THE ROLE OFBEAUTY IN

TRANSFORMATION

byLesley Sutton

When we awaken to beauty, we become awareof new ways of being in the world.

This little booklet is about BEAUTY and the role

it can play in unity, mission and the

transformation of our towns and cities. It aims to

expain why it is vital for the church to recover a

deeper understanding of the value and role of

beauty if we are to stand any chance of sharing

Gods love and presence to contemporary

western society.

Throughout history secular philosophers and

Christian theologians alike, from Plato and

Augustine to contemporary thinkers like Hans

Urs Von Balthasar and Roger Scrutton have

spoken of the importance of the ancient triad of

goodness, truth and beauty; the three

transcendentals that describe the character,

nature and presence of God.

In Evangelical traditions we have for the past few

hundred years tended to focus on the importance

of Truth, the 'Word' being the most important

means of sharing Gods love with the world.

More recently we have engaged with acts of

goodness and kindness through the many social

action projects the church now initiates, for

example food banks, serving the homeless,

street pastors, community centres and many

more expressions of good works.

But Beauty has been harder to claim and has at

times slipped away from the evangelical

consciousness, seeing it perhaps as irrelevant or

superfluous. But it can be argued that in a world

that abandons an understanding and an

affirmation of beauty, that neither goodness of

truth can remain good or true.

So what do I mean when I say we need to

recover the art of beauty?

By beauty I do not mean the pretty, the pleasing,

the perfect or naive, but beauty, I believe is the

very nature of God, that can be found,

discovered, and even surprise us in the midst of

our everyday lives, even in the most difficult and

harshest of situations.

Beauty is the divine breath of love and grace that

touches our hearts with a thread of gold.

It brings hope, life, aspiration, joy, gentleness,

peace and goodness.

It brings a taste and a touch of our creators heart

so that when we encounter beauty, be that in

music, art, poetry, nature, science, the embrace

of friends or family, or in the kindness of a

stranger in a moment of terror and devastation,

we encounter God.

Beauty becomes liminal space; a place of

transition; a space in-between, where boundaries

are dissolved. It points beyond itself to the

eternal, like a finger pointing to the moon. This

notion is often named in the arts as the sublime;

a quality of greatness and vast magnitude,

power, awe; of being overwhelmed by something

greater than yourself; a threshold to the divine

loving embrace of God.

It is a moment when we, in our mundane

everyday lives, catch a glimpse of the eternal

realm, overlapping with the present moment.

Beauty is the product of honest attention to the

particular, the universal, the human and the

divine. It is the naked simplicity of the essence of

life when we take the time to discard all the

superfluous distractions that call us to look away

from the very heart of creation and life.

Simone Weil in her essay ‘Waiting for God’

writes,

“The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender

smile for us coming through matter.

He is really present in the universal beauty.

The love of this beauty proceeds from God

dwelling in our souls and goes out to

God present in the universe.

It is like a sacrament.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar explains that

‘the search for love and beauty is intrinsic

to the human condition,”

and that as Christians our mission is

“to build a culture of love, to change the world

from the inside......to live as co-creators with the

Divine Artist.....To live lovingly, and wonder at the

unity of beauty, truth and goodness.”

However in todays culture we have been

conditioned to see beauty as glamour; stunning

photoshopped models without a single blemish

on their perfectly formed faces. Or as expensive

and desirable objects that create the perfect

home in magazines and on tv programmes like

Grand Designs. Life has become starved of true

beauty as we have tried to possess and

consume it. Modern life has become ugly, mass

produced, materialistic, always drawing attention

to the negative, the bad, the evil, the things to

fear, the people to hate. Much of contemporary

art particularly in the British Art scene has

become obsessed with the language of the age.

Art is now disturbing, shocking, reflecting the

uncertainty of life since the two world wars. It is

about randomness, life without truths and

absolutes, life without religion and faith. As our

society has lost its faith in God and religion so

too it has inevitably lost faith in beauty, for beauty

is of God.

But true beauty, an echo of the presence of God,

brings hope, compassion, joy and peacefulness.

In Greek the word for beautiful is 'kalon' - related

to the word 'kalein' - the notion of the call.

When we experience beauty we feel called by

another. We sense something that is beyond

ourselves, in the words of George Steiner,

“Beauty is an echo of the presence of other.”

I want us to now look at three different examples

of beauty that reveal Gods presence and love

amongst our communities.

Beauty from ashes.The first is a story that was highlighted on our

televisions and social media at the beginning of

last year (2014) Stephen Sutton, was a brave

young teenager who having been diagnosed with

terminal cancer, spent the last few weeks of his

short life raising millions of pounds for cancer

research. In a tv interview with one of his friends

at the cancer unit he was treated at, a young

teenage girl, said tearfully,

“Ever since I was diagnosed with cancer,

the world has seemed more beautiful,

colours are stronger,

everything is more intense and amazing.”

A similar experience is shared by terminally ill

author and critic Clive James. He read a farewell

poem he had written on the Andrew Marr show in

October.

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.

So slow a fading out brings no real pain.

Breath growing short

Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain

Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see

So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls

On that small tree

And saturates your brick back garden walls,

So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends

This glistening illuminates the air.

It never ends.

Whenever the rain comes it will be there,

Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.

Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.

What I must do

Is live to see that. That will end the game

For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,

A final flood of colors will live on

As my mind dies,

Burned by my vision of a world that shone

So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

‘Japanese Maple’ by Clive James, first published

in the New Yorker, © Clive James, 2014

Their eyes had been opened, because death can

bring us closer to the Divine. God reveals His

glory to us when we stop and pause and think

about life and death. They have discovered the

eternal in the present moment, for they are no

longer too busy rushing around achieving and

competing, but their diagnosis has forced them to

slow down and to listen and to see everything

more intensely.

They have discovered the beauty of death and

resurrection. They have seen the beauty of God

in their time of distress and pain and are reaching

out to the call that they are sensing.

Colour as a tool for transformation.

Our next story is about a man called Edi Rama,

he was the mayor of Tirana, the capital of

Albania, for eleven years. An artist before he

became a politician he believed in the power of

colour to revive the hope that had been lost in his

city. Believing that art and beauty could become

a starting point for urban regeneration he began

a programme to paint the drab grey buildings in

the city with bright colours. Red, blue, green,

yellow, orange, pink, rainbows of colour and

pattern decorated the facades of homes, offices

and community buildings creating whole streets

and landscapes of brightness.

He tells us that the EU were not happy that their

funding was being used in this way and said that

the colours he had chosen did not meet

European standards and so asked him to

compromise.

He said ‘No’ that compromise was the colour of

grey and that they had already more than

enough of that.

He says,

"I am a realist who dreams".

“I love the joy that colour can give to our lives

and to our communities.

When colours come out everywhere,

a mood of change started transforming

the spirit of the people....

People started to drop less litter in the streets.

They started to pay taxes.

They started to feel something they’d

forgotten.....

Beauty was giving people a feeling of being

protected.

This was not a misplaced feeling

- crime did fall.”

To learn more about Edi's inspirational story whynot listen to his TED talk "Take back your citywith paint"

Beauty and storytelling

Our final example of the role beauty in our

communities is of a project I led in 2014. In the

summer of 2012, whilst on retreat, I sensed God

speak to me about using my passion for art and

beauty as a means to share his love for the

people of Manchester, the city where I have lived

for the past twenty seven years. Gradually, over

the next few months, the jigsaw began to come

together in my mind to form a picture of an arts

trail across the city centre during the season of

Lent, that would explore themes taken from the

Passion narrative using a variety of art forms

including sculpture, painting, installation and

sound, to be hosted in six significant and

beautiful cultural spaces in the city centre, and to

accompany them with a series of spiritual

reflections to make the journey around the art

works a form of pilgrimage.

Life by

James Sutton

hand carved

marble

Theologian Walter Brueggeman suggests that,

"The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture,

nourish and evoke a consciousness and

perception alternative to the consciousness and

perception of the dominant culture around us."

He goes on to say that as christians we should

critique our culture, lament the sorrows that are a

part of our everyday and then to offer an

alternative way forward, a way of hope. The

PassionArt Trail trail became, in this way, a form

of prophetic mission in the sense that its intention

was to help the visitors lament the suffering that

we all experience in our everyday lives, and yet

to offer a way through them, a pathway of hope,

by drawing on the stories and experiences of

those who lived through the Passion of Christ.

By exhibiting and commissioning art works that

consciously explored themes such as betrayal,

bereavement, suffering, forgiveness, hope and

compassion, some through the visual retelling of

the Easter story, others that sensitively evoked

aspects of these themes within contemporary

contexts, we invited viewers to relate to the

Passion story in a personal way, offering spiritual

reflections and prayers to help them participate in

this visual pilgrimage. We partnered with three of

the cities most beautiful secular spaces who

welcomed us because they valued the beauty

and the quality we were bringing.

More than seven thousand people engaged with

the art works and their message, experiencing

the Easter story through the beauty of art and

music.

Summary

We are all expressions of God’s handiwork,

created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which

God prepared in advance for us to do Ephesians

2:10 Our vocations find their roots in who we are

and the sense of purpose we have. Among a

multitude of vocations, the Spirit of God is still

creating. In our architecture, urban planning, our

literature, education, movies, music, visual arts,

theatres, enterprise and community work, there

are endless possibilities to create spaces that

reflect the value of people and the beauty of

God's creation and so contribute to an

environment where we all flourish. In this way we

bring expressions of the divine into everyday life,

our prophetic presence drawing attention to the

creator who has set eternity in the human heart.

As christians called to city and town

transformation we must be agents of beauty as

well as of truth and goodness.

Beauty is a language that speaks through the

hardness and indifference of our culture.

Truth is now considered subjective, but beauty

disarms, it attracts without an argument, for it

speaks directly to the heart and not just the mind.

The church therefore now needs to offer

goodness, truth and beauty as ways to share

Gods love with the world.

Acts of kindness and goodness have flourished

over the past few years as we have re-engaged

with the social gospel of Jesus, but perhaps we

can enhance and grow our mission by engaging

with beauty too.

If we are called to reflect God to the world then

we surely are called to reflect beauty.

So can I ask you to consider when you are

planning your mission, your worship, your

transformation agenda’s, how can we bring

beauty into the spaces around us?

How can beauty be evoked and welcomed in

your place?

Lesley Sutton

Lesley supports Roger in leading the Gathermovement and is launching Gather Creative, tosupport and encourage the arts within unitymovements.

Lesley is a visual artist and curator and foundingdirector of PassionArt, an organisation that seeksto encourage and nurture art and spirituality, andthe recovery of beauty within the church, thehome and our communities. She has worked withRoger in churches and community groups formore than 30 years and in the cultural arts sectorfor around 12 years.

Lesley and Roger have 4 grown up children and6 grandchildren.

You can find out more about Lesley and

PassionArt by visiting the website

www.passionart.org or

www.passionarttrail.co.uk

© Copyright Lesley Sutton 2015

www.wegather.co.ukGather is enabled by the Evangelical Alliance

© Copyright Lesley Sutton 2015