In late February, in the opening weeks of the war in Ukraine, one photograph began to circulate that, out of all the images filling our feeds, stuck with me: a quiet city square under an apartment block, a public green carefully tended, a single conifer skillfully pruned. A scene of serenity, tranquility, and peace. That photo was juxtaposed with a shot of the same square after heavy shelling by the Russian army: the apartment block, still standing, was now cratered with holes, but the lawn and tree were obliterated, reduced to a grayish morass of smoke and dust and ash.
War breeds such images at a harrowing rate. For the victims, such images serve multiple purposes: they are reminders of what was lost, but equally, they serve as catalysts for what must be rebuilt after the conflict ends. Not simply public necessities such as housing and streets, nor even amenities such as parks or playgrounds. No, something far greater must be restored after the rubble is cleared away: something that animates those public squares, gives them value beyond their mere utility, signs the warrant for their restoration to begin.
To write about beauty is famously difficult. Definitions tend to fall short; to quote Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on obscenity, we can’t always say what it is, but we know it when we see it. Take a moment and ask yourself: why do we not simply speak our hymns in a monotone pitch, as opposed to singing the line of a melody? Why, for that matter, do we even write hymns, employing rhyme and meter and heightened language to testify to our faith? Why do we adorn our churches with elements such as vaulted ceilings and stained glass, and why, for that matter, do we even build ornate houses of worship at all? 
Nobody asks these questions because the answers are so patently obvious. From Eden to the New Jerusalem, beauty defines the world humans are meant to live in: through art, through worship, through appreciation of natural wonders. Nor is its Edenic origin any accident, as N.T. Wright argues in “Surprised by Hope,”
“To make sense of and celebrate a beautiful world through the production of artifacts that are themselves beautiful is part of the call to be stewards of creation, as was Adam’s naming of the animals. Genuine art is thus itself a response to the beauty of creation, which itself is a pointer to the beauty of God.”
Mere response, however, is only the beginning. Scripture regularly teaches that believers are invited not just to celebrate and enjoy beauty, but instead, to envision and to enact it; in short, to co-create it. Few better examples of this invitation exist than the instructions for building the ancient Tabernacle (Exodus 35-40): here, beauty is not simply a suggestion; it is a command. Given a set of divine proportions to ensure architectural harmony, the Israelites were to use only the most costly and precious materials to craft a dwelling place for their God, materials that would have amazed the faithful and the pagan alike, and elicited a desire to know more about the deity dwelling within those walls.
Why do we not simply speak our hymns in a monotone pitch, as opposed to singing the line of a melody? Why, for that matter, do we even write hymns, employing rhyme and meter and heightened language to testify to our faith?
Both the Tabernacle and the later temples have long disappeared, but our records of their beauty still survive. Such beauty elicits wonder and encourages awe; correspondingly, such a posture of the heart prompts the fear of the Lord, which Proverbs tells us time and again is the beginning of wisdom. Yet, starved of beauty as part of our regular diet, human spirits wither: We grow thankless, irritable, and self-exalting. We grow prone to serve other masters, to worship illusory, chimerical gods. Citing Psalm 93 among others, J.I. Packer argues in “Knowing God” that ignorance of divine majesty — of which beauty is a core component — plagues us “moderns” more than we know:
“The Christian’s instincts of trust and worship are stimulated very powerfully by knowledge of the greatness of God. But this is knowledge which Christians today largely lack, and that is one reason why our faith is so feeble and our worship so flabby. We are modern people, and modern people, though they cherish great thoughts of themselves, have as a rule small thoughts of God. When the person in the church, let alone the person in the street, uses the word God, the thought is rarely of divine majesty.”
The answers to my earlier questions may be obvious, but their obviousness does not, sadly, negate the need for them. Beauty may be instinctive, but it is an instinct that we have long let atrophy. For too many churches today, focused on external metrics such as growth of membership or finances, or the accumulation of influence in the political sphere, beauty has become an afterthought, a decorative element that we are to consume, but not champion—as incomplete a depiction of God’s nature as a portrait of a face without a nose.
Beauty and Our Unquenchable Thirst for the Divine
Perhaps one of the reasons beauty has fallen by the wayside is its elusiveness — that difficulty of its definition. Ironically, to artists at work, its elusive nature often yields only more impassioned pursuits, from the poet searching for the perfect line to the painter seeking the perfect shade. And so should it be. For if beauty is one of the central aspects of God’s nature, it is only right that we should tune our hearts to search for that aspect just as much as we search after His love, mercy, justice, and other divine qualities. In glorifying our Creator, we are not just to celebrate His beauty, to anticipate its full arrival in the eternal city, but to reflect it in the here and now: to share it, to let it flow into our present broken world. So how can we participate in this vision, and what difference can it make?
For too many churches today, beauty has become an afterthought, a decorative element that we are to consume, but not to champion.
Fifty years ago, in her book “Hidden Art,” Edith Schaeffer offered a host of practical suggestions for creating and sharing beauty on a daily basis. We are made in the image of a Creator, she argues, and are in communication with Him through prayer, worship, and sacrament. So co-creation must inform our earthly mission; to believe otherwise would be akin to a child rejecting his own last name.
“It is true that all men are created in the image of God, but Christians are supposed to be conscious of that fact, and being conscious of it, should recognize the importance of living artistically, aesthetically, and creatively, as creative creatures of the Creator. If we have been created in the image of an Artist, then we should look for expressions of artistry, and be sensitive to beauty, responsive to what has been created for our appreciation. … The fact that you are a Christian should show in some practical area of a growing creativity and sensitivity to beauty, rather than in a gradual drying up of creativity, and a blindness to ugliness.”
Much of Schaeffer’s interest covers established forms of artistic practice, such as visual arts, music, literature and drama, and cooking. Drawing on her life with her husband, Francis, and her work as one of the founders of the L’Abri Fellowship, she illustrates how simple gestures such as drawing, singing, and group recitation add joy, liveliness, and intentionality to otherwise daily encounters. Peppering her pages are hand-drawn sketches, including cartoonish depictions of Francis’ sermons, that serve both to prove her larger point — these sketches are the spoonful of sugar to her medicine going down — and to explain complicated theological concepts to adults and children alike.
Discussion of the traditional artistic disciplines is to be expected, but it is in the “lesser” chapters that Schaeffer’s argument shines: chapters on gardening, on recreation (yes, on how to play and have fun), and even on how to dress, with a sublime meditation on Matthew 6:28. Her chapter on flower arrangements is a masterclass in pastoral care and should be required reading for members of any mercy ministry, male and female alike; in her view, creativity may be more visible on a hospital meal tray than on a gallery wall. So, too, her insights on beauty at home: through restoring furniture by hand rather than simply buying new, through salvaging scraps of fabric and wood and fashioning them into toys and gifts, through enhancing décor on behalf of a child or a spouse or a guest, we give witness to who we are as children of an inventive God.
Herein lies the mystery. Countering the shows we love to watch on HGTV, interior decoration is not about adorning a home. Rather, true interior decoration is internal decoration — adorning the heart — through grateful recognition of the gifts of talent and resource we have been given, and returning those gifts to others freely, joyfully, with no expectation of gain. (Schaeffer is particularly keen on the ministerial service that believers must show their disabled or impoverished neighbors.) Such a vision directly hews to C.S. Lewis’ claim in “The Weight of Glory,” where he likens the search for beauty to the search for that which is eternal, and thus eternally pleasing to God, over all earthly things: “We do not want merely to see beauty,” Lewis writes, “though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
For Lewis, the “weight” of glory is the weight of sharing in God’s own recognition of the imperishable beauty of human souls. Beauty, then, is more than cosmetic. It always has been. By first inducing in us an unquenchable thirst for the divine, it draws us ever closer to our Creator, and sets alight A.W. Tozer’s famous “secret law of the soul” whereby we conform ever more to His nature. By calming the troubled mind, beauty becomes an agent of divine healing in a suffering world. Conversely, by perturbing the complacent heart, it heralds the breaking-in of the heavenly kingdom, and the upsetting of the natural order. Beauty uplifts, consoles, excites, soothes, delights, surprises, and above all challenges the soul: No matter its angle of approach, beauty arrests our quotidian existence, and requires us to grapple with the claims of eternity.
In this respect — though it is rarely expressed in this way, and to our detriment — beauty is nothing short of an agent of our sanctification.
Pursuing Beauty With Surfaces, Thresholds, and Seasons
How else shall we encourage this pursuit? Frankly, few guides outpace Edith Schaeffer’s, which I exhort all interested believers to read, and which needs no updating even a half-century on. But if I may draw on personal experience, meditating on this topic for the last several years has yielded a few other insights, specific opportunities to bring beauty into our homes, our lives, and our worship. Three specific areas arise: surfaces, thresholds, and seasons.
First, surfaces. Several years before the pandemic closed our church plalnt’s doors, we moved into a new building and we were grateful to have found a space whose architecture was local to New Orleans. Our new double-shotgun house was an iconic, familiar structure and made visitors feel far more welcome than our previous location. Yet for months after we moved in, our walls remained bare, a legacy of the prior tenant. Something about that emptiness felt off, and so after weighing our limited budget, we hung a handmade wooden cross and our pastor’s stoles on the walls, which one of our parishioners called “our stained glass.”
Almost immediately our attitudes during worship changed, as we went from worshipping in a gray sheetrock box to a space filled with color and rich cloth, fabric that our youngest children used to caress and explore as they sat. Was it as lavish as the Tabernacle? Hardly — but across those many centuries we could hear the Tabernacle’s echo more clearly. Here, then, the opportunity: find bare, empty surfaces around you and cause them to awaken. How visceral, how much more embodied the experience of worship becomes, with this one small change.
Second, thresholds. In my new congregation, though we are grateful to worship in a restored historic church, certain elements of design make our theology more visible. Every Sunday morning we set up vertical banners in the entrances to the major doorways of the building, banners that describe our purpose, our ministries, and our mission. Though the banners themselves are attractive, that is scarcely the point. The point is that by stepping through the outside doors, and then again into the sanctuary, we are entering into spaces that are increasingly set apart, reserved for that which is eternally holy, beautiful, and true. A small gesture though it may be, each time I cross the plane of those thresholds, I am reminded, like King David, of everything it means to enter the house of the Lord, and — after Schaeffer — to allow the beauty of that house to adorn my heart long after its doors have closed.
“We want something else which can hardly be put into words —to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
– C.S. Lewis
Third, seasons. We live in an unending circus of the now, where distractions, notifications, and earthly delights assail us with unrelenting speed, and anxiety sets in not just when our devices ping but when they don’t. How good and necessary it is, then, to remind ourselves regularly of the seasons that transcend the now, seasons that supersede fiscal years and election cycles (meaningful though they may be). As Brett McCracken has recently argued, believers are bound to a deeper reality that underpins the traditional seasons, in which we sow and harvest not wealth and influence but fellowship, gratitude, repentance, and hope—during Pentecost, Advent, Lent, and Easter, respectively.
The gifts of those seasons are more nourishing than anything flavored with pumpkin spice; why would we not feast upon that richness at every turn? The simple act of hanging liturgical colors in a service can be as potent as any hymn, a visual cue that grounds us in eternal time, as we labor and wait for Christ’s revealing. Denominations sometimes differ over which colors signal each season, but no matter how the color wheel spins, stop the needle somewhere; in my old church plant, those pastoral stoles were deliberately arranged in order of the liturgical seasons, to stoke just that awareness. This opportunity can take many forms: In my new church, we drape different colored bolts of linen over our sanctuary’s central cross, serving both as the hand on the ecclesial clock and a royal garland for our King. The symbol could not be more apt.
We, too, Are a Form of Art
A venerable cathedral, a nascent church plant, or a simple fellowship at home; to each of these contexts these three opportunities are adaptable, and my hope is that such insights are useful to anyone seeking new ways for beauty to innervate their lives and worship. Tying them all together, though, is one of Edith Schaeffer’s final admonitions: that each of us is not just an individual, but an environment:
“I do not mean that we produce art consciously now, but I mean we are an art form, whether we think of it or not, and whether we do anything about it or not. We are an environment, each one of us. We are an environment for the other people with whom we live, the people with whom we work, the people with whom we communicate. … Our conversations, attitudes, behavior, response or lack of response, hardness or compassion, our love or selfishness, joy or dullness, our demonstrated trust and faith or our continual despondency, our concern for others or our self-pity — all these things make a difference to people who have to live in our ‘environment.’”
Equipped by the Holy Spirit, Schaeffer urges, we are empowered to bring needed peace, healing, and restoration into the world through the development and application of those “hidden” art forms, those everyday gifts of beauty and care that serve both as reminder of and impetus to shalom.
If beauty is an instinct, then it is an instinct we must reclaim and soon, lest our witness in the world diminish, and we fail to see the full face of our Creator. With these considerations in mind, it is hard not to return to the images of wartime desolation that have saturated our news media these past months; as I first wrote this, a massive Russian bomb had just fallen on the main theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, a building that was serving as a shelter for civilians and children. The word “kids” was painted on the pavement outside as a deterrent to Russian bombers; instead, the label seems to have made the building a target. Rescue efforts for the shelter underneath the building — that morass of tangled wood and metal, bone and blood — discovered more than 300 dead.
Amid such horrors, we must comfort those who suffer, mourn what is lost, and strive for the renewal of beauty in the wastelands of the world (Isaiah 61), even as beauty itself serves to inspire, to remind, and to instill hope. Certainly Ukrainians need no reminder, as a video of a Ukrainian performance of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suite performed in the ruins of Kharkiv has garnered well over a million views. So, too, have Ukrainian churches wrapped their precious stained glass for fear of its destruction, as a moving essay by Yuliya Komska details.
To these situations and others like it, N.T. Wright notes the moral urgency that beauty imparts:
“The beauty of creation to which art responds and which it tries to express, imitate, and highlight, is not just the beauty it possesses in itself but the beauty it possesses in view of what is promised to it. … We are committed to describing the world not just as it should be, not just as it is, but as, by God’s grace alone, one day it will be.”
As children of a creative God, our ultimate hope must serve not as an alibi for that restoration but as its spark: “When art comes to terms with both the wounds of the world and the promise of resurrection,” Wright argues, “and learns how to express and respond to both at once, we will be on the way to a fresh vision, a fresh mission.”
Holding that art and beauty can be thus missional, and here believers may step boldly forward; just as a church is not a building but the faithful who worship inside it, a theater is not an arrangement of wood and stone but the performances held therein. Let us walk as that living environment of compassion, joy, and trust that Schaeffer describes, and let such a love of beauty, a holy desire, inform our steps. May we not simply pray — though pray we must — but may we labor purposefully to share in the heart of heaven and to allow that heart to flow into a world desperately crying out for its presence.
Benjamin Morris is a native of Mississippi who now lives and writes in New Orleans.