Beauty in the Church

Khouria Krista West's Lecture Notes on "Envisioning the Kingdom: the Why and How of Beauty in the Orthodox Church

Session 1: the "why" of beauty in the Church

• We are living in a time that has a fragmented, disintegrated approach to beauty. It is not part of our theological tradition as Orthodox Christians.

• As Orthodox Christians, we have a beautiful God and we are created in His image.

• We are human, and as such, have a physical and spiritual reality.

• We are sons of God and in the words of Philip Sherrard, to a son of God means, "for god to be, in an active and not merely a passive manner, the source, the inmost center of our reality."

• In Christ, the was of separation between God and man is destroyed and the entire universe is fully, divinely integrated -- there is no longer a divide between heaven and earth, the physical and spiritual.

• In the Gospel of John, Jesus says: "For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God." John 3:20-21.

• In this way, man shares with Christ, in the words of Sherrard: "in that sacrament of love and beauty in which all things, released from their bondage, live, move and have their being. Outside this relationship... man has no real place in the world, or the world in him."

• To be fully human, necesstates that we fully participate with our Beautiful God, that we see Him as the ultimate reality, the fountain of our being, the reason of our existence, and the purpose of our lives. We do this by recognizing two truths:

1. The incarnation of Christ is an eternal truth and has fundamental consequences for the cosmos -- "the was of separation os destroyed.

2. We are called to co-operate and participate in the Divine in the Universe in our physical world.

• Our vocation in Christ is: to cooperate and participate in the Divine and this virtually always involves cooperating and participating in beauty, in all its myriad forms, because we have a beautiful God.

• Plato and Aristotle go to lunch: Aristotle and his "no food touching" is mono-symbolism or "a thing only means one thing and only that thing"; Plato and his messy salad is poly-symbolism and "things mean things and things mean other things."

• Beauty isn't "good" or "bad", it just is, in all its varied, amazing, sometimes complimentary, sometimes contrasting forms.

• Sacrament is the means by which we cooperate with God in the sanctification of the created world. Sacramental living, living in such a way as to make all things holy, is healing for the world, for others, and for ourselves.