Mister Preacher: Beauty as Death

My wife and I were at the grocery store the other day and she commented to me on how beautiful a young girl working behind the counter was. It was true. There was something about her particular face construction and whatnot that made your brain go, “We should stare at that. It’s so symmetrical!” Not staring in an uncouth way, but in the same way one might look at a nice painting.

The moment got me thinking about the nature of beauty.

Beauty as I See it

This idea of beauty is not something we’re born with, you know? At least not one’s personal idea of beauty. If you’ve ever wondered why some nice, pretty girl thinks messy, unshaven drug-addled drop-outs are the bees knees, this will make things make a lot more sense. Because while there is something our brain enjoys about a certain type of physical symmetry, personal opinions of beauty are also a socially programmed thingamajig. The people one is exposed to most, and are accepted as the norm (there's that love of symmetry again) in your specific social group, are thought of as the most desirable. 

That may be why you find yourself always dating the same type of person, but you can talk to your counselor about that, I'm more concerned in this piece about how it also may be why we treat some people as worthless.

Beauty as Social Currency

If what is beautiful to us can be influenced by outside forces, it stands to reason that, in the world we live in, people will use that power for nefarious purposes. It’s interesting to note that beauty is a concept that has often been defined by those who have more than the rest of society and believed themselves better for that fact alone. For instance, all the fat we so desperately try to lose was seen in some eras as a positive thing. Why? Because food was scarce and being overweight was an outward sign that one had money enough to purchase enough food to be so.

That twisted definition of beauty (which defines power and influence) affects the Church as well. The bible gives an example of this kind of behavior in James 2:3. James warned against giving the best seats in the house to the rich and important, and making the poor sit on the floor. And things haven't changed. At one church I attended, which shall remain nameless, they were desperate for new members—to grow the church—but when those who began to attend were not as upper middle-class, nor as well-educated as themselves, they weren’t  all that happy with it.

White churches are white, conservative churches are conservative, rich churches are rich—etc., etc., etc. Sometimes this kind of stuff is due to language barriers, or living in particular neighborhoods, but mostly it’s not. Mostly we just see ourselves as so much more worthy of beauty--as more important--from the other that we can’t imagine worshipping with them. It’s because we want beauty, as we have come to define and worship beauty, and all that comes with that all-important social currency, more than we want God.

Marinate in that.

The good news of Jesus says that those faux barriers of beauty we’ve created have been crushed to dust. There’s no male and female, conservative or liberal, black or white in God’s economy. We’re all equal and we’re all welcome at God’s table. Beauty is revealed as the unsymmetrical gathering of the lame and well, the rich and the poor, the mayor and the high school drop-out. Beauty is the diversity of those imperfects made symmetrical, made one, as they are gathered in God’s love.

-Chad