Reading Time: 4 minutes

So I’ve been presenting our church’s announcements lately. Which y’know, wouldn’t be that big of a thing if they didn’t…tape me. So far, every Sunday, I shrink a little in my seat as the monitor enlarges my prerecorded face to two feet tall. True, I see this little video as a distinct hospitality, inviting people into our church’s activities and community, making them feel welcome and relaxed, maybe even laugh a little.

But it’s time for me to admit some straight-up immaturity on my part. (I’ve written about my gnarly body-image issues before. )After seeing meticulous beauty all the time on TV, it’s hard not to succumb to the eyes of our culture’s usual bait-and-switch, our love affair with an attractive veneer.  I hone in on my flaws: My crazy-curly hair is pretty set on doing its own thing. The woman doing it before me was probably a size 4. And could we position the camera up a little so my chin doesn’t look so double-y?

I’ve heard actresses all have that one body part they’re self-conscious about. They might even procure a body-part double for a revealing scene. Maybe I latch on to those stories a little too hungrily. I guess I’m thinking we all have that similar appetite: for genuine, unflawed beauty.

The Magnetism

I was thinking of this during  a simple, moving wedding video of my friend’s son last week, viewed over my friend’s kitchen table.

I watched the bride smooth on her eye shadow; watched her mom zip the trailing white dress. The flowers were perfect, the music of the video a just-right variety of sentimental. But what I may never forget: The look on her groom’s face as she walked down the aisle.

I don’t think his mouth could have physically smiled any wider. If convention hadn’t restrained him, he might have bolted up to her. The guy’s happiness was just this side of contained–to the point it was leaking out the corners of his eyes. My own eyes were a little moist. I remember thinking, I hope I get to see my son be that kind of happy. 

There’s something in all of us that wants to be deeply connected, unified, even, with beauty. It magnetizes us. (They don’t call a girl a “head-turner” for nothing.) We go to great lengths–time, money, resources–to surround ourselves with beauty; to create it in and on and around ourselves, saturating every one of our five senses.

But it goes even further, I think. Like my friend’s wedding, we long to possess beauty. To have it tucked beneath our arm.

As C.S. Lewis puts it,

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.

–The Weight of Glory

I’m clearly not the only woman who longs to be seen as beautiful, as desirable; to have beauty by association (“Is that your son? He’s such a doll!”).  And I’m not just talking the kind of beauty varnishing my outsides, but true beauty from the inside out.

 

The Caveat

Anyone who’s flirted with beauty here knows it doesn’t deliver. The polish chips off. The sweet ride has to be taken to the mechanic. The scented candle burns out. Your adorable baby throws a royal hissy fit in the middle of the condiments aisle. Even the guy with great character loses his cool or slips into selfishness.

Lewis continues,

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have
not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance.

….We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

Things started out that way, in the beginning. Tim Keller exquisitely describes a unified God deciding to set His love on something: Let us create. You can hear God adoring everything proceeding from him. It is good. It is good. I hear him affirming the beauty that unfurled from him.  When he puts the very image of himself into people, he ramps the praise up to very good status. Our value and beauty are linked to his.

We go to lengths to put ourselves in front of beautiful places, or surround ourselves with beautiful music, or hang out with beautiful people. But these will leave us empty if we don’t learn to see all of these things as mere tributaries and God himself as the fountain, the headwaters of it all.

-Timothy Keller*

The Fairytale Ending

Maybe that’s why I find myself so stinkin’ curious about this wedding at the end of the Bible, nestled in Revelation. There’s a bride there, and it’s us: God’s people. She is breathtaking. Finally, because of Jesus, that unified circle from Creation–the one we broke in our rejection of God–is restored. She’s beautiful without and within, and she’s about to be united.

This is what I’ve longed to hear, I think: That praise from the One who fills my gaps even now. You are good. I made you. You’ve got a piece of me that is thoroughly good, inherently beautiful.

A kind friend of mine, listening to my lament about the announcements, looked me in the eye, Maybe it’s good for people to see there’s God’s beauty in you, even when it’s not movie star perfect.

She might just be right.

 

Like this post? You might like:

A Body Good: Naked Truth about Body Image and Part II: Soul-questions before I Begin (…or Quit) My Workout Routine

Effortless beauty?

Shadows, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the Inside-Out Life

 

*Keller, Timothy. Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. New York: Penguin Books (2013), p. 170. Kindle edition.