beauty as a way of being.
The beauty we behold here, and the beauty we make, is but a foreshadowing of what is to come.
One of my favorite verses in my favorite Psalm is this:
One thing I have desired of the Lord,
That will I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord
All the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord,
And to inquire in His temple.—Psalm 27:4
The beauty we behold here, and the beauty we make, is but a foreshadowing of what is to come.
I am writing this as a reminder to myself, and also for you.
the spirituality of beauty
Almost daily I forget that the Lord’s good grace is made perfect in my weakness. Almost daily I eat over-spirituality like it is warm, fresh bread slathered in salted butter. Don’t be too swept away in lovely things. Beware the lust of the eyes. Don’t love beauty too much, or beautiful art, or pleasant things. Isn’t plainness, isn’t austerity the mark of a pious and sanctified life? Where the lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, and the pride of life are guarded against with rigor? After all, ”All is vanity,” declared The Preacher, “and grasping for the wind.”
I am devouring a wondrous book, Ragged, by Gretchen Ronnevik. The tagline reads, “Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted.” In it, she writes,
“Works-based sanctification, also called self-righteousness, is a vicious cycle. It’s a weight that entangles us. […] The spiritual disciplines are an act of remembrance of God’s grace, not a means of obtaining it or manipulating it. God made the covenant. God sacrificed His Son. Anything we do at this point is evidence of His redemption in our lives, and He will get all the glory.”
Her words reflect an aghast, rhetorical question written many centuries ago: “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” Ahh the flesh, virtue-signaling itself in the proud denial of self: oh, see how righteous I am, loving not the things of this world? Resisting the allure of beauty, a temptress designed to ensnare the soul and lead one away from the holiness of God?
Forgetting, of course, that holiness itself is beauty:
Give to the Lord the glory due His name;
Bring an offering, and come before Him.
Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!—1 Chron. 16:29
I have often regarded my love and longing for beauty with suspicion, and my semi-rejection of it as marks of maturity and righteousness. But I am finding something else to be true, and Ronnevik knows what it is: self-righteousness, or a form of works-based sanctification. It is me fighting against the goodness and grace of God. Fighting against my own weakness, and trying so hard to harvest the fruit of the Spirit through self-effort rather than resting in the vine so Christ can bear His fruit through me.
“As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving.” (Col. 2:6-7)
Christ is received by grace through faith, and so we must walk: by grace through faith. Mercifully, God reminds us: His grace is sufficient for us. This means my weakness is useful to Him. My weakness is necessary for His glory. Oh, for the faith required to believe this!
In Ragged, Gretchen Ronnevik explains:
“For some reason, when we talk about what it means to be a Christian, we refer to God’s unending grace. When we talk about experiencing that grace daily, the conversation starts to sound like a business/success book with some self-help thrown in. We start talking about strategy, self-discipline, life-hacks, and the guilt falls upon us, because, before we recognized it, we’d started climbing in our own strength, and we started to believe it was enough to get us out. We come up with plans for success. How can we become stronger Christians? We know the road will be hard, so we draw from multi-level-marketing companies’ strategies for sustaining and reproducing the faith. Pump yourself up. Say the affirmations in the mirror. Believe in yourself. Do the work. We forget that God came for the weak.”
This is me! Oh, me. I am weak. So weak.
the ministry of beauty
I have always been haunted by beauty, and with some chagrin admit that I had more courage to create at six years old than I do now in my middle-aged life. I wrote my first poem at six years old. I sewed my first little rag doll then, too. At eight, I would make my younger sister lie down on a sheet of fabric, draw around her body with a pencil, and sew actual clothes she happily wore. Even though I would stitch together layers of paper and write stories and draw horses and prairie girls and ball gowns; even though I did hours and hours of pirouettes and plies while listening to Tchaikovsky in my thick pink tights and soft pink shoes, I doubted myself and my art.
In my twenties I wore the black belt of an artist. I was a MAC girl swishing fluffy makeup brushes covered in violet and bronze along brow bones and into the hollow of cheeks. At night I typed away on my rickety keyboard so late that my husband decided to invest in his sleep and bought me a new, sleek, quieter one.
All of these creative expressions, a haunted attempt at making and beholding beauty.
All of these creative expressions, yet I was terrified to call myself an artist.
I turned 40 in December of ‘19 and on the same day, discovered that a tiny, 7-week-old heart fluttered in my belly. Since becoming a mother, a hunger for art-making has burst to life, almost savage in its strength. It’s grown fast and fierce alongside my son and an ever-burgeoning collection of substrates and supplies, online classes and guilt. Guilt, because I am petrified. I am an artist who is starving for beauty, starving to create, and I am not creating. I am frozen in place by inertia, perfectionism and fear. Weakness.
What if my self-righteous approach to the regulation of beauty is a rejection of the gift of God? What if I am declining His holy invitation to showcase the evidence of His redemption in my life for His glory?
What if, instead, through His grace made perfect in my weakness, I wholeheartedly embraced beauty as an offering, as a ministry, as a way of being? What if I trusted the wise Holy Spirit to gently correct me if my heart veered off towards worldly affection rather than deeper and closer to the gentle and generous Artist of all?
It’s not about my perfect strength but His, and His is made perfect through my weakness. I must be weak if I want to be strong. This is the way of godly things.
Years ago, I used to say, “Make your life a luscious work of art.” It was the slogan I yearned to live in to, a tagline on my business website and postcards and other ephemera. But my desire, and the language of my longing, has shifted. No one says it better than Jeanne Oliver, an artist I dearly love. In her workshop Art as Worship, she gently encourages, “Make your whole life an offering.”
This. This, this.
“Bring an offering,” King David declared, “and come before Him!” As a woman, an artist with empty and longing hands, a mother, a daughter of God, I can come to Him only in my weakness, presenting my body a living sacrifice. A living work of His art.
Here I am. Here is my life, my longing, my love. May my whole life be an offering to You. May the work of my hands and the fruit of my life become a ministry of beauty. May the beauty I behold here, and the beauty I make, be evidence of Your redemption, a foreshadowing of the beauty to come.