I am of a variety of schizophrenic minds about the Met Gala. Spent valuable time I did not possess reading the outrage ebb and flow on twitter yesterday, and then went back and looked at a lot of the outfits again. But then, as per usual, was overcome by the juxtaposition of all those outfits against the sick and horrifying accounts of NY’s attorney general being a public champion for women, apparently, while in private, well, I had to stop reading the piece because I don’t have a very strong stomach for this sort of thing.
As usual, I just want to say the obvious, which is that if you sow destruction, you reap the whirlwind. If you sow a sexual revolution, you don’t get sexually free women. If you sow unbelief, you don’t get rationally minded sciency cleverness. If you sow in dishonor, discontent, disquiet, and sin, you don’t get to be raised in glory, not if you don’t eventually and heartily cling to the one who was, for real, raised in glory.
So the Met outfits are a fascinating study in decadence. Some of them are really beautiful (I’m not going to provide links because it would take hours). The ones that nodded toward the medieval church in an elegant way, with headdresses and rich colors, I thought were genuinely and artistically interesting. Those ones opened a window on the great beautiful underpinnings of Christianity in the west for the last one thousand nine hundred and sixty years. We’ve been living off the crumbs of beautiful religious art for a few decades now, and some of these dresses were like the bright sparkling effervescence before the flame suddenly and completely dies. Others of them were mostly ghastly. Found myself shuddering over the one’s that had crosses emblazoned here and there across thighs and bosoms (I’m squinting at you, Kim Kardashian–funny how spell check always recognizes her name but not any of the other more interesting words I want to use but don’t know how to spell).
But while they were all traipsing up and down in that great temple of western civilization, the place where so many beautiful pieces lie quiet and still to be gaped at by the unknowing, the uneducated, the buffoon pea-cocking and leering at the camera, across the city the dark evil horror of abuse, misogyny, racism, rape, fear, and isolation were finally brought into the tepid light of our new found, conflicted, unhappy #metoo consciousness. The ugliest things have been revealed, such as you think might happen in other less well-established nations, places that don’t value women “as we do” over here.
And I’ve got to say, if you thought humanity was good, if you thought we didn’t need God and could have a moral conscience all our own, formed and fashioned, sewn and trussed by the cause du jour, you have got to open your eyes and see that you were wrong. There is no one good. There is no one beautiful. There is no one can sow anything good into the ground apart from the grace and mercy of God who is himself both good and beautiful. We can borrow and mock his goodness and beauty, but until we accept that it was his in the first place, we are only going to continue to face the inching, the marching, the preening decadent decay, the destruction of the defenseless and weak.
I always stand in church on Sunday mornings enduring the Gloria, overburdened by the wide chasm between the words that I’m trying to sing and the accumulation of sorrows all around me. Sometimes I feel like I am choking, not because I don’t believe the words, or because they themselves are not beautiful, but from grief. Because I can’t say the word ‘glory’ and understand it and see it. The glory of God so surpasses the news of every week that I find myself almost hopeless.
But that’s because I’m thinking of temporal order, of obvious virtue, of what I want to be myself. I am not remembering to look at the stark bitterness of the cross, where the glory of God was so cataclysmically displayed, where he took the seeds of our destruction into himself, himself being sown into the ground, and laid there to rest, calming once for all God’s righteous anger at our whirlwind destruction of dishonor and violence.
Once for all, yet we feel the storm’s powerful effects, buffeting and ruining what once felt so secure. But this only means that there is ever yet time and place for the true beauty of mercy. The victim, the abuser, the mocker, the confused, the beleaguered, the angry, the unbeliever, the hopeless can come into the wide, gracious, beautiful mercy of the cross and there find a glory more brilliant than anything that could be asked for or imagined.
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