senses: he would play a chord and see a vivid color. For him music crossed boundaries, and it occurred to me that music was crossing boundaries for me, too. I was playing music and finding spiritual meaning and resonance. So, you considered what was spiritually inspiring to you as a kid: playing baseball, camaraderie with teammates, watching with family. Then, as a teen, you found jazz guitar a spiritual resource. And now as a Christian educator, you realize that in all these unexpected places you’re finding spiritual significance in beauty. Yes, and let me note the danger of a performative contradiction in trying to theorize the very reality that I’m saying is finally mysterious and inarticulable. When I look back at what I’ve written, I can say, Yes, this captures what I think and feel about beauty, but at the same time, in a very real sense, it doesn’t come close, because I’m trying to talk about something that has depth and mystery. This is the pertinence of you saying that knowing the statistics and strategies adds to the beauty of baseball, but that factual knowing is not the primordial sort of knowing that comes with actual engagement with the game … Yes—and this goes back to Pseudo-Dionysius and his observations about beauty— there’s something about beauty that does not allow us finally to grasp or articulate it, but at the same time, there is something about beauty that sparks a desire to know. 10
