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."