MAKING THE UNBEAUTIFUL ACCEPTABLE- Part 1

“I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.” (Oscar Wilde)

At the risk of sounding haughty, I am significantly influenced by post-structuralism. There are many parts of post-structuralism that I would say I connect with. For example, I high value the naturalistic and community approach to truth. But there is another aspect that I also really connect with to a much greater extent: that being that language is ultimately flawed. To explain it as simply as I am able to: I have to put a thought that I am have into words that despite my best efforts don’t completely fit what I am thinking. I then have to find some way to convey those thoughts. I may choose to speak them or in a case such as this blog, I may choose to write them down. You, the listener or reader has to filter through the various external forces that affect your ability to understand my thoughts such as cultural barriers, prejudices, and context, and then take what you hear and give your own meaning to it. You then develop your own original thought concerning what you think I am trying to convey. Despite the most deliberate attempts at communicating effectively, it is almost impossible for one person to use words alone to convey a thought. Anyone who has ever written an email that was misinterpreted should understand this. Language inherently has many degrees of separation from meaning to meaning. In The Concept of Anxiety, for example, Kierkegaard argues that there is a natural tension and interdependence on sin and our understanding of sin. In order for us to label an act sinful we have to have some understanding of why that might be sinful. In a sense, the idea and the language are used to define each other.

One of the greatest misrepresentations in this life (which have been largely shaped by language) is what is or is not beautiful. The human experience is filled with things, people, and ideas that are unbeautiful. But what makes it unbeautiful is uncertain. Please don’t misunderstand my point. I am not arguing that those things that are unbeautiful are in fact beautiful. Many of those unbeautiful things may in fact be beautiful, but just as many of them are definitely ugly. There is no doubt that sin, greed, and hate easily fit into the ugly category. The world hates things that are unbeautiful. It prizes its understanding and interpretation of beauty to the extent that anything that is less than perfect often falls into the ugly category regardless of how valuable it may actually be. But the church is rarely much different in its disdain and discomfort with things that don’t align with its definition of beauty. However, the church responds to its disdain and discomfort in a very different way than the world usually does. The church, as I have experienced it, wants to somehow redeem the unbeautiful. In cases such as poverty, many churches feel the moral responsibility to abolish such an injustice. In instances where the church can’t make the unbeautiful beautiful it attempts to convince that which is unbeautiful that it is actually beautiful. To be less generic consider poverty: Christians will often tell the homeless individual that they are beautiful to God despite their homelessness. I believe in social justice and attempting to see the beauty in everything and I believe that the Church should advocate relentlessly for those who can’t speak for themselves, but I also believe that there will always be a degree of ugliness within the human experience and that it is that ugliness that defines the human experience just as much as that which is beautiful. Our fixation on beauty is understandable, but the great injustice is that when the church dismisses the value of all that is unbeautiful it dismisses a significant part of the human experience. As Christians advocating for God’s perspective in the natural world we cannot dismiss all that makes the natural real. In other words, we can’t ignore, dismiss, or gloss over those elements within this life that make us feel uncomfortable. Nor should we always try to fix, replace, or redeem that which is ugly. We must accept that there are, in fact, things in this would that are ugly that are our responsibility to work with God on redeeming, but there are also many things which are just as ugly that we must learn to accept as part of this life that have value despite how uncomfortable or powerless it may make us feel.

Perhaps that is why Christ didn’t make everything “right” in the world during His ministry. There is no doubt that he could have. That is what people expected of the Messiah. I have heard that the reason that Jesus didn’t fix the world’s injustices is because He was giving that calling to the church. I am not denying that humanity has in it the potential to end hunger and all forms of hate, but for God to say it is our problem takes a tone of Deism that contradicts the passion of Christ. But this train of thought is getting us off the topic of the unbeautiful and entering the realm of the presence of evil. But isn’t that how the church typically approaches things that are unbeautiful. The argument is typically approached something like, God is beautiful. Therefore things that are unbeautiful are not of God. Therefore things that are unbeautiful are evil. Therefore, not only is poverty evil, but so are those that live in poverty. “Wait a second,” says the church, “those that live in poverty are the result of what is evil, not evil themselves.” The natural argument would then dictate that those then that have wealth are the result of what is good, not good by proxy. But wealth is no more righteous than poverty, unless we value beauty more than we think. The problem is that when we attach sin to the unbeautiful, despite our best efforts, we are attaching the people associated with that sin as sinful. To remedy this we might conclude that poverty then might not be evil, rather a condition of the world that is uncomfortable and undesirable. Poverty, therefore, is just ugly, not sinful.