Multi-faceted justice (2): Create beauty

Yesterday we talked about Multi-faceted justice in creating peace. The second part of Keller’s last chapter in Generous Justice is Create Beauty.

Beauty, like sex, has truly taken a beating in our culture. Whenever we worship something that doesn’t contain the capacity for receiving that worship, we end up marring and destroying it in the process. We were made to worship God. But we’ve made the mistake of worshiping beauty and sex and we’ve marred them so much they’re barely recognizable as the good God intended them to be. Sex is from God, we got that down. But beauty is from God too. In fact, all that is beauty comes from God.

But sadly in our culture beauty has come to be privilege of the rich. You can pursue beauty if you have the means. You can be beautiful if you have the money for plastic surgery, high-end cosmetics, and a fabulous colorist. You can have a beautiful home if you can afford at $300K mortgage. You can have beautiful art or accessories or decor if you can afford the hefty pricetag. The underlying belief then has been that to forsake consumerism is to forsake beauty. But that’s all wrong, right?

To forsake consumerism is to embrace beauty.

To do justice is to create beauty.

Or, more interestingly, to create beauty can actually cultivate a more just life overall. Why? Because beauty “decenters” the self and moves us to distribute attention away from ourselves.

Elaine Scarry writes in her book On Beauty and Being Just that

“I am looking out of my window in an axious and resentful state of mind, brooding on some damage done to my prestige. then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared…and when I return to thinking of the matter it seems less important.”

As beauty de-centers the self it is freed to center on others. But this requires a radical re-orientation to true beauty. Beauty in our re-touched, glossed up, bikini-body, veneered society is a pitiful representation. Just as we must recover God’s intention for sex, we must recover God’s glorious expressions of beauty. And more practically, we search for beauty and create it anywhere we can.

A single woman rocking HIV-infected orphans. A tiny blossom on a bare-winter branch. Cracked wood and peeling paint on a well-loved old rickety bench.  Worn-out gold shoes. Fresh wheat grass. A newlywed’s kiss. A husband kneeling by a hospital bed. A widow giving her only two mites. A prostitute kissing His feet.

His feet.

Isn’t that where all true beauty is found? As Jonathan Edwards said,

“If through an experience of God’s grace, you come to find Him beautiful, then you do not serve the poor because you want to think well of yourself, or in order to get a good reputation … you do it because serving the poor honors and pleases God, and honoring and pleasing God is a delight to you in and of itself.”

Do we see God as beautiful?  Is our desire to gaze at His beauty? Are His words sweeter than honey? Is He daily captivating our souls?

When He becomes beautiful to us He will define what is beautiful to us.

He was poor. The poor will be beautiful. He was authentic. Authenticity will be beautiful. He was pure. Purity will be beautiful. He was grace, kindness, love, forgiveness, justice.

That will become our standard of beauty.

Let’s gaze upon our beautiful Savior, let Him define what beauty is. Then make it our glorious aim to create that beauty with every breath He gives. This beauty is not just the privilege of the rich, but a gift to the poor. It’s certainly not expensive, but will cost us all we have.

Look around. Where will you begin creating beauty today?