Why Beauty Matters.
Another excerpt from N.T. Wright – In the context of how God
plans to redeem creation through his saints – Justice, Beauty, and Evangelism.
The topic here recapped is justice and beauty in the context of one’s home or
dwelling found in the conclusion section of Ch. 13.
JUSTICE.
This is the foundation, I believe,
for the work of hope in the day-to-day life of the church. My own vocation has
taken me to an area of my country where, for many people, hope is in short
supply. A nebulous sense of injustice hangs over many a community in the shape
of the half-formed belief that the industrial collapse of the late twentieth century
must be somebody’s fault and that something should be done about it. It is a
reflection of the fact that when a large community has been built up over
several generations around one or two key industries, and when those industries
are then shut down not because they are unproductive or because the workers are
incompetent or lazy but because they do not fit the larger strategic plans of
people whose faces are never seen in the area, then there is a quiet anger, a
sense hat something has gone wrong at a structural level. Human societies
should not work like that, and if they do then questions have to be asked. Part
of the task of the church must be to take up that sense of injustice, to bring
it to speech, to help people both articulate it and, when they are ready to do
so, to turn it into prayer (it’s surprising, until you find yourself in that
position, how many of the Psalms suddenly become relevant!). And the task then
continues with the church’s work with the whole local community, to foster hope
at any and every level. And part of the argument of this book is that when this
is done, this is not something other than the surprising hope of the gospel,
the hope for life after life after death. It is the direct result of that: the
hope for life before death.
BEAUTY.
The
second feature of many communities both in the postindustrial West and in many
of the poorer parts of the world is ugliness. True, some communities manage to
sustain levels of art and music, often rooted in folk culture, which bring a
richness even to the most poverty stricken areas. But the shoulder-shrugging
functionalism of postwar architecture, coupled with the passivity born of
decades of television, has meant that for many people the world appears to
offer little but bleak urban landscapes, on the one hand, and tawdry
entertainment, on the other. And when people cease to be surrounded by beauty,
they cease to hope. They internalize the message of their eyes and ears, the
message that whispers that they are not worth very much, that they are in effect
less than fully humans.
To
communities in danger of going that route, the message of new creation, of the
beauty of the present world taken up and transcended in the beauty of the world
that is yet to be – with part of that beauty being precisely the healing of the
present anguish 0 comes as a surprising hope. Part of the role of the church in
the past was- and could and should be again – to foster and sustain lives of
beauty and aesthetic meaning at every level, from music making in the village
pub to drama in the local primary school, from artists’ and photographers’
workshops to still-life painting classes, from symphony concerts (well, they
managed them in the concentration camps; how inventive might we be?) to
driftwood sculptures. The church, because it is the family that believes in
hope for new creation, should be the place in every town and village where new
creativity bursts forth for the whole community, pointing to the hope that,
like all beauty, always comes as a surprise.
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