Beauty and the Prophetic

Beauty is. It exists. But defining what makes something truly beautiful is nearly impossible, since beauty's essence is deliciously elusive. What strikes one person as breathtaking leaves another cold. Still, there are moments when whole crowds are struck silent by the same wave of transcendent beauty.

My husband and I spent the early years of our married life in Southern California. We lived within walking distance to the ocean, so it didn’t take long before we witnessed, and then eagerly joined the town’s rhythmic, daily ritual of paying homage to the sunset. No matter where people were driving, where their hurried lives were taking them, nearly everything stopped at sunset. Cars pulled to the side of the road, families stopped playing in the park nearby, people halted on their walk home from work, it didn’t matter what they were doing. Every single day a crowd of people gathered facing west, silently gazing at the sun as it lowered, yet again. It felt like church. 

The experience of being captivated by beauty has quietly shaped nearly every culture on earth. It's the sense of being caught by something larger than yourself, if only for a moment: time slows, the ordinary falls away, and you're left standing in front of something that unravels you from the inside out. Cultures have organized themselves around chasing that experience through architecture, gardens, dining experiences, theaters, and galleries. Nations build entire calendars around beauty-encounters, like Japan's cherry blossom viewing, where crowds pause to sit under blooming trees for a few weeks a year.

Beauty's power to propel the human race is undeniable. Sometimes that pursuit has exposed the darker side of humanity as well. Societies have created whole constructs to try to capture beauty, grasping at its power for selfish gain, objectifying its true purpose. But when we truly feel the impact of authentic beauty something within us knows that it carries an essence that is much deeper and more revelatory. It's a word that attempts to name what we experience as we feel its impact on our soul. When we exclaim that something is beautiful, we are feeling pulled, caught by its presence, sometimes even branded by the encounter. At times it feels as if a veil has been lifted and we are brought out of dimness, even if just for a moment.

The awakening experience of beauty existed long before Hollywood co-opted it. In fact, if we want to talk about where beauty itself began, we must look to the Trinity. Before the world existed, there was unveiled beauty flowing from Father to Son to Spirit, and creation was its overflow. Before any culture shaped our idea of beauty, beauty already existed. This is why authentic beauty remains transcendent and pure. No matter how people have tried to grab hold of this mystical experience for personal gain, its true essence cannot be tainted. Much like love, beauty has the ability to awaken us, summoning us to its shores in search for more. So we must return our wonder to the Source of beauty and its mysterious power, in order to understand why it exists, 

Beauty and the Prophetic Gift

Beauty didn't invent itself. Its power was given by the same God who called light out of darkness. So what would it mean to let beauty be defined only by its source? If it means anything more than a passing feeling, we must view it through the lens of Christ.  In Him beauty looks nothing like what culture has trained us to understand. It is the undoing we feel as we watch the Incarnate One compassionately love the broken, the beggar, and the grief-stricken. He bowed low for the sake of others, adorning the cross in self-giving love. This is beauty stripped of every ornament we'd normally attach to the word. If the sunset can stop a town in its tracks, the cross should stop history itself, because it reveals a God who would rather die than let love go unspoken.

Consider how the New Testament describes Christ: 

the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15); 

the one through whom all creation happened, 

the radiance of God's glory 

and the exact representation of His being (Hebrews 1:3); 

the Word made flesh (John 1); 

the light of the world (John 9). 

Christ is the visible form of the unseen meaning of the universe. Selah.

If beauty cracks us open, pulling us outside ourselves toward something we can't fully name, prophecy does the same work. What if the awe-struck wonder we collide with in our encounter with beauty is a gift from the same Source as the 'anointing' we experience in Church? What if the same Holy Spirit infuses moments of transcendence in a theater, or a gallery in order to awaken us to the presence of the Master Creator?  What if this is (at least sometimes) the spirit of prophecy in action, but we haven’t had eyes to see or ears to hear? As a crowd gathers to watch the sunset, some may see and understand the prophetic nature of what they are witnessing, and hear what the Lord is speaking. Others will not. 

In the incarnation, we find Mary giving herself unto a co-creation process with God to bring unseen glory, unfathomable beauty, into the seeing world. This is a profound picture of what prophets and artists are called to do. Though Mary walked the streets of Jerusalem, carrying the Majestic One within her womb, people did not comprehend what they were seeing. Does this make the pregnancy of Mary any less prophetic? Not in the slightest. It just wasn’t understood for many many years to come, and in truth, we are still experiencing its unfolding. This is how the prophetic works. This is also how the creative arts work. 

The true power of beauty was never manufactured, it was always outflow. Before creation, before culture, before we ever learned to chase it, beauty already belonged to the love shared between Father, Son, and Spirit. Every fragment of true beauty we encounter is a glimpse of that love. If we, as Christ followers, are caught in a reactionary rejection of beauty's cultural counterfeits, asleep to its trinitarian birthplace, then we're likely blind to the way the spirit of prophecy moves creatively through the world.

A sanctified imagination will see beauty as flowing from its true source, always, somehow awakening us to truth, to love, to God Himself. The authentic prophetic will always, somehow align us to the eternal purposes of Christ. In order to reunite the prophetic and the arts, we must remember that true beauty, as seen through the person of Christ, will always have a prophetic essence.  Because the same Spirit that stopped a town at sunset is the creative Spirit of the prophetic. The question was never whether beauty is prophetic. It's whether we're paying enough attention to hear it.