What is Beauty?
My friend Arthur Morton (the first Fine Arts Pastor I'd ever met, now heading up a ministry called for Christian artists called Poiema: Beauty, Truth, Passion is leading a discussion tonight in Dallas about the nature of Beauty. Is there such thing? How do you measure it? What standards apply when it comes to evaluating art for it's beauty?
If I have an idol in my life, I suppose Beauty would be it, and in the end, I have always found it hard to distinguish Beauty from God. I use the capital "B" because I believe there is an idea of Beauty that stands behind all things we find beautiful. Or perhaps it's the capacity in us to see Beauty that stands behind all such experiences, but either way, the human experience of Beauty is one of the great gifts of God, one of the rich clues He leaves behind as He moves in the world, one of the most powerful reasons we are without excuse when we reject Him.
Beauty is order. Wait, perhaps not, you say, calling into evidence the vast wildness of nature, the unpredictability of action unfolding. And, you go on, order can be ugly, a sort of dead, conventional, long-out-of-date adherence to a substandard form. True...true. But we start with order because the word connotes that move from chaos that is true chaos to order which is true order, a dynamic order full of whirling tension through which processes move, processes that birth worlds, whether they be worlds of paint, of words, of metaphors, or materials ranging from steel to ceramics to the very stuff of planets and suns.
Beauty is dynamic. Our ideas of beauty range in diversity from culture to culture, I believe, because the nature of beauty is buried deep in all the processes of creation, material and spiritual (not that I buy that kind of dualism, but it's convenient to say it that way). The very nature of Beauty is that it must be dynamic, an ever moving target that shifts because of our perceptive limitations--we are the blind men ranging not around one elephant, comparing faulty notes as we go, but we are blind men exploring a universe where we touch beauty in a million moments, each of us crying out when we touch it, saying, "Here, here...here it is, I found it!" And indeed we have.
Beauty is heart-breaking. I told a friend the other day that the world breaks my heart everyday. What I think I meant was that the Beauty of God's world is more than we can stand. I certainly don't mean "pretty." I am referring to the sheer glory of what is around us, and the brokenness, too, which is a doorway to the greatest Beauty of all, the dynamic re-ordering of a life by the power of the One who spoke Beauty into being to start with. I am not one of those people who subscribe to the idea that this life is simply a warm-up for the next one. Perhaps that's true, but God made this life, this world, these colors, these humans, and it is in this here and now that we are living and laughing and crying out and praying, and there is a connectedness between Beauty as experienced in a work of art, or a moment of communing with nature, and a moment of a child's unmasked joy, and the Holy Spirit breaking through the hard casing of a life to re-order the thing with the dynamic, miraculous (nothing short of that, miraculous) love of God.
And that is beautiful...
Lord, break our hearts with Beauty again today...
11:31:58 AM 
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