Beautiful
Beauty is commonly trivialized in our culture, reduced to decoration, equated to the meaninglessness of words like pretty and nice. But beauty is not an add-on; it is not an extra; it is not what we look for when we have a break from necessity. Beauty is fundamental.
It is fundamental to catching our attention:
A classic example is marketing of automobiles. Almost never is a $40,000 car advertised as practical. Indeed, almost always it is accompanied by an attractive young woman next to the most luxurious model, photographed in some elegant setting. The future of an entire industry triple-dipping at the fountain of beauty.
I suppose that is why my wife makes me buy used cars.
But it is fundamental in much more important ways.
Beauty is the evidence of and witness to the inherent wholeness and goodness of things. It is life in excess of what we can manage or make on our own. Beauty arrives through a sustained and adorational attentiveness to what is there: a rock, a flower, a face, a rustle in the trees, a storm crashing through the mountains, the sound of a stream, the glow of the moon. The generosity of a stranger. The faithfulness of a friend. The love of God.
Without the strong understanding of the holy and the beautiful we often give in to common misunderstanding:
Holy is to bland what beautiful is to trivial.
Holy is to boring what beautiful is to pretentious.
But a true understanding of holy would help us to understand that it is far from bland and boring. It is not goodness in a straight jacket, truth drained of mystery. It is not a nick-knack angel on a shelf watching over us as we sleep. Holiness does not make men and women smaller so they can use God in convenient doses. Instead is makes them larger so he can give out life through them, extravagantly, spontaneously, powerfully, dangerously.
Just as dark is the absence of light and hunger is caused by the absence of food, could it be that ugly is the absence of beauty?
A scripture uses beauty and holiness together. Mankind seems to have followed by connecting ugly and evil.
Beautiful
The ugly fills us with dread, confusion, despair, and fear and focuses on survival, saving ourselves at any cost. It seems to be the theme of much fiction.
The beautiful draws us close. It fills us with awe, with wonder, with comfort and with hope. It motivates us to want to share it with others. Is it strange that it is the theme of Scripture?
Seldom do we call our best friend and say, “This is so dreadful, painful, and chaotic I wish you could be here with me to enjoy it.”
Much of current culture presses us to pay for the privilege of sharing in horror, violence, chaos, and despair by calling it entertainment, art, or music. We may join in this by calling the ugly, good and the beautiful, trite. We may give silent approval by not holding out for something better. We may play a part by not encouraging, applauding, and supporting those whose talent is clouded by self-doubt.
Often it seems no different than paving the poppy fields or using the Grand Canyon as a land fill and calling these acts an award winning reality show.
May we who celebrate the name of Jesus take care that what we say and sing; all that we do for work and play; and what we purposefully and casually create and appreciate, be beautiful.
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