Yesterday I bashed at the Women’s March in DC, garnering for myself many Facebook likes (which proves I’m right, cough) and a couple of interesting comments, the best of which was, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
I thought about this all night while I was sleeping, which will make everything I’m about to say deeply coherent and therefore worthy of the Internet.
So, as you may have noticed, I am Christian, in the most offensive way of using that word, by which I mean that anything I hear and see I reflexively filter through the lens of scripture. You might think I’m not equipped to do this but I am. I’ve read the Bible over and over and I understand it both on the micro (some of the time) and the macro level. I’m always learning new things, but if you ask me what the Bible is about, say in three sentences, I can deliver. Moreover, I’m fascinated by the Bible, by its depth and breadth, it’s strangeness and it’s familiarity. It has formed and shaped the way I see everything. This is relevant, because when we’re taking about Beauty, you and I probably don’t mean the same thing.
Swimming, as we all are, in the post post post modern brew, some of us more comfortably than others (me, I’m the one that’s uncomfortable) the lens through which everything Ought to be filtered is the Self. Whatever I happen to look at, I’m supposed to filter it through my own sense of reality and spiritual reality, and meta reality, and then make a judgement–as long as my judgment falls within the accorded narrow confines of secularism. I find it so interesting that the individual is supposed to reign supreme, as long as it’s the right kind of individual, but then all the individuals go and put on silly hats so that they look very very very very much like one another.
The Offense of the Gospel is that I oughtn’t to decide what is beautiful all on my own. I should let my aesthetic sense be shaped entirely by what God thinks is beautiful. God is the beholder. Whatever I look at, I should bring along his aesthetic sense as I consider its, to me, relative beauty. But God isn’t relative, he is absolute, and so there are some things that can be said, with firm conviction, to be ghastly, and other things that can be acknowledged as beautiful.
Now, before I get into what we can say For Sure God thinks is beautiful, I should acknowledge that Christianity in the west has a devastating aesthetic problem. Go into so many churches and the first word that comes to you is not going to be Beauty. It’s going be something more like Ugh. But that’s not God’s fault. I think it’s because we Christians have allowed our aesthetic sensibilities to be shaped more by the post post post modern brew than by the Bible. That’s why we keep having to have movies where Jesus looks like Fabio.
Ok, so what does God think is beautiful? And then, what does he think is ugly? Somewhere or other, I’m not good with numbers, he says, “How beautiful are the feet of him who brings good news.” So we can safely say that missionaries and preachers are objectively beautiful. They are. Other places we find that the bride that the Son wins for himself, that’s the church, is beautiful. So, when you’re all enduring Sunday morning together, or serving up a soup kitchen meal, or sitting around studying the Bible, that’s beautiful. And finally, we can say with absolute certainty that the New Jerusalem, with all its gold and precious jewels, is beautiful. The way it’s described is supposed to boggle the aesthetic mind. We can’t even imagine how beautiful it’s going to be. These are only three. I haven’t said anything about the Temple, the Tabernacle, the Priest’s Garments, the Land, and so many other moments of God’s declaration of objective beauty.
Now, what does God think is ugly? This one is so easy. I’ll just make a quick fire list–sin, pride, division, rebellion, death, excrement, infanticide, idolatry, the rich taking advantage of the poor, the ruination of widows and orphans, hypocrisy, disorder, pride, pride, pride, pride….I could go on.
Notice how so many of the ugly things reside within the person. Sometimes you might not be able to see them because it might Look beautiful on the outside, like a Pharisee, or a rich woman mincing along with bells on her shoes, but the Objective aesthetic status is ugliness.
As a Christian, you have to learn to spot ugliness where you might not otherwise have expected it, like in the heart of a gorgeous Hollywood superstar, or in the mouths of a thousand angry feminists who claim Pride as their main deal. Their faces may shine like the morning sun, but so did Satan’s and he’s not objectively beautiful. He is the essence of what is ugly, even though we are always deceived.
That’s the point. On our own, without the scripture we are deceived. We call what is good evil, and what is evil good. We think things are pretty when they aren’t actually pretty. We think things are ugly when actually they are more beautiful than anything.
The best example, and the one I’ll leave you with, is when one sinner comes to repentance whatever he, or even she, might look like on the outside. Suppose someone really poor looking, who has no nice clothes, and only a vagina hat appended to her head, hears the news that even though she was steeped in the devastating ugliness of sin, that nevertheless God the Son so wanted her to be joined to the gorgeous spotless bride of the church, that he took all that ugliness into himself and died the most hideous and brutal way, taking the pride, the anger, the bitterness, the disappointment into his very body to destroy it forever. And that she gets to go free, not bound any longer the all the things that plague and trouble her, but that she is free in Him to go into eternal life, into that unimaginably beautiful city. That’s the most beautiful thing that ever happens in this world. We should be eager to see it, swift with our lovely feet to rescue the one that is perishing.
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