To keep beauty and compassion alive...

Last night I kept thinking about what role the Church of Jesus Christ has in keeping beauty and compassion alive in these dark times. Clearly, I am a Christian Humanist in the Gregory Wolfe school - check out IMAGE journal @ http://imagejournal.org/- or the artist Mako Fujimura - check out his work @ http://www.makotofujimura.com/ -or T.S Eliot or even Flannery O'Connor. The integration of truth, goodness and beauty is one of the greatest needs in the United States these days...

+ I watched the Republican candidate for governor of New York, Carl Paladino, talk about his role of bringing a baseball bat to Albany and politics. To be sure, there is anger and fear all about, but he is a true barbarian - and many of his tea-bagger consorts are equally troubling. They are unable to give a wise or reasoned expression to the mood of the country. Instead, they have become masters of exploiting anxiety and throwing gasoline on ignorance, prejudice and stupidity. Just listen to Rand Paul, Sarah Palin or the new media darling, Christine O'Donnell, talk about the so-called common good if you think I am too harsh. It is a frightening time.

+ Equally troubling is the mean-spirited nonsense that Newt Gingrich and Glen Beck are spreading. They are clearly the new Visigoths tearing down the walls of Western civilization from inside. When Gingrich, who intellectually knows better, says the President's vision is shaped by a Kenyan anti-colonialism, he is simply dressing up the ugly dog of questions surrounding Obama's birth certificate (and all that implies) in fancy clothes. And when Beck paints the President as a liberation theologian who isn't interested in personal salvation, he has obviously forgotten Obama's lengthy study of Reinhold Niebuhr and his articulation of social sin. These two liars know how to parse enough truth into their propaganda to do Goebbels and the Third Reich proud.

Which brings me around the the role of preserving truth, goodness and beauty within the Church. Some, Hauweraus et al believe that there is no point in trying to redeem the world because the world, by definition, is fallen and sinful. Their goal is to build up faith communities who offer a clear and vibrant alternative to the status quo. And I resonate with that deeply. At the same time, like the Celtic monasteries of old, I sense that the churches are being called as the repositories of our best art and highest social ethics, too. These may be our new "dark ages," but the darkness will never completely vanquish the light.

Thomas Cahill wrote about the way the Celtic monasteries once kept alive reading and art while holding safe the sacred manuscripts of culture until such a time as they might not be burned. To my way of thinking, these are times not unlike those of old. It brings to mind what Alexander Solzhenitsyn stated so powerfully in his Nobel Prize speech:

Dostoevsky once let drop the enigmatic phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time it used to seem to me that this was a mere phrase. Just how could such a thing be possible? When had it ever happened in the bloodthirsty course of history that beauty had saved anyone from anything? Beauty had provided embellishment certainly, given uplift—but whom had it ever saved?

However, there is a special quality in the essence of beauty, a special quality in the status of art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolutely indisputable and tames even the strongly opposed heart. One can construct a political speech, an assertive journalistic polemic, a program for organizing society, a philosophical system, so that in appearance it is smooth, well structured, and yet it is built upon a mistake, a lie; and the hidden element, the distortion, will not immediately become visible. And a speech, or a journalistic essay, or a program in rebuttal, or a different philosophical structure can be counterposed to the first—and it will seem just as well constructed and as smooth, and everything will seem to fit. And therefore one has faith in them—yet one has no faith.

It is vain to affirm that which the heart does not confirm. In contrast, a work of art bears within itself its own confirmation: concepts which are manufactured out of whole cloth or overstrained will not stand up to being tested in images, will somehow fall apart and turn out to be sickly and pallid and convincing to no one. Works steeped in truth and presenting it to us vividly alive will take hold of us, will attract us to themselves with great power- and no one, ever, even in a later age, will presume to negate them. And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.

And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy. After all, he was given the gift of seeing much, he was extraordinarily illumined.

And consequently perhaps art, literature, can in actual fact help the world of today.

In this context, advancing - advocating - and celebrating the arts in church is a joy-filled mission and calling, yes?

credits: Images by Makoto Fujimura