Beauty, Truth and Goodness: the Aesthetic Apologetic and the Idea of Home

“But do you think,” said Lucy, “Aslan’s country would be that sort of country—I mean, the sort you could ever sail to?”

“I do not know, Madam,” said Reepicheep. “But there is this. When I was in my cradle, a wood woman, a Dryad, spoke this verse over me:

Where sky and water meet,

Where the waves grow sweet,

Doubt not, Reepicheep,

To find all you seek,

There is the utter East.

“I do not know what it means. But the spell of it has been on me all my life.” C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I had planned on this title being a more academic post, explaining the theory behind the "Aesthetic Apologetic" and reclaiming the word "Aesthetic" from its weak usage of a surface or artificial "beauty" to enlighten anyone who cares to know about the word's meaning for deep and intoxicating Beauty, the kind men and women are comforted in dying for.


Instead, I decided to take the concept away from theory and present some of it in practice. What follows is a story that many people have heard who know me, and many who I cherish deeply have never heard.


This is the story of one summer day's reflection on the disapproval or dislike that I had received from a peer, a friend explained that the reason for the person's dislike was because "he has tasted more of real-life than you have," and he couldn't relate to my happy.... demeanor. The words "Real-life" caught my attention and gave my rather literal brain something to think on. What is "real-life?" why had I experienced less of it because, as far as both him and my friend could see, I was happy? Is to love life to know less of it?


Something has gone wrong, it always has been wrong, but what ever it is no longer lets us ignore it as easily as we did as children. After all, we might have been more aware of "it" back then so "it" bothered us less. Evil was not something we tried to justify, and we tried to avoid it because something told us to be afraid. The monster under the bed, keeping your foot under the covers while you slept, there is something so reassuring in being covered.

My childhood was not difficult in the way it is for some children, my parents were both very loving and very present. They were not overbearing, but very approachable, and they loved to spoil us when they could. My childhood was difficult in a more physical sense, I was extremely ill and on bed rest at the age of 9 for six months. HSP, a disease that remains unknown in many of its properties, began as a mutated infection progressing in extreme cases (such as mine) to kidney failure, joint pain, and organ rupture leading almost certainly to death.

When I was ten, a very small eleven, bony with wide green eyes bursting with a dreamy air of fairyland, a year of constant pain and tension that HSP brought to my happy home sent me into a season of destructive conclusions.


My family was struggling after 9/11. We settled down in California and left Parker, CO far behind. We were in the mountains of Magalia and I hated it. Mostly because I was proud and did not want to be associated with the drug scene of the area. I also remembered when we had abundance. Abundance before the terror attack that killed over 2,000 people and left thousands more, my daddy included, jobless in the aftermath of extreme company loss. Add to that an unexplored mutagen and medical expenses of a rare disease and a sensitivity of this reality on both myself and, although I was less aware of it then, on my parents... devastation was brewing in my heart. I believed my family's financial state was my fault, the fighting also my fault, every little misfortune was (in my understanding) wholly my responsibility. So I concluded that if I loved my family that the best way to show it was to commit suicide.

Suicide is one of the most undeveloped horrors humanity ever has ever had to process. It is so close to one of the most extreme acts of love, Self-sacrifice, but is so far from that actuality. I am not sure if all suicides are driven by the same process, but mine looked like this:

1. Pain, I was constantly in pain.
2. Observance, seeing the distress of my situation affect those around me.
3. Misunderstanding, I took that data I was receiving from Pain and Observance and jumped to find a cause that gratified.
4. Pride, I believed that the misery I was witnessing was my sole responsibility, that my existence caused it.
5. Identity, I had identified with my nightmare, the loneliness that HSP subjected me to, rather than holding on with faith to my Creator and King as being able to do more than I could imagine.
6. Despair, not only was I living a nightmare, the dreams I had nursed my whole childhood, of being a Foreign Missionary and a mother, like my mum were taken from me.

My despair was fueled by a series of crushed hopes. I was too sick to be a missionary, my immune system would never sustain foreign climates, it could hardly recover from a domestic cold. I had also been informed that in my condition having children was more than unlikely. The two dearest dreams of my heart had dissipated, what then was there but suicide? As I set out to remove myself from the world and relieve it of the mere frail 70lbs that I occupied on it, a warning voice asked me a question,

"Tirzah Lee, don't you trust Me?"

"Yes L-rd, of course I trust You, but this is easier," I replied in frustration.

"No, I have a plan and a purpose for you and you need to trust Me."

It was then that I could see the truth, I no longer imagined relief on my family's faces at my demise. I saw pain and the wide question that haunts a grieving face, 'why?' I saw that my death was not "the most loving thing I could do for them," but the worst possible response to all their love and effort in caring for me.

What I wanted was Love, to both receive and give it, the two best ways I had experienced love had been:

1. in what I was given from my parents, this encouraged my desire to be a parent my self.

2. in what was displayed in the relationship Messiah Yeshua opened with mankind through His death and resurrection, which put a fire for missions in my heart, I wanted to make it known to all people that He loves them.


I wanted to save people, physically as well as by the Holy Spirit. I wanted to rescue the Child Soldiers in Uganda, I wanted to release the tortured men, women, and children from sex trafficking. I had never been an inactive believer, so my forced inactivity on bed rest was excruciating when it appeared purposeless. But with a renewed pressure to the premise "Trust G-d" I dove again into activity with vigorous faith. I gathered names for an anti-slavery petition, I began to lead a young girls bible study when I was healthy enough to attend church, when I wasn't I began an online bible study with some of my summer camp friends going through 1st Timothy. I busied myself with reading and knitting and drawing. It was around this time I began to write and abandoned my morbid attitude of prior despair and anxiety. Honestly the anxiety that I could meditate on today as result of adult responsibilities makes me feel ashamed when I remember how trusting and hopeful I lived day to day in that time.

There was once a missionary and his family who spoke in a church in my town about their service in Kenya. I was so thrilled to attend this service event although I did not attend the church he was speaking in. I felt so called to Africa that I hung on every word, I drank in every picture. At the end of the service he encouraged anyone who felt called to missions to come to the front to be prayed over. I felt the Holy Spirit leap like a flame within me, "Get down there!" even though every step was like the little mermaid in the fairy tale 'as knives and razors' I practically ran to the front. My grandpa was with me, we talked with the missionary. It came to light that I had a peculiar condition that limited what my exposure to infections and viruses.

"You can't go to Africa," he said, "It is too dangerous for your immune system, you'll die." he suggested I look at serving missionaries by raising support for them at home.

I smiled at him, determined, "If I can't go because I am sick, then Jesus is just going to have to heal me because I am going to Africa."

He asked if I believed Jesus could heal me and I replied, "I believe all things are possible with G-d."

He laid hands on my head and he prayed for G-d to be faithful in fulfilling my calling. I went home with my ideal of the heroically faithful missionary a bit demolished with the human reality, a man who has experienced disappointment and could only look on me as a wide-eyed eleven year old who hasn't tasted it yet. Not very different from how I look at some of my own memories of my youth, but that moment I was acting in something more of "Real-Life" than any moment that I could deem naive. Rather it was the Tirzah of last year, enraptured with a human dream that was ignorant compared to what I was 10 years ago full of Hope and trust. Faithful.

Three weeks later I was suffering from a head ache, this wasn't uncommon. My mum encouraged me to take a nap on her bed so that I wouldn't have to summit the stairs to my own room before dinner. I awoke almost an hour later vomiting blood. Once in the Emergency room, carrying a grocery bag full of more vomit and blood from the car ride, I was taken to a bed and set up in a room. Everything seemed to go by so quickly that night. With my condition surgery was impossible and it was evident that my stomach had ruptured. My mother joined my father and the doctor in the hallway, the door was open and I could hear him break the news, "She probably won't last the night, be prepared to say good-bye."



I laughed. My parents came to my bedside, mum held my hand and cried, I tried to reassure her, the words which faith filled as so explanatory must have fallen so full of madness on everyone's ears, "Mommie don't cry, I am not going to die, I have to go to Africa, Jesus is going to heal me." I was so full of peace, I was bubbling with joy. The next time my vomit had only purple blood,this was a puzzle to the doctor and nurses who anticipated to see my further expiration. CAT scans, MRIs, Blood tests,and X-rays followed. They could not find indication of where the rupture had been or any cause for why it had stopped.


There was no marker in my blood that I had ever been sick with HSP.

After ten years when I think back on those memories it is almost like looking back on the story of a sister more than it being myself sitting in that hospital bed. I was so small, I was so trusting; I could almost feel that determination set down on my face as if my forehead was made of flint, a smirk dancing on my lips when the official conclusion was recovery due to "positive thinking". I looked at the perplexed nurse when she asked me what happened, "Jesus healed me," I said.


In this world you will suffer, but dear ones take-heart! For He has overcome the world and all of its sufferings!

The year after I was healed I joined my Great Aunt and Uncle on a plane ride that would settle us for two weeks in Rwanda, Africa. At 13 I found myself preaching in churches were the congregants were suffering from AIDS, an autoimmune disease with similar symptoms to what I had suffered. I built my message on healing, I shared my testimony and concluded that the ultimate solution of Heaven is healing. In the end that Great Home is one that is full of Life, perfect and uninfected Life. Life that has no taste of pain, tears, or death.

Real Life.


Tirzah in Rwanda (Watch the YouTube video here)






I am full of many fears. My faith as a child convicts me as an adult. Why do I busy myself with worrying about things like relationships, the romantic kind, when the reality of that is much more pleasant when entrusted to G-d's sovereign understanding than if I try to marry myself off. There is the cliche we are given in the church of "be the person you want to marry." I am finding myself more partial to this advice than I expected as I become more aware of the struggle it is to just pray and "be anxious for nothing but in everything through prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving make your requests known to G-d, and the peace of G-d will be with you in Christ Jesus." I want to be a woman of prayer because I want to marry a man of prayer.



We like to say "you are my home," when we talk to a lover, I've entertained that thought and wondered "when at last might I find home in his eyes," yet I want to banish that thought. There may be a refection of Home, a mere copy to remind us of the original, but no person or place can beat the Original. Unlike most "Originals" such as the single works of great artists, this Original is not limited in being accessible to us. Rather He is ever present, proving that "Real-Life" is not something far-off but in a strange turn of reality it is possible to live in it unwavering and unlimited by whatever circumstances or sufferings are allotted to us. The living in this manner is what we call the Christian's Joy, and why the Psalmist says "The Joy of the L-rd is my strength."

One of the most striking impressions left on me by those that I met and served in Rwanda, is the people were so full of dedication to living in this Joy. They had nothing (to our standards) yet we have nothing if we don't live with those fruits manifest in our lives. It is no wonder that Tolstoy attributed happiness to poverty, and when Jesus says it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom. When we have so many copies around us to dedicate our lives to, how easy it is to lose sight of the Original; and once sight is lost, how quickly we become disappointed in living.

One final thought, I feel the temptation to try and go backwards to how I was when I sat in that hospital bed. I have an inclination that if I were to try and do so I'd be more disappointed with my faithlessness than I am at this point in acknowledging it. Moving back to another time, to a memory, is another move toward a copy. I must consider the present, take in the good growth that has come in the last ten years and remember that this season- if it is a winter, will prove to be very good for the tree. I might look dead, and other trees that are evergreen might assume that I have died when all my flaws and failings become evident to their spying eyes,

"When the soul still felt the full power of the divine grace upon her, her imperfections appeared to be destroyed; but, as the work of purification goes on, the virtues sink deep in the soul, disappearing from the surface and leaving the natural defects in conspicuous prominence... During the entire winter the trees appear dead; they are not so in reality, but, on the contrary, they are submitting to a process that preserves and strengthens them." Jeanne Guyon

This last season feels like a winter, and I might be more aware of those defects that anyone who has thought to seek them out in me. It is surprising how little time people dedicate toward thinking about anyone but themselves, (and how we believe that everyone is aware of us when we aren't really aware of anyone) but those defects that have been exposed to my own mind in myself have been heavy blows indeed.

I have trusted G-d with my body, now the task is to trust Him with all things else in their turn: Heart, Mind, Talents, Future.