Taste and see
The sensate
When the psalmist wants to commend the goodness of God, he reaches not for an argument but for a flavor: taste and see that the Lord is good. He does not say think and conclude or study and deduce. He says taste. There are souls for whom God becomes real most powerfully through the senses — through beauty, music, color, fragrance, the swell of an organ or the hush of a candlelit room.
This is no accident of the body to be overcome. God himself filled his ancient sanctuary with deliberate sensory richness — gold and blue and scarlet, the smoke of incense, the sound of bells, fine linen and carved wood — because he made human beings to apprehend him through their senses as well as their minds. The sensate soul worships with eyes and ears and skin, and finds God in the beautiful.
If this is your pathway, you may have been made to feel that responding to God through beauty is shallow, sentimental, a lesser thing than sober intellectual faith. It is not. It is how some souls were built to taste the goodness of God. The stirring you feel when light falls through stained glass or a melody breaks you open is not a distraction from worship. For you, it may be the very doorway in.
“Oh taste and see that the LORD is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.”
— David — Psalm 34:8 (WEB)
If God becomes real to you through beauty, music, and the senses, offer them to him in worship — letting what you taste and see become a doorway to his goodness.
“Worship the LORD in holy array.”
Sensate souls are often made to feel that responding to God through beauty is shallow, a lesser thing than sober intellectual faith, and so they distrust the very doorway God built into them. The interior work is to honor the senses as a God-given pathway — he filled his own temple with beauty — while guarding the shadow, ensuring the senses become a doorway to God rather than a destination that moves us without lifting us to him.
This week, worship deliberately through your senses: seek out beauty, music, or a place that stirs awe, and offer the stirring to God, letting it carry your heart to him rather than ending in the feeling itself.
We have inherited a long suspicion of the senses, as if real worship lived only in the mind and anything felt were a lower, riskier thing. Yet the senses can be stirred while the heart never lifts, leaving us moved by the music but not drawn to God. The discipline is to make beauty a doorway — and the soul that walks through it gives God the whole sensing self.
We live downstream of a long suspicion that the senses are the enemy of true spirituality — that real worship happens in the mind and the will, and anything involving beauty or feeling is a lower, more dangerous thing. But God, who designed the senses and filled his own temple with beauty, plainly thinks otherwise. He gave us eyes and ears and the capacity for awe, and some souls find him most surely through them.
The shadow of this pathway is real: the senses can be stirred without the heart ever rising to God, leaving us moved by the music but not actually drawn to him. The discipline is to let the beauty become a doorway rather than a destination. But do not despise the gift. If God meets you in what you can taste and see and hear, give him your senses in worship, and let the beauty he made carry your soul to the One who is goodness itself.
- Have I dismissed beauty-borne worship as shallow or sentimental?
- When has a sight, sound, or fragrance drawn me toward God?
- Do my senses become a doorway to God, or stop at the feeling?
Lord, you made my senses and filled your temple with beauty. Forgive me for thinking that meeting you through them is lesser. Let me taste and see that you are good, and let every beauty be a doorway that carries me to you. Amen.