A Good Problem To Have

"And what is beauty?"

"Terror."

"Well said," said Julian. "Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” (From The Secret History, by Donna Tartt)

___________

"At some point, we have to wrestle with the problem of beauty."

My friend, Dave, said this while we sipped coffee and talked about the things of God. We talked about faith, doubt, joy, sorrow, and the nagging sense of mystery that we are prone to misplace. But mystery is part of our maturity. If we avoid it, we are missing something around us and in us. When we slow down, when we pay attention, we are submitting to a pace that feels unproductive but in fact is stimulating the slow work of change. The celebration of mystery is a pursuit of wisdom that does not depend solely on well curated libraries of thought but on the vastness and closeness of the unseen.

The older I get, the more questions I have, and I'm okay with that. Curiosity is not an enemy but a friend that has all the time in the world to sit with us. My faith is simpler -- one that receives desperation as a gift, one that is learning how to run again in the wide open spaces (now you're singing Dixie Chicks) to which God invites us. It's where singing, laughing, crying, and cussing are prayers.

I'm learning to rest.

But simplicity doesn't ignore the harder questions. It makes space for the humble wrestlings, deferring to the promise of all things new -- even when it seems we are stuck in the endless cycle of putting a new coat of paint on a thing that rusted years ago.

I have my questions.

Why do certain things happen?

Why does God let them happen?

The theodicy that even A.I. cannot solve.

As Dave and I stumbled through the problem of pain, he said, "At some point, we have to wrestle with the problem of beauty." While I think and talk a lot about beauty's cultivation in pain, I have never thought about the problem of beauty as something that needs to be addressed like the problem of pain. If we have to wrestle with the pain of the world, we have to wrestle with the beauty of the world. Why is beauty important or necessary? Does it have a purpose? Is it a waste of time? Is it a means or an end? Is it something that we have to wrestle with or is it a mere luxury to lessen the pain -- a temporary distraction from the real world.

Consider this: beauty is revealing the real world.

Now, if beauty is simply subjective and something we simply just have opinions about, then the problem of beauty is irrelevant, if not silly. But, if beauty is revealing something more, then we must wrestle with what beauty is leading us toward.

Many think the problem of pain disproves God.

But, does the problem of beauty prove God?

Chloé Cooper Jones, in her stunning memoir Easy Beauty, shares this conversation:

“Isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder?”

“I don’t think anyone who says this knows what it means.”

“No?”

“Or rather, it has a meaning no one believes. It’s a silencing sentence, one that reduces rather than explores one of the most exhilarating human experiences. The experience of beauty. What a shame.”

I'm not going to lead us into a debate about good and bad art here (Thankfully!), but ask the question: Why reduce the experience of beauty? Why relegate it to mere opinion or preference when it has far more to say about God, the world, and the exhilaration of being human?

It is not simply about preference (eye of the beholder) but something exhilarating, even terrifying, because it invites an experience that is hard to quantify. Something moves deep within us, and we don't know what to do with it. We feel this urge to codify it, to make sense of it when maybe that's not the point.

Beauty is uncontainable. It often seems an allusive reality when it speaks to the deeper, often ignored longings of our souls. We see a film, look at a photograph, behold a painting, hear a K-Pop Demon Hunter song, and we are moved to tears, laughter, joy, even anger.

How can something so "useless" overflow with such grace?

Beauty is sacred. A gift to remind us that the world has not gone to shit but is moving steadily toward new creation. Beauty is not for our consumption. It is not for us to exploit. You may feel hopeless, despairing, looking at the world around you and wondering "Whats the point? Why should I even care about something as vague as beauty when there is so much more to do?"

Beauty helps us hope. It is not a disembodied hope but one we carry deep in our bones, bearing a weight of glory that sometimes feels too heavy. But we carry an ending, one that invigorates our imaginations for life today, in the present. This is not a lazy appeal to heaven but an active pursuit of a present flourishing. Beauty teaches us how to groan for new creation, to see that somewhere in the problem of pain lives the urgency of beauty, and perhaps dealing with the problem of beauty means seeing it and celebrating the mystery and restoration which it champions.