Homer wrote, "Beauty is lifesaving."
Playing in GRO we always get asked if we are a Christian band. I always found the question a bit odd. When you meet a plumber, do you ask if he's a Christian plumber? My understanding is that to be a Christian is to do whatever it is that you do with great passion and devotion.
In Colossians: "whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus"
He is teaching people to live as Christians, and then whatever they do will be sacred, holy work. Music already is worship. Music is praise. Music is sacred. Music is good. There is beauty in it. Creation doesn't need a label to make it sacred or acceptable. When God made the world he called it, "good." Now obviously anything can be corrupted and desecrated and used for other purposes other than it was intended for. But making music is sacred
So much of Christian music is absolutely terrible. It often lacks creativity and inspiration with recycled clichés for lyrics. Sometime I feel like it may actually be desecrating the art from in its quality.
There is no need for a Christian label for something to point to God. Where there is beauty, there God is found as its author. In as much as truth and absolutes points to Christ, so does beauty
Beauty is that which delights us, that which takes our focus us out of ourselves in appreciation and wonder. It takes our thoughts blissfully away from ourselves. It is the thing in our surroundings which draws our attention and by which is an occasion for 'unselfing.'
We delight in things that are beautiful so much because beauty's sway is capable of 'unselfing' our thoughts.
A pleasant Spring day can totally alter my mood for the good.
A restless child is appeased when he/she remembers Christmas is but days away.
When anyone sees beauty their hearts are quickened yet their taste for true beauty is still unsatisfied. When we see beauty on this earth, it never is ultimate beauty (beauty itself), and thus we are always left wanting more. Beauty makes us at once utterly satisfied and strangely unsatisfied, because we have not the source. Because it is not eternal it does not ultimately satisfy.
"Something beautiful fills the mind, yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation." - Elaine Scarry, Professor of Aesthetics at
The whisper of Christ blows amongst all things which are beautiful. Not everyone is able to see the beauty of God in the beauty of the world but we all experience it. As the blind man taps the pavement with his stick, we touch God or rather God touches us through experiences of beauty, whether we are aware of this or not.
*Much of this blog is lifted and borrowed from Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell & a Blog by David Phillips
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