Beauty revealing truth

For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: "Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true". The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration. ~from an essay by then Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI)

I don't have a lot to say this week other than to note that the sliver of the Christian culture that I live in is very weak on beauty. The essay linked above discusses the Beauty and Truth in Jesus with more detail and delicacy than I can, so I encourage the brave to read it slowly.

But I will make the follow comments. I understand my role and my community to be a missional outpost. This means that we live on the far edge of a boundary, let's call it the edge of the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the World (this may be too high falutin' but it'll work for now). So we call out to and receive the weary and worn, we triage them with the truth of God and send them on in, deeper into the kingdom, further in where they can settle into the kingdom life and kingdom rest.

It's the edge-ness that I want to draw attention to. If we are what we say we are, "evangelical" or "missionaries to our zipcode" or "attractional" or whatever, why aren't we more devoted to beauty? Isn't beauty by definition attractive?

I spent 6 months studying in St. Petersburg, Russia. This is a city that was called the Venice of the north. The Hermitage Museum houses art on par with the Louvre in France. The Russian choirs, ballets, and operas were frequent and magnificent. When I rewind through my memories, I had some of my most intense experiences of beauty there--stumbling into choir practice at the Smolny Cathedral, catching sunset in Tavrichesky Garden, that aria in La Traviata. These left me with the deepest sting of loneliness. I was in St. Petersburg alone, I experienced these on my own. But it felt like such things should be shared.

What is truly beautiful draws us out of ourselves, Ratzinger says that it "reawaken[s] a longing for the Ineffable, readiness for sacrifice, the abandonment of self" and contrasts this with false beauty which "stirs up the desire, the will for power, possession and pleasure."

As it happens, I enjoy and value beauty for the missional outpost, but I don't know how to comes to be. But I daresay it's a question worth wrestling with.

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Image of Smolny Cathedral