On Beauty: Both Universal & Particular
Preaching at my friend Chris Yoder’s church in OKC, All Souls’ Episcopal.
“Does beauty matter?” “Does beauty matter in worship?”
Those are two questions that I’ve been asked countless times over the years and nobody loves my initial answer: “It depends.” It depends, that is, on how we define beauty.
As I tell my students, it’s complex and complicated business. The western Christian tradition neither affords us a uniform answer nor humors us with an easy answer. When you add eastern Christian traditions into the mix, things get even more tricky.
And any discussion of beauty should always carry a warning label: “Handle With Care.” It should do so on account of the many ways that ideas about beauty have been used to cause great harm, not only to individuals but to entire peoples and cultures.
With all those caveats in place, however, one can still assert a few positive things about beauty.
Beauty has everything to do with aesthetics. Beauty always makes its appeal to the senses. Beauty always costs you something—not necessarily monetarily, but in terms of thought, care, time, energy, skill, etc. And God should always be regarded as the author, source, and end of beauty.
Having just visited my friend Chris Yoder’s Anglo-Catholic church in Oklahoma City, All Souls’ Episcopal, I had occasion to think about how beauty is also such a contextual thing.
Take its church architecture, for example. As a mid-20th century structure, it bears the theological and aesthetic marks of its time. And while some may dismiss it as a dull-brown barn, I found that it wonderfully resonated with the Romanesque architecture of the High Middle Ages and with the biblical imagery of the church-as-ark-of-salvation.
I also loved its stained-glass windows. Rather than being light and airy in typically Gothic fashion, they were pleasingly square and earthy, with stylized figures that subverted the characteristically Caucasian features that one normally sees in European cathedrals.
What I appreciated, finally, was how the whole campus included little gems of art and beauty, which I often discovered serendipitously as I walked around.
I write about a number of these things in my book, A Body of Praise, which you can read for yourself, but I am yet-again grateful to worship alongside another member of Christ’s Body, who is beautiful in its own unique way.
