I am joyful just now, because this is a great moment for God’s people. Too many around us are abandoning beauty as a value. Instead, we are rushing after what we like and it is killing us. This is the bad news, but the good news is that if the world, the flesh, and the devil insist we paddle about our tastes, the people of God can start building beauty.
What if we built beautiful churches again? We can. I once had the honor of speaking at Saint Joseph in Houston and that church had just finished creating beautiful iconography to the Glory of God. My soul soared when I saw what God’s people had done.
Don’t be discouraged. This can be done, but we grow discouraged because of the bad things around us. The world is broken, not as God made it to be. As beautiful as the cosmos is, and the beauty is all around, the beauty would be greater still if people did not make bad choices. Everything is interconnected and so our bad choices and hate ripple out to the stars.
Fly above the clouds and find beauty that God made, but the plane I am on is full of angry, petulant, complaints about the bumpy ride. We are bringing ugliness to the clouds! The temptation is to focus on the evil . . . and evil there is, but we are also bringing beauty. There is a dad taking care of baby next to me and the sight is lovely. Flight attendants are working hard to serve us and make our trip pleasant.
This is beautiful and that too comes with us as we journey into the sky.
One way to know something good is that it will care about beauty. The vulgar, the base, the crude are not of God. Saint Paul says:
Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 9What you have learnede and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
My darling wife, Hope, has spent years trying to teach me this lesson. I must love beauty and not grow discouraged. I must reject ugliness, defeatism (the ugliest of ugliness!), and whining. We can find the just and praise it. We can find the lovely and replicate it. We can commend the commendable and so cheer up, because we are no longer looking within, but without to where love moves the Heavens and the stars.
We can have peace, but only if we embrace beauty. When we send kids to warehouse schools, designed with only utility and not beauty in mind, then we may produce decent academics, but we have missed our calling. God wants us to be good, true, and beautiful and when you hear the harsh rhetoric of the television preachers you know they have missed God’s best.
Beauty need not cost money. The ancients had much less than we do and built buildings we revere. My grandparents built churches in the mountains so lovely, people take pictures of them. Money can produce garish monstrosities, while beauty is free. Look up! God gives the stars to us all, the cathedral of the poor.
God’s best will always be beautiful.
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