The Bell: Beholden to the Beholder

It’s that time of year.

When I get up early to go to the gym, and as I drive, I can see the lovely tangerine glow behind Mount Baker in the Cascade Mountains. The sun is starting to come up, the day awakens and I sigh and exhale slowly, acknowledging the creator’s handiwork.

Something lifts my soul, reminding me of some lines from a recent Luci Shaw poem where she describes yeast:

something that rises in
the dough, like an act of
worship, spontaneous as
jubilation, the bubbles of praise
that rise within us.

As I see the iridescent glow behind the Cascades, and feel that spontaneous jubilation and those bubbles of praise well up in me, I wonder if my deep response to beauty is an act of worship.

Beauty is so much a part of our lives, yet so difficult to define. Poets, painters, writers, philosophers and musicians have tried to describe beauty for thousands of years. And even though beauty is always available, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde notes: “Man is hungry for Beauty. There is a void.”

What is it about beauty that manifests this hunger?

That compels artists to write, paint and sing it, as if we can hold it, possess it?

That makes time stand still for just a moment, and beckons an involuntary submission to something, to someone greater, not unlike the relinquishment we call worship? There is a deep sense of surrender and devotion, as to one’s lover or intimate relationship – an otherness that obliges an emptying of distraction to be present to that moment or to the ‘other.’

As a record producer and music leader in houses of worship, I’ve spent much time reading about and pondering beauty in my life of faith, and the question of beauty as an act of worship has been on my mind a good long while.

One of the key issues in defining beauty is its subjectivity. We’re all familiar with “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” – meaning we decide what is beautiful or not. Here is where it gets troublesome.

Beauty can be consoling and disturbing. It can be inspiring and defeating, sacred and profane, heartfelt and cerebral, exhilarating and sobering.

We’ve all heard a piece of music, read a poem, looked at a painting that someone has described as beautiful, and we’ve scratched our heads with a “Huh?” Conversely, we’ve also passionately showed someone similar art and have encountered passive indifference, reminding us again of how diverse our responses to beauty are.

Medieval theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas suggests, “Whatever is received depends on the mode of the receiver,” reminding us that how beauty is perceived has much to do with our personal taste, which is seldom logical or reasonable.

Yet – in spite of all this malleable subjectivity, there are consistencies in beauty. Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer denotes “all the qualities of The Beautiful point in one direction.”

Beauty does have commonalities pointing in the same direction. A simple example: Most of us would rather be stuck in a room viewing a gorgeous sunset, than stuck in a room with a rock. Yet even though there are many things we can agree on regarding beauty, we still encounter that thorny issue of our subjective taste and if and how God defines beauty.

Here, I turn briefly to Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, who was considered a giant in 20^th century theology. Barth was deeply suspicious of people deciding how God defines beauty because we end up placing God into our own interpretation of beauty, molding him to our bias.

As we hold up our ideal of beauty (art, music, nature or everyday beauty) to surmise how God fits into it, we make God a subset of our beauty – a subset of our taste and aesthetic – and we only see the part of him we see through our own lens.

In doing so, our perception of beauty ends up defining God for us:

Hence the God of the pretty,
the God of the majestic,
the God of the inspiring emotion that moves us,
while we overlook the God of the quiet moment, the God of the difficult truth, the God of lament, and the God of the Jewish man hanging on a cross.

How many times have we deemed a song or experience as worship because it fits our aesthetic of how we want to feel?

Barth says beauty doesn’t define God – because God is beauty.

This may seem like a theological splitting of hairs, but it is essential for us to resist the temptation of creating God in our own aesthetic image.

Another Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar gives a similar warning:

We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name (beauty) as if she were an ornament of a bourgeois past – whether he admits it or not – can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

What Balthasar is saying is that reducing beauty to decoration – like a chaser or a sugar coated pill to help Truth and Goodness go down easier – affects our appraisal of beauty, as well as diminishes the spiritual disciplines of prayer and love. We reduce beauty to functionality. People who cling only to their aesthetic of beauty diminish God’s presence in their world.

To understand the depth of God’s beauty, it’s necessary to see beyond beauty as ornamental, and regard it as an essential part of God’s holiness. This is critical in our development of a perspective that is more inclusive of the beauty we encounter daily, reflecting God’s embedded character.

For me, it starts with desiring God’s glory and beauty outside of our inadequate perception of it.

Reflecting Abraham Heschel’s pithy observation: “First we sing, then we understand,” we step forward in desiring to see beauty through his eyes. To be beholden to him, as our loving Beholder.

Here Barth directs us again, that to widen our conception of beauty, the beauty that God exemplifies, we need to look to scripture, to creation and to the person of Jesus to see how God is beauty.

As Gadamer says, the Beautiful points in one direction. And Barth says, that direction points to scripture, and it’s here we find God’s character and beauty exemplified.

A few examples:

In Philippians 4:8 we read, “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.”

Likewise in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3-10), notice whom Jesus declares blessed: the poor in spirit, the mourners, those that hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted. And in Paul’s sublime treatise on love in 1 Corinthians 13, we read of the beauty of love’s many facets.

Lastly, in Isaiah 53:2 we have an example of God’s contrary perspective, foretelling the Messiah: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.”

This last scripture is a good example of God’s currency of the beautiful. What we hold up in value does not always equate with what God values. In these words,“. . . no beauty or majesty to attract us”, we see the holiness and divinity of Jesus outside of what we value as aesthetically beautiful.

So, not seeing beauty as an ornament (as Balthasar suggests), but seeing it as an extension of God’s being – his holiness – is to open our eyes to notice his ever initiating presence in the world around us, to see and experience beauty in his currency of value.

As Mary Oliver perceptively suggests in one of her poems:

If you notice anything, 
it leads you to notice
more
and more.

Much of this can be inculcated into how we lead worship in our Sunday services. It’s not just the purview of the pastor to educate the congregation in the ways of God; for every time we lead a song in corporate worship, we are educating the faithful in God’s narrative.

If we want to instil a broader sense of beauty in our world and in our faith journey, how we tell the story of God to each other on Sunday mornings educates us into gaining a deeper insight into God’s beauty. Without ignoring the lack of beauty in and around us, to recognize his beauty in the likely and unlikely places is to see what we haven’t seen; to feel what we haven’t felt; to hear what we haven’t heard; and to love where we haven’t loved – welcoming God to enlarge our hearts, souls and minds to participate in the beauty and glory of himself.

Lastly, beauty welcomes us and invites us out of ourselves into something, someone other.

To give ourselves over to the one who beholds us with love, beholden to the Beholder, is our resonant response to beauty as an act of worship. The key word here is response. Beauty initiates, and we respond to the mystery of God’s participation in our world.

We love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). We move because he first moved us. We welcome because he first welcomed us. Beauty invites. It is hospitable. It says, “Come on in and partake of the depth and breadth of your loving creator.” We merely have to respond to beauty’s welcoming invitation, in all its diversity, equity and inclusiveness.

We’re invited into the grandeur of the heavens; the splash of weather, the dance of words; the hush of tenderness; the heartache of loss, the moan of the train, our poverty of spirit, the surprise of pleasure, to celebrate restorative justice and ponder the solitude of a 33 year old Jewish man hanging on a cross 2,000 years ago.

Beauty invites us into conversation with the Divine. To “draw us into intimate communion with himself in worship and prayer, not just to convey information about himself, but to disclose himself.” (James B. Torrance)

As he regards us with the grace, forgiveness and love he wants us to trust in, we, as responders to beauty, welcome others to engage this conversation with creation, with each other and ourselves, and with the fullness of Beauty in communion with the Father, Son and Spirit.

Beholden to the Beholder.

Roy Salmond is a music producer / audio producer / podcast producer / engineer / composer / writer. A veteran of 45 years in the music business, Roy still works on music that enlightens, enlivens and encourages the ‘better angels of our nature.’ He also writes a weekly blog, Between The Notes, that focuses on the arts, faith in the everyday wonder, heartache and mystery of life.

He has posted this comment on this site as a member of The Bell: Diverse Christian Voices in Vancouver. Go here to see earlier comments in the series.