Too often, paying attention to beauty is regarded as a luxury in our society. People think only the affluent have time to appreciate the beautiful. Every one else has to spend all their time earning a living in order to feed their families. This kind of thinking denies the ancient wisdom that a satisfying human life needs the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
It, also, implies God is a luxury, for beauty is one of the primary ways we come to God. We seek God’s Truth with reason, we pursue God’s will with ethics, and we accept God’s Way because it is beautiful. God’s person, his vision, and his love overcome us with their beauty.
Most of us would agree, if we think about it, that love is more beautiful than reasonable or ethical. We can’t really explain love. Instead we experience it with our whole person, with our heart more than our mind. It overwhelms us with its beauty.
Our society seems to asking if we can afford beauty. In our area, the political debate has become a division between those who think government’s only role is to provide jobs and those who feel it should make other services available to the community. A wealthy developer has bankrolled 5 candidates for the school board who promise they will not raise property taxes but will grant private developers exemption from taxation. Many of us fear that the ensuing school budget limitations will cause the district to drop the arts from the curriculum.
To lose the beautiful, as found in the arts, is to lose an essential part of our humanity. Drama, music, and the fine arts are Sabbath activities. They enable us to come out of ourselves and our everyday concerns in order to ponder questions of meaning and purpose. When we go to play, attend a concert, or walk through an art gallery we grow silent, put aside what we have been doing and allow the work to impress us.
This is important, because the arts present life at its fullest. They refuse to reduce the mystery of the whole or the uniqueness of each part. The arts are beyond our control. We receive them, we respond to them, but we do not change them.
The artist is often the first to address a problem emerging in the community, often the last to hang on to a virtue. She can hold reality before us without forcing her opinion upon us. She allows us to ponder what we experience and come to our own decisions.
I came to appreciate this in my ministry. Often when issues were very controversial, I discovered I could best be prophetic not by haranguing the congregation with what they should do, but rather by using a drama in which they could examine the problem themselves and feel its urgency. I’m sure that is one reason Jesus used story more than direct teaching and law.
Of course, that means we should find beauty when we go to Church. Care should be taken that the words, the music, and the art are beautiful as well as instructive. Paying attention to beauty is certainly part of a Sabbath lifestyle.
Taking time out from the frantic pursuit of modern, everyday life includes enjoying the beautiful. Its pursuit is one way we seek God. We should not only pay attention to beauty ourselves, but also share it with those around us. Parents and grandparents should be taking their children to drama, concerts, and art galleries as ways to introduce them to beauty, knowing this is a road to God.
