For the Feast of the Epiphany, Beauty

There’s a brilliant article making the rounds imploring women’s ministries to stop telling women that they’re beautiful. This is quite a bold request, and one that I applaud. It’s true, the gospel is first that you are Not Beautiful, and only later that God can make you so.

I do think we need to spend more time thinking about beauty, though, not less. I’m wondering if one reason women are told all the time that they’re beautiful in Christian realms is not just because of the insecurity that we all feel (that would be me, I’m horribly insecure), and because the American Gospel is about competent self actualization, but because at the very root of it we are all starving for beauty.

Let me back up and complain about my town for a minute. Its hard enough, driving around here having to go into big ugly box stores, to find enough beauty to feed my worn out soul. I cocoon myself in my house, stuffing every surface with the most beautiful objects that I can afford to own, saturating my vision against the moment I have to go out and face the town. I like the idea of minimalism, but I live in an age where practicality is devouring the landscape. Every single thing built seems to be made as hideously as is possible. There’s a new strip going up (which is miraculous because I’m used to things only being demolished not constructed) of some restaurants and a vitamin shop. It’s so ugly. My soul weeps, if not my eyes, as I drive past it every Monday to take my daughter into an even more ugly structure for a dance lesson.

The thing is, the people inside the building, particularly the dance place, are beautiful. Really. I don’t run across very many horrible looking people. Even I myself, whom I loath, am not that terrible looking. The human face can be attractive even in the sourest and most unappealing light if you examine it and consider what sort of person is peering out at you out of discouraged and overwrought eyes.

But when all around I see is pretty dim unattractive utilitarian architecture, I have to work very hard to see the beauty in the people inside the buildings.

Which brings me to a further complaint, this time about the church. We talk a lot about truth, and sometimes about beauty, but not so much about beauty. There are some nice looking spaces in my church, but there are some equally dismal ones as well. The ladies facilities spring immediately to mind. In the balancing of the church budget, when you have to chose between feeding the poor or knocking the whole thing down because it looks like a bomb shelter, you usually decide to feed the poor. I’m not saying this is a wrong or bad choice. But somehow the utilitarian nature of even our worship spaces has to have crept into our conception of God. We always like to imagine that God is just like us, that he values the things we value, and thinks the things we think, and so it must be that he himself is practical and utilitarian.

When really, God is a poet, an artist, a musician, a holy and perfect judge. We have glimpses of what he is like in creation, but it takes a full minded reading of the Bible to discover how strange and fantastic he is. Stop for a moment in the middle of Exodus and try to calculate and then imagine the amount of gold required to adorn not only the Ark, but the eventually permanent Holy of Holies. Imagine the ornate carvings, the garment of the High Priest, the number of yards of fine twined linen that had to be woven for the curtains. If that is not fantastical enough, try to sketch out a picture of whatever kind of contraption God seems to be flying around in in Ezekiel. Practicality is not the first word that springs to mind.

As you readjust your gaze from the Bible back on to your familiar surroundings, you might find that the ubiquitous low hung box buildings that surround you, or the misguided skinny jeans do nothing to help you know him.

But we do know that he is beautiful. And because we are idolatrous, we confuse our beauty, which is sorely lacking, with his. So we have to Be Beautiful. We have to. And if we are not we have to say we are. It’s practically a matter of Salvation. How can a beautiful and perfect God countenance the troubled ugly human? Only if we take his place and call ourselves beautiful.

But it’s too much effort. I can’t keep up the farce. I’m just not good looking enough to be God. I prefer the ugly truth of the cross, that my heart and mind were so black, and the ways of my body so disordered, that God bore in himself the due penalty of my ugliness. It’s so unpleasant to look at. But it’s so much better than pretending.

And also, I like to fix my eyes on that strange Perfectly square city, heavy laden with gold, where my body, having been restored and renewed, will apparently live in perfect beauty.