Search the word “beauty” and I find only glossy advertisements for makeup. No wonder we associate aesthetic terms like image with shallowness, as in, “He only does that to maintain his image.” If beauty is only skin deep, it has no purpose other than sales and marketing.
If image is only a tool for our momentary politics, how can it provide any depth of meaning?
If image is only a tool for our momentary politics, how can it provide any depth of meaning?
The question about beauty is: can we see it even in what is broken? The artist Marcel Duchamp loved to let randomness appear in his work. Meticulously crafting a sculpture in glass, he would let the glass fall to the floor and break. He wanted to preserve the broken pattern, to insist on our looking at it, rather than past it.
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit. (Psalm 51:17) Broken glass, broken bones are one thing, but the worst and very deepest place to experience brokenness is in one’s soul. And yet, God sees brokenness there and affirms it as that most holy of acts: sacrifice in worship.
“Grace makes beauty out of ugly things,” goes a U2 song. Can we look at the broken Son of God and realize what God saw there?
God, help me not to deny what is broken, but to see it as You do. Amen.
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Just because I'm losing, doesn't mean I'm Lost!
"Put your brokenness under the blessing." Henri Nouwen
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Second Minute: Your Thoughts and Observations