Killing Beauty

The radio announcer for the local public broadcasting station was doing his darndest to list the many reasons why listeners should donate funds to support its classical music format.

“Above all, we have something here you just can’t find anywhere else: a commitment to something beautiful, something that transcends the rest of our culture,” he opined. “Your support means that you recognize this beauty and want it in your life.”

Pretty heady stuff for an FM radio station, but it worked. Within the hour enough callers, at $100 a pop, had committed to “beauty” in a tangible way– with their checkbooks. And public radio was saved until the next fund drive.

I didn’t call in. Not because I don’t believe in the value of classical music; in fact I tune in every day. It was more because I already “donate” through my tax dollars, which are funneled into public broadcasting whether I like it or not, to pay for liberally-biased news reporting, whether I like it or not.

What did capture me, however, was the announcer’s reference to beauty. It’s a refrain I keep hearing echoes of in the strangest places. Like on home and garden television.

“Life is short and we want to have a home where we can make beautiful memories,” said a young woman, gushing in an episode of a first-time homebuyers’ show. “We know what’s really beautiful in life and our home is the place where it all happens.”

Then there are the self-help gurus with promises of success that reach into the hearts of searching individuals. “You are beautiful because you believe you are beautiful,” said one shiny-headed gentleman to a live studio audience and, I swear, there were tears in his eyes. “It’s time for you to step out into the world and say, ‘Here I am, and I AM BEAUTIFUL!”

Hmmm. Here’s the dilemma: I agree with them all. Sort of.

Classical music really is uplifting. Homeownership really is good for people. Healthy self-esteem really is essential to being happy.

But as with everything of substance, if God doesn’t form the foundation of these beliefs, they remain empty. If God isn’t in the music, it’s noise. If God isn’t in the home, it’s a facade. If God isn’t in the self-help lesson, it’s a fraud. Bereft of God these human accomplishments, rather than uplifting human nature, actually exploit for profit one of the deepest needs of individuals: to experience true beauty.

Beauty can only exist in friendship with God, with an acknowledgement of the Creator of all, and a willingness to serve Him. The reason beauty itself exists –all forms of beauty – is because God intends it to. Everything truly beautiful finds its ordered relationship with God and reflects His love for creation. The most beautiful forms of human accomplishment come from a love of God and a desire to make some small part of His omnipotence tangible and reachable to us. The reason we crave beautiful experiences in life is because we are uniquely made to do so.

Is this expecting too much of beauty? In the past, most people have never thought so. Sure, there have always been the naysayers, those who have “enlightened” themselves straight into darkness. Author and philosopher Albert Camus famously said, “Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of eternity that we should like to stretch over the whole of time.” The good news for Mr. Camus and others who despair is that true beauty is eternal and does last forever because God mercifully ordains it.

The epic history of men and women is one of reaching for beauty, in the arts and sciences, in the struggle for self-government, in many and diverse modes of personal achievement. However, the post-modern culture, which has gripped the hearts of nations, aims to blind us to this tradition of beauty by flinging the muck of secular humanism into our eyes. We don’t believe the truly beautiful is possible, necessary, or appropriate anymore. That’s because we don’t believe God is possible, necessary, or appropriate anymore.

The world is very busy killing unborn babies, killing personal excellence, killing true beauty, and insisting all of the time that this is the best way to live because it proves we are our own masters. In the meantime, we court false beauty in every way money can buy in an attempt to offset the bleakness we’ve engineered. Innately, we don’t like a world without substantial beauty. So we fabricate poor substitutes that require nothing from us.

In case you feel this is too philosophical a dilemma for most people to bother with, consider how this attitude towards true beauty has affected our politics, our economy, our health care, our families, and our future. What may sound absurd in a sound byte on the radio or television is having an impact of historical proportions. Here’s an example:

“The food we grow and cook, in the place we call home, define who we are,” stated a gourmet chef in an article I recently read.

I don’t know about you, but I want to be defined by more than what’s over my head and what’s on my dinner plate. I want to be defined as a creation of God Almighty, made in His image. That’s the only way I can be certain of my dignity, my worth, my own beauty. Without it, anyone can decide the value of my life, based on any terms. Without it, anyone can decide whether or not I deserve to exist.

Many people today seek to kill beauty as a passionate rejection of God. They want the rest of us to accept noisy music, empty houses, alternative lifestyles, and a host of other distractions in lieu of God’s beauty.

The good news, however, is that people in the 21^st century still respond to true beauty, even if they can’t explain why. It happens every time a movie with wholesome values is a surprise hit at theatres. It happens when people choose to have children without calculating the costs. It happens every time a person acts with authentic charity towards another. Even unacknowledged, God’s beauty can reach into the soul of a person and awaken a need that He has placed there and only He can satisfy.

People want to be uplifted. They want to reach above the fray for something true and wonderful and fulfilling. They still search for, whether they know it or not, the beauty that comes from the mind and heart of God.

“Truth, goodness, and beauty are but different faces of the same all,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.”

I awoke one morning from a dream in which hundreds of people were floating in wreckage and sewage, and reaching with their arms and bodies up to the sky where radiance, beauty, promise shined forth on their upturned faces. The wasteland was secular culture. The promise was the light of Christ.

Keep reaching heavenward.