Monday Morning Music Ministry

5-16-16

I don’t know if this is proper horticultural protocol, but I have long defined weeds as flowers and plants that are ugly or inconvenient. After one springtime battle with pretty purple crownvetch that misbehaved – seeming to grow four feet along the garden every night as I slept, choking delicate and expensive plantings – I decided on this definition.

In the same way, there are things in life that have elusive dictionary definitions, but are commonly accepted by humankind. “Beauty” is one of these things. Classic episodes of “The Twilight Zone” aside, we humans all pretty much agree with what is beautiful. In appearance, music, art, sunsets, and buffet tables. (A Supreme Court justice made the same point in a very different way when he stated he could not define pornography “but I know it when I see it.”)

There is a popular saying that did not originate (as 90 per cent of popular sayings seem to) in the Bible or Shakespeare. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is from the novel “Molly Bawn” (1878) by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. There’s a trivia question, or answer, for you. We hear it all the time. It is not true; but it rings true.

I say this because there are certain innate perceptions and instincts, and an elemental sort of consensus about what constitutes beauty. Not without exception, but largely. Once upon a time, but… less and less it is the case.

People Magazine has an annual issue announcing its “Sexiest Man Alive” (Esquire claims the distaff honors) and it is revealing of our sorry age. First, we see that “Sexy” has replaced “Beautiful” in our estimation. And it is dismissive of almost anyone other than Hollywood stars. Where are the Africans, Asians, Semitics, Martians? Beauty has been debased. I usually disagree, actually, with their coronations… but who am I to argue with supermarket checkout-line pronouncements?

One of the first philosophers, Plato, had beauty, and other things, figured out when he celebrated harmony in music. Why chords and harmony please our ears he did not ascertain, and neither have we; but he theorized that harmony on earth – in music, poetry, debates, colors, fashion, relationships – is a reflection of heavenly harmony. Heaven? The pagan Plato? Yes, he believed that there is such a thing as abstract truth.

Abstract Truth might be unknowable, Plato thought, but humankind ennobles itself by striving for it; to try to know it; to manage to practice it. Unlike his rival Aristotle, he was on to something. In fact it is why the early Christian fathers considered themselves Neo-Platonists. The Bible, and the Person of Jesus Christ, embody Absolute Truth.

Harmony: the goal of artists, composers, musicians, poets for millennia. Today, a lot of music employs dissonance. Literature dwells on chaos. Art depicts the sordid and degenerate. Drama and movies are obsessed with conflict and disaster. These tendencies do not vitiate our conception of Beauty and Harmony, or Plato’s postulation, no. They confirm the fact that people who love beauty and seek harmony are seeking, consciously or subconsciously, Absolute Truths in their lives. And a world turned ugly is reflected in the arts.

Where is Beauty? We have replaced the concept with many perverted versions. Where is Harmony? It has been drowned out by the cacophony of self-indulgence and hate in contemporary life. God planted these instincts in us! He programmed His children to love and seek Absolute Truth and the beautiful, harmonious things of God.

A lost generation cannot cherish beauty, harmony, and truth, when it believes those qualities do not beckon them in wonderful ways, abstract but attainable. They think, if there is no such thing as Absolute Truth in a Heaven that does not exist, how can it have relevance on earth? Hence, everything is polluted, from art to treatment of our fellow man.

If beauty and harmony are good things, there is a universe that is home to them.

If Abstract Truth exists, giving us all a conscience and a sense of justice, then something… some One… has placed them within us.

With history’s exceptions (let us call them people yielding to sin) like war and persecution, we all seek lives and hope for a world of beauty and harmony. We sense, and we know, that Creation, uncorrupted, is what once we collectively shared, and what innately we seek.

Beauty, harmony, and Truth must have authors. And so, if there is a Creation, there must be a Creator. Why people fight against this self-evidence is a mystery, but no more so than people who temporarily go mad and choose today’s things we listed above: dissonance, chaos, the sordid and degenerate, conflict and disaster. Hate. Sin.

The God of the Universe – the God of the Bible, author of Salvation – exists. And He grieves at our current course. Jesus was and is our substitutionary payment, suffering death that we deserve before a Holy God, so that we might be free to commune with the Author of Beauty, Harmony, and Truth, forever.

Like the man with the muck-rake in “Pilgrim’s Progress,” let us take our eyes from the slop we live in every day, somehow getting muddier and muddier. And look upward. “Abstract” does NOT mean “non-existent.” It means of a different substance. Manifested in different ways, through other ways. Like Truth, and in beauty and harmony.

Jesus, recorded in Mark 21, said that “our hearts incline toward evil.” A desperate condition. But our souls seek beauty, harmony, and Truth, and on that path with Him lies our redemption.

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Click: Beauty and Harmony: Grimaud plays Beethoven
The second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. Helene Grimaud; The Hessicher Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester, Frankfurt; Paavo Jarvi, conducter.