The Cathedral and the Strip Mall

When Mary of Bethany broke her alabaster jar of costly nard to anoint Jesus, Judas protested the waste, calculating how much more efficient it would have been to sell it for the poor. But Jesus defended her, calling her lavish, seemingly impractical gesture “a beautiful thing” (Matthew 26:10).

True worship is rarely efficient; it is extravagant.

Picture two buildings. The first is a medieval cathedral in some forgotten European town. Its spires reach toward heaven, its stained glass tells the story of salvation in colors that seem lit from within, and its very stones invite you to lift your eyes upward. The second is a suburban strip mall church, beige and rectangular, indistinguishable from the insurance office next door. Inside, a screen flashes lyrics over a stock photo of a sunset. The coffee bar smells nice.

Now, both buildings might house faithful believers. Both might preach the gospel. But ask yourself honestly: which one would make a stranger stop in his tracks and wonder if there might be a God?

The question is not meant to be cruel, or overly critical. It is meant to be honest.

For we have inherited a strange notion in modern Christianity, that beauty is decoration, an optional flourish for those with refined tastes. The “real work,” we say, is preaching truth and doing good. Beauty can wait. Beauty can be sacrificed. Beauty is, frankly, a luxury we cannot always afford.

Thus, in the mid-20th century, there was a movement away from beautiful churches and toward modern sensibilities, structures that were stripped bare, and eventually came to resemble the rest off whatever was popular in the world at the time: worship spaces that came to look more like presentation halls, the concert venue, the coffee shop, the storefront. This movement thought that to speak to the world we needed to look more like the world, and in turn, we would more effectively "speak their language" and win more souls. The intentions were noble, but decades later, the results of the experiment are in, and the numbers do not reflect those previously noble intentions.

What happened?

 

The Three That Walk Together

The ancient philosophers, and after them the great Christian theologians, spoke of three transcendentals: the true, the good, and the beautiful.

These were not three separate things, but three ways of perceiving the one reality of being itself. Wherever you find one, the others are present. To pursue truth is to pursue goodness is to pursue beauty. They are like three faces of a single jewel, turning to catch the light. They are if you will, the difference between a diamond (highly valued) and a shard of plain glass (basically, garbage).

This is not mere philosophical speculation. It is rooted in the very nature of God. Scripture tells us that God is truth: ”I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). It tells us that God is good: ”No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18). And though we less often speak of it this way, Scripture also testifies that God is beauty. The psalmist cries, ”One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple” (Psalm 27:4).

Saint Augustine, looking back on his long wandering, addressed God with words that have never been surpassed: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!” (Confessions X.27).

Notice he does not say, “Truth so ancient and so new,” though that would have been true. He says Beauty. Because what finally pierced him, what finally drew him home, was not an argument. It was an attraction. It was the radiance of a Beauty that had been calling him all along.

 

When We Tear Them Apart

Here is the tragedy of our age. We have tried to separate what God has joined together. We have tried to have truth without beauty, and goodness without beauty, and we have discovered, to our shock, that we cannot even keep truth and goodness without her.

Consider how this happens. A church looks out at the culture and says, “We need to reach people. We need to be relevant. We need to speak their language.” So it strips away the old hymns, the old liturgies, the old art, the old architecture. It replaces them with whatever the culture happens to find palatable this decade. The motive may even be sincere. But what has been communicated, beneath the words?

The message, whether intended or not, is this: the gospel itself is not all that different from the world in kind, only in degree.

We try to complete in a "marketplace" of ideas, trying to "sell" our message as the "best" message in a hierachy of alternative choices.

So we dress it up in the borrowed clothes of the marketplace. We make it match the aesthetic of the shopping mall, the concert venue, the TED talk.

The medium has become the message, and the medium is saying: we are no different from anyone else. If what we have satisfies your personal, immediate, felt-needs, good. If it does not, feel free to go look for what does.

 

The Beauty That Argues

Hans Urs von Balthasar, a theologian of the last century, devoted thousands of pages to recovering the role of beauty in Christian thought. He observed that beauty had become the “forgotten transcendental,” and that her exile had impoverished everything. “We can be sure,” he wrote, “that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love” (The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1).

Strong words. But consider their logic. Why does prayer falter when beauty is dismissed? Because prayer is, at its root, the soul’s response to the glory of God. It is the soul saying yes to a radiance it has perceived. When we have trained ourselves to dismiss radiance, to see it as "too religious," superficial, or sentimental, we have trained ourselves out of the very posture that prayer requires.

And love? Love is the soul’s movement toward the beautiful. Not merely physical beauty, of course, but the deep beauty of another person made in God’s image, the beauty of holiness, the beauty of sacrifice. If we have killed our capacity to perceive beauty, we have killed our capacity to love what is most worth loving.

The early Church understood this. When the envoys of Prince Vladimir of Kiev went searching for a true religion in the tenth century, they tried the various faiths and found them wanting. Then they came to Constantinople and entered the Hagia Sophia for the Divine Liturgy. They wrote back to their prince these famous words: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men.”

They were not converted by an apologetic argument. They were converted by beauty. And in being converted by beauty, they were converted to truth and to goodness, because the three cannot finally be separated.

A more contemporary example. I'm familiar with a local parish that was originally founded in an abandoned gymnasium.

The space was functional and affordable. But for decades, the parish struggled to attract new members.

Then, they did a serious renovation. They gutted the place, they added new walls, they put in oak pews, they adorned the sanctuary with gorgeous artwork, including a rather striking image of the Lamb of God painted in a newly-crafted dome over the altar area. They had a decent outreach budget, but it wasn't really working. All their efforts to spread the Good News were falling on deaf ears. So, they repurposed their budget in exactly the "opposite" direction, a direction that some might have thought wasteful at best, or "neglecting" their evangelical duty at worst.

They have the same pastor as before. They are preaching the same message. But in just a few months after the renovations, they are leading a new-member class that boasts of more than forty people, compared to only two who had joined just the year before. It is not about numbers alone, of course. But those forty people are souls, and the beauty spoke to them. And the most interesting part. The majority of the people who are joining are young people, young families. Most of them have not been baptized.

Often, in the last century, Christians shuffled the chairs on the deck of the titanic, and individual churches boasted "great growth" when they competed better against other churches. Their growth was, to a degree, bolstered by "transfer." People left small churches because they thought these new "big churches" were doing something powerful, they wanted to be a part of it.

But at the church I mentioned above, with forty new people joining this year (and the year is only half-over), that's not what they're experiencing. They are attracting secular people, unchurched people seeking beauty in a world that merely offers pleasure. The very demographic (young people) that the Church has always deemed most essential to win for the sake of the Gospel, but has struggled to reach for decades. The beauty of the place, though, spoke and it led them to desire the good and the true.

Precisely because it told them that what happened there was something that would give not as the world gives, which so often "takes" more than it offers when it promises us happiness. It told them that there is a truth and a goodness that is not contingent on the whims of the day, that there is a truth and a goodness that has persisted in a kind of beauty that never fades.

 

The Beauty of the Cross

But here we must be careful. The beauty of which Scripture speaks is not the beauty of mere prettiness. It is not aesthetic comfort. Beauty alone can be alluring, but beauty is never supposed to stand alone. It is meant to accompany the good and the true.

Because by "beauty" I am not talking about what's merely pretty.

The supreme revelation of divine beauty is the Cross, and the Cross is not pretty.

Isaiah saw this centuries before Calvary: ”He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). The Suffering Servant, in the world’s eyes, was the opposite of beautiful. And yet in him, in his self-emptying love, in his obedience unto death, we behold the deepest beauty there is. The beauty of love poured out without reserve.

This is why the Christian aesthetic, when it has been faithful, has never been merely decorative or sentimental.

There are a great many "Greeting Cards" with pretty images, with Bible verses on the inside, that you can buy. But have you ever known someone to receive such a card whose life was interrupted by it? Has a pretty image and a single bible verse taken out of context to sound "nice" ever changed a life?

The great medieval cathedrals do not exist to make us feel pleasant. They exist to overwhelm us with a sense of transcendence, to bring us to our knees. The icons of the Eastern tradition do not flatter the eye. They confront the soul. Gregorian chant does not entertain. It draws us into contemplative prayer and worship.

Beauty in the Christian sense is not opposed to suffering or to sacrifice. It is the radiance of self-giving love, made visible.

It is the form that holiness takes when it becomes incarnate. And this is precisely why it has the power to convert.

Because it shows us what we were made for. It shows us the kind of glory that no advertisement, no entertainment, no political program can give.

Think of what's at the center of many or most beautiful cathedrals. A life-sized crucifix. An image, culturally speaking, that is not at all pleasing.

In the first century, it was an image of an object meant by the Romans to stoke terror in the eyes of conquered peoples. Christians, though, within a few centuries started surrounding their crucifixes with beauty. They did not "pretty up" the crucifixes themselves, they remained starkly confrontational. But they surrounded them with so much beauty that the message was clear: if you have the eyes to see it, this kind of suffering, this kind of love, this very cross is the most beautiful thing the world has ever known.

It's a statement utterly subversive to the world build on economic efficiency and the market driven by the sale of pleasure. It says, all this beauty is drawing you toward one thing that stands in opposition to everything the world tells you.

 

What We Have Lost

When Christianity trades beauty for expediency, when it imitates the culture instead of offering an alternative, something terrible happens. People stop believing that the gospel is true. Not because they have been argued out of it. Because they have ceased to be drawn by it. The gravitational pull is gone. The radiance has dimmed.

And then, having lost the power to draw, we are surprised to find that we have also lost the authority to speak. We declare what is good, and the world shrugs. We declare what is true, and the world yawns. We have made ourselves indistinguishable from the marketplace, and the marketplace does not need us to tell it anything. It only demands that we "bend" toward the satisfaction of whatever it is they think they want.

Because the marketplace is not concerned with the promulgation of the "good" or the "true." The marketplace is concerned with appealing to preferences, to meeting felt-needs. Thus, a market-driven expression of the Church will invariably lose moral authority (to declare what's good) and will cease to be a beacon of truth, because in the marketplace, truth is far less important than desire, and our desires are always subjective, always changing, always contingent on the individual in the moment.

Lose the "beautiful" in our expression of faith, the community itself who understands the "good" and the "true" might not realize what's happening. Until all of a sudden, ceasing to express a sense of transcendent beauty in the world, they stand in wonder that the world no longer sees it as a homing beacon, as a light of what's good vs. evil, or as a standard for truth.

It's a trinity of necessity. All three must go together. The moment the Church loses either a sense of the "good," the "true" or the "beautiful," it will lose the other two. It might not happen over night, but it will happen. And once it has lost all of the above, the Church itself loses all authority in culture. It becomes, well, just another item to "complete" for our attention. And frankly, a message that says "take up your cross and follow me" will not likely speak to a marketplace that thrives on desire, temporary comfort, and a therapeutic sensibility that abhors suffering and says, instead, "if it feels good, do it."

 

Living the Three Together

How then shall we live, in a world that has forgotten the union of the true, the good, and the beautiful?

First, in your own worship, seek beauty. Not for its own sake, but because beauty is the natural form that truth and goodness take when they are taken seriously. If what you are trying to "get" out of the Church is something you could get from any other substitute in the world, well, you're selling yourself short in what you're seeking. Because temporary "felt-needs" only get you so far, they only get you through the moment, but they cannot carry you through life and death.

When Mary of Bethany broke her alabaster jar of costly nard to anoint Jesus, Judas protested the waste, calculating how much more "efficient" it would have been to sell it for the poor. But Jesus defended her, calling her lavish, seemingly impractical gesture "a beautiful thing" (Matthew 26:10; Mark 14:6). True worship is rarely efficient; it is extravagant.

Second, in your home, make beauty a habit. Set the table well, even when it is just family. Hang art that points to something higher. Play music that nourishes the soul rather than merely entertains. Your home is the first place where your children will learn whether beauty matters. Teach them by what they see and hear to value a beauty that is more than desire, or you will have a much harder time raising them to value what's true, or to live according to what's good.

Third, in your speech, refuse the ugly shortcuts. The cynical joke, the cruel observation, the gossiping word, these are aesthetic crimes as much as moral ones. They train the soul to find pleasure in what is base. Choose words that are true and good, and you will find that they are also beautiful.

Fourth, when you encounter beauty in the world, let yourself be stopped by it. A sunset, a piece of music, a child’s laughter, the architecture of an old church. Do not rush past these things. Receive them as messengers from the Beauty that made them. Remember, all true beauty has it's source in Beauty Himself. All beauty when perceived rightly should not be reduced to an "object" (as when a beautiful woman is reduced to an object of lust in the eyes of men) but should give us cause to direct our gaze upward, to the One who makes Himself known in beauty.

Finally, remember that the deepest beauty is the beauty of holiness. The most beautiful thing in the world is a soul transformed by grace. ”Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness” (Psalm 96:9). Pursue holiness, and you will become beautiful in the way that matters most, with a radiance that will draw others toward the source of all light. When we are truly pursuing holiness, we will see beauty in places no one else does.