While staying with my wife in Germany for a few months, over a year ago, I was introduced to the concept of Life-Art by my friend Werner May. As he explained it to me, I got very excited. I had been thinking about the beauty of God in reference to my work as a psychologist and counselor for many years—having read Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, and Hans Urs von Balthasar on beauty—and had been organizing my thoughts about human development and the care of souls around such a framework of reference. I have even written about this throughout my book, Foundations for Soul Care.However, Werner’s proposal went further than what I had been thinking, since what he was suggesting amounted to something like a life-philosophy, a way of seeing all of life with reference to beauty, with its ultimate reference point in the origin of all beauty: God. I was immediately captivated by this ideal, and began to think through its implications after returning home to America.

However, within a few months I noticed that I was feeling a kind of heaviness, a sense of conviction surrounding this ideal. I believe most thinking about beauty and certainly my thinking about beauty, assumes some standards or criteria for evaluating beauty and determining just how beautiful something is. In classical discussions, beauty is usually considered to involve some type of ideal form, and a harmony and proportionality among the elements. With such criteria, one can compare kinds of music and art and distinguish great works and inferior works. This seems to me to be intrinsic to the concept of beauty and essential to making sense of it. However, being the sort of compromised individual that I am, I am often painfully aware of the lack of ideal form and harmony and proportionality that characterizes my life and my relationships with others. I struggle with indwelling sin; I am sometimes fearful, and at other times, arrogant and critical. My backyard right now is filled with weeds; our garage needs painting. So, if life is supposed to be art, then it seems to me that it entails measuring oneself against standards of beauty, of wholeness and harmony and so on. So to be a participant in Life-Art, it seems to me, one must have a fairly beautiful life: great virtue, care for others, the pursuit of justice, beautiful social skills that express the beauty of divine love; intense spirituality; one’s life and one’s home ought to be reflections of divine wholeness and perfection, at least, if one is going to lay claim publicly to the high calling of “Life-Art.” As I looked at my life, I realized there are elements of my life that are not so beautiful. I’ve always tended to be somewhat aware of my inadequacies, but I found that the more I emphasized and promoted Life-Art in my mind and heart and to others, a sense of unworthiness grew. The high calling of Life-Art was making me miserable!

Is there anything wrong with this line of thinking? If there is, I can’t see it. Human life is supposed to be an image of God, a picture and a sign of God. The reason the ideal of Life-Art makes so much sense is because fundamentally God has created and designed us to participate in his beauty, so that we are most fulfilled as we live in ways that reflect his holiness, harmony, and proportion. I think that all this is undeniably true. Hence, it seems that my sense of conviction is warranted. I am haunted by a sense of failure, of falling short of the beauty of God. So if we are to pursue living-life-as-art, can we say anything encouraging about that which is not wholly beautiful or is just plain mediocre? Indeed, can we say anything encouraging about that which is ugly?

During the past year, I was pushed by these considerations to think more deeply than ever before about the beauty of God and about God’s intentions for us with respect to Life-Art, and the following are some of my reflections.

If the true God were simply the one God of Jewish or Islamic monotheism or the one, abstract Creator God of the philosophers, I think people like me would be without hope and would be cast necessarily into despair at the thought of conforming to God’s perfect beauty in their lives. Most theists perceive God to be absolutely perfect and this would seem to require that all humans be perfect like him in order to be beautiful (allowing for their finitude—but this is not a problem. A picture of a beautiful scene can itself be a beautiful representation).And with some important exceptions and qualifications, I think much of the Jewish Testament portrayal of God tends to underscore this understanding. I think perfection and beauty are actually basic to God’s character and expressed in his law, which he built into the fabric of the universe and into the human heart (Ro 2:12,13) (including aesthetic standards), as well as revealed to the people of Israel.

However, the triune God, most fully revealed in the Christian Testament, alone gives people like me hope who believe in the ideal of Life-Art, but feel keenly their inability to reflect that ideal adequately.

Why? Because while the Son of God is declared to be the perfect representation of the Father (Heb 1:3)—and so is just as beautiful as the Father—the Son’s beauty was displayed in becoming a finite human being and entered into our brokenness and sin. He became a baby, a creature that messed its pants and spit up and had food on his face. He wept, he grieved, at times he was enraged and anxious (think of Gethsemane!). He was persecuted and mocked, he was misjudged and misunderstood; he was crucified and stabbed, and nailed in shame between two thieves. Christ entered into all our human life, and though he did not commit sin himself, he was made in the likeness of sinful flesh (Ro 8:3), and he so identified with our ugliness that he even became sin for us (2Co 5:21). Interestingly, perhaps the clearest statement on this score can be found anticipated in the Jewish Testament.

“He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him,
  Nor [beautiful] appearance that we should be attracted to Him.
  He was despised and forsaken of men,
  A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
  And like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised, and we did not esteem
Him.
  Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried;
  Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
  But He was pierced through for our transgressions,
  He was crushed for our iniquities;
  The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him,
  And by His scourging we are healed.”  (Is 53:2b-5),

We are told here that Yahweh’s suffering servant, who is to come to redeem God’s people, will not be so beautiful in his physical appearance. How is this reversal of values and expectations possible?

Now it remains gloriously true that the life of Christ was indeed beautiful—the very definition of true beauty, Christians would say; what Edwards calls primary beauty—the beauty of a perfectly virtuous character. It is obvious to the most vehement skeptics that he was a man of uncommon virtue. The Bible says repeatedly he was without sin. So the beauty of divine perfection undoubtedly shined through the humanity of the Son of God. His beauty is that which provides the rationale and fulfillment of all beauty in human life and it confirms the sense of conviction that all of the rest of us human beings possess, no matter how little, since we are aware at some level, way deep down, that we have less beauty than we ought to have, or to put it more bluntly: we can tell that we are more or less ugly.

But Christ’s beauty—that is, the beauty of the triune God—is a double beauty, for in addition to being the very Archetype of wholeness and harmony, it is also the beauty of self-giving and self-denying redemption for broken sinners; it is the beauty of agape-love, the beauty that happily extends itself deep into the imperfection and ugliness of human life, without reserve and with resolute compassion, and it embraces that which is its opposite, and even to what is contrary to itself. God loves this ugly world, and Christ became its propitiation or resolution, “coming to terms with” its lack of moral and spiritual perfection and bestowing upon human decay, disability, rejection, and rebellion a transcendent dignity and majesty, to all who will receive it. The lion became a lamb that was slain; the redeeming king sits upon a donkey; Life entered into death; the Beautiful One was cast away by humanity—and the absolute paradox, by his loving Father—as if he were ugly.

And he became ugly, so that the triune God might share with us his healing beauty, so that we would first be declared beautiful in Christ through faith, and then so that we would enter by faith into his beauty, taking it into our being, so that our lives would somewhat resemble his beauty, slowly growing into it—into the beauty that embraces the disgusting, the smelly, the gross, the despicable—and in his arms our lack of beauty/our ugliness is seen in a new light. He didn’t choose the pretty and humble Cinderella; he chose the ugly step-sister. And he does not immediately give us a facelift and ask that we put on makeup to cover over our warts and pimples. Instead he loves us as we are and simply declares that we are a beautiful princess (in Christ), made perfectly beautiful, eventually, in spite of our current imperfection, because he has bestowed upon us now all of his beauty, so that we now have more than enough beauty to be really pleased with our selves in the light of his favor and love.

It seems that our beauty now, as Christians, is not in spite of our ugliness, but because of it. God’s infinite goodness fills up our emptiness and brokenness, cleanses us from our sin, and in the process, our ugliness takes on a different complexion in the eyes of God. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Christ says. “The first shall be last, and the last first.” Life-Art in the kingdom of God is the artistry of Christ’s life applied to our destitute lives of ugliness, which takes that destitution and makes it a compound of both ugliness and beauty, but which in that redemptive composite actually is made wholly beautiful. God can see it; the question is can we?

Someday, there will be no more shame. Someday, there will be no more tears spilt over our current disfigurement. In that day, our transformation into the beautiful bride he already tells us we are in his eyes will be actualized and we will see ourselves fully as we are seen.

Until then, I can write about Life-Art, but not without wincing a bit, not without blushing some and acknowledging publicly what all who know me well know all too well: that I am not so beautiful. But I know someone so beautiful, so beautiful that I find all my desires and wishes and quest for beauty point to him, are fulfilled in him, and find their satisfaction in him. And I am in him and he loves me.

“After this, our Lord reminded me of the longing I had had for him; and I saw that nothing kept me from him but sin, and I saw that this is so with all of us. And I thought if sin had never existed, we should all have been pure and like himself, as God made us; and so I had often wondered before now in my folly why, in his great foreseeing wisdom, God had not prevented the beginning of sin; for then, I thought all should have been well. I ought certainly to have abandoned these thoughts, but nevertheless I grieved and sorrowed over the question with no reason or judgement. But Jesus, who in this vision informed me of all that I needed to know, answered with this assurance: ‘Sin is befitting, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’”
Julian of Norwich, Showings