Beauty in the Threshold

A year ago this month, James K.A. Smith shared a piece on Christian Century that I’ve reread no fewer than ten times since then. His title and thesis is, “I’m a philosopher. We can’t think our way out of this mess.” Smith makes the argument that it is beauty that will save the world, not critique, and I’m inclined to agree. The question for the thinking person, though, is how does one turn down the volume on thinking and turn up the simple appreciation and cultivation of creativity? There are so many bad arguments being made and so much terrible formation taking place, both within and without the church. Simply setting a piece of art in front of someone and asking them to meditate on it surely can’t be the answer.

Or can it?

This is what I’ve been thinking about all year.

Part of my aim for this work sabbatical has been to meditate during the times in which I would normally be working. That has taken the shape of prayer and scripture reading, of course. But mostly it has taken the shape of art appreciation, poetry reading, working with my hands, and even sorting out closets and cabinets to not simply make them more functional, but more beautiful. The question I’m asking myself is not “Can beauty save the world?” but “Can beauty save me?”

“Save her from what? Surely she’s not talking about her salvation?” you might ask yourself, conditioned as we are to spiritualize everything. No, friend, I’m not talking about my salvation. But also, I am, in a sense. Not to get too theological, but I do believe that salvation once had cannot be lost. But I also believe there is an ongoing work of our salvation, that is that we are saved and also we are being saved. It is a matter of degrees, I think, not over the threshold of heaven or in the number of jewels in one’s crown, but instead the degrees to which we see God while we’re still looking through a dim glass. In other words: can beauty scrub a little bit more of the grunge from the glass through which we see God?

I’m inclined to agree with Dostoyevsky and Smith and more learned philosophers than me, that beauty can save the world, and in fact, may be the only thing that will save the world.

While I agree with that ideally, I still have to ask myself, though, what it means for the writers whose vocation it is to think and then make thoughts sayable? These were the questions I was wrestling with in my previous post. Do we just stop thinking out loud? Critiquing the terrible? Sharing the good? Is making art the only way forward? Smith writes, “If love alone is credible, literature is truer than philosophy . . . In the spirit of tikkun olam, Judaism’s endeavor to repair the world, I’m throwing in my lot with the poets and painters, the novelists and songwriters.”

Friends of mine who previously haunted the halls of Christian think pieces have been throwing in their lots with the poets and painters, the novelists and songwriters, too. They’re writing beautiful novels and gripping poetry and poignant songs. They’re abandoning places that reward the cheap thrills of viral posts and tiny hearts and numbers that passive-aggressively tout one’s worth to the world. They’re seeing through the thin theological arguments we make for continuing to inhabit them.

I fear, though, that leaving the spaces where beauty is made accessible to all means creating silos of elitism. There have almost always been artists and writers guilds, spaces where creators come to mingle and share and spur one another on to better work. But if beauty is to save the world, the world has to not only be invited, but know they’re invited.

I am wondering if the Christian’s call in this world is mainly to be people who stand in between. That may be the most enneagram nine thing I’ve ever written, but more and more, when I consider where the world is most hungry, it is for those who will stand in the liminal spaces, the thresholds between two disparate things, even two competing things. And when I consider where my joy is most full, it is with my back to neither, but my shoulders spanning across the two. Isn’t that what Jesus did as he hung bleeding on the cross? Made a way for a thief and a pharisee and a centurion and a little child?

I wish I could be a person who throws my lot in with one or the other. But because I’m convinced (today at least) that beauty will save the world, I have to believe beauty has to come to the world as she is and not just as we wish she was. In other words, we can’t always exist in the ideal, sometimes we just have to move a little bit more toward it every day. Perhaps by reading a poem each day and sharing it. Perhaps by going to a museum. Perhaps by washing a window clean or by making a closet beautiful. Perhaps abandonment of the less than ideal isn’t the answer and instead it is simply to fill one more corner of our home and hearts with something well and truly good.

This is what Richard Wilbur is talking about in his poem Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

And what William Morris meant when he wrote, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

And what Saint Augustine meant when he said, “Love, and do what you like.”

And what Paul meant when he wrote, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” In other words, if we’re making the most beautiful arguments or stunning art in the world, but doing it without love for the world, we’re just making ugly noise and someone is right to tell us to stop.

Beauty does save the world, but maybe not the beauty we think. Maybe it is the rosy hands of the launderer or the poet who erases the same line so many times it wears a hole in his paper or the mother who scrapes together a lunch for her kid every day or the mindful social media user or the one who lights a candle each morning before the house alights with noise or it is the clothes hung up in the closet or the scent of a boxed cake baking in a kitchen or the words, “I love you,” said just before the lights go out at night. Maybe this is the beauty that will save your world. I know it is saving mine.