by Caleb McCoy| Fall 2024 |
When I was first considering whether I wanted to attend ACU, the robust Study Abroad program was a big point in its favor. I was a bit frightened by the idea of leaving my own country for a semester, but now that I’ve done it, I can heartily encourage anyone to take this opportunity if they can. Over the semester, we learned so much and traveled so many places that it’s hard to mention them all. We went from studying the wisdom of Narnia in C. S. Lewis class or reenacting scenes from famous poems to hiking through the fells of the Lake District in northern England or staring up at the Northern Lights on a trip to Finland. But through it all, I grew to see the world differently, more deeply than I had before.
My journey toward this began in our English literature class, where we studied the famous poets of Britain. One of the first poets we studied was also the one who struck me most deeply: William Wordsworth. He saw ecstatic beauty in nature and wrote his poems in such a way that his readers could not only see the same object, but also see with his eyes, a poet’s eyes. I began to wonder how I could learn to see things the way Wordsworth did.
I first began to understand how to see deeply when my friends and I went to Switzerland on our long weekend break. I was totally unprepared for the immense glory of creation that I witnessed on the trip. Technically speaking, I saw grassy hills with forests and mountains in the background. I saw mist and fog, lakes and waterfalls. But to reduce my experience to the number and type of each object seen would be to completely neglect its most essential aspect. The beauty of what I saw was astounding. After taking the train up to the top of Mount Rigi, my friends and I spent about ten minutes taking in the majestic beauty before us, seeing the green hills below us that merged into the white mountains dozens of miles away, wondering why human beings ever chose to live anywhere else. The mountains were so far away that they looked as if they were painted onto the background of the sky. The valleys below us were covered in mist, making cloudy lakes between the peaks. The air was cold and quiet, with a freedom and freshness unlike anywhere else. I had stumbled across a painting in real life, a masterpiece right before my eyes.
As I began to ponder this, I realized that I was witnessing the work of the first and greatest Painter, the Creator of all things. It was He who painted the grey-blue peaks in the far distance. It was He who clouded the valleys with fog. It was He who brushed the mountain mists with light from beyond the clouds. He put into all these things that which we, for all our technological prowess, cannot hope to quantify: beauty. The supreme Artist graced this world with His beauty, so that our hearts might leap and our eyes might rise to Him, the Giver of all good gifts. This beauty is what Wordsworth learned to see, and now, however imperfectly, I am growing to see it too.
