Too many of us are obsessed with how we look. As a culture we are getting fatter and also more critical of the slightest unsightly bulge. Any college professor knows that a shockingly high number of women, and now men, have eating disorders.
Media inundates us with images of how we should look that excluded most of us.
I don’t know all the reasons this is happen, but I increasingly wonder if my grandmothers, especially my mother’s mother, Nana, might not have known something important that could (just might?) help.
I started thinking about my Nana and her generation in my early thirties. My age group was image obsessed, but insecure . . . vain but without self-confidence . . . cynical about everything while falling for every marketing ploy promising happiness . . . and the next generation was no better and (perhaps?) worse. A small worry began to grow in my mind that something was wrong in me, my friends, and my students that standard answers were not touching.
It was a worry that began, of all places, with my silver-haired Nana.
My mother’s mother had been an orphan, suffered under very difficult foster parents, had limited chances for schooling, and was crippled, her term, almost all her life. Yet she wrote songs and plays for her church . . . always was growing in love and open to new spiritual possibilities. She had amazing visions of God and His Kingdom all her life. Nana enjoyed beautiful things and grew old gracefully. She outlived two of her children. . . but had the spiritual strength to remain wise and happy.
Nana liked to talk and I enjoyed sitting with her and talking. Whenever I would tell her about the problems of students with body image or other issues like it, she would frown. When I would ask her what worried her she would say, “These kids today. . .they’re too inside themselves.”
She was a compassionate woman, but she could not understand young people who, with many more blessings than she had enjoyed, seemed to “wallow in the miseries.”
Men and women Nana’s age did not seem to have the same problems or worries that kept cropping up in later generations. . . whatever virus had been released in our operating software her generation seemed immune. At a fundamental level, she had an iron confidence in God. She lived for Him and allowed Him to set all of the standards in her life.
Nana would often worry that the “young ‘uns” were missing something. “We had it easier,” she would say to my shock as I recalled her young married life in Depression era West Virginia. “There was so much less ugliness. . .” That was wisdom and I benefited from it myself.
In the middle of doctoral work in philosophy, I was deeply confused and spiritually struggling. Nana was living with my parents and one night when I was staying with them, she slipped a note under my door. It was written on her trademark flowery stationary. It even smelled like her strong perfume, but there was nothing soft about the note. It firmly reminded me of my duty . . . of right. . . and it was exactly what I needed to hear.
I have had many more chances in life than my Nana had. Nana had no chance to go to high school, but she was wise with Biblical wisdom. I never heard Nana discuss self-esteem and her only counselors were pastors and friends, mostly friends.
Counseling is a good thing, I have been deeply helped by it as has my wife, but it is not the only good thing. Nana probably could have been helped by counseling, but I needed something Nana had that I did not.
What did Nana know that we don’t? Why was she able to find peace when I couldn’t? Sadly, Nana could live well, but she could not help me analyze her strengths. She just took them for granted so it was up to me to try to figure it out . . . hoping that if I could find the source of her confidence, I might be able to help myself and my friends.
One place to begin was in our comparative pictures of reality. Traditional Christians described reality as “good, true, and beautiful” and Nana accepted this. God was sovereign and in charge. Now most of my students accepted the Lordship of Jesus Christ. . . and I knew I did. We accepted God’s right to determine our course of action . . . what was right and wrong and our basic picture of reality. Of course we did not live this out perfectly, but then neither did Nana. . . she was no saint!
Then with a shock I realized that in my thinking “beauty” had been absent as a category. I did not think in terms of absolute beauty. . . in fact I was not sure I believed in it. I began to survey my friends and students and discovered that any idea that God cared about “beauty” was almost totally absent from their minds.
The most relevant difference I could find between Nana and me was that I did not really believe in beauty and she did. Nana knew God cared about beauty and had standards.
I am sure this idea is a stretch for many people. It was hard for me to believe at first as well. At least I knew from the start that the reality of beauty was not a new idea. A little reflection reminded me that most of the “great writers” I read believed in “real beauty.” I wasn’t quite sure when the idea died, but it surely had.
My generation had grown up in a world where beauty is “in the eye of the beholder.” All of us were Christians . . . and believed in moral absolutes and truth, but when it came to art, culture, music, and clothing our personal standards ruled supreme.
This freedom in aesthetics oddly diminished its significance. For some, personal taste in clothing or music became of supreme importance, but this allowed for eccentric styles to develop. What was beautiful in their eyes soon was incomprehensible, or even ugly, to everyone else. For the rest of us being told that we were free to choose as we wanted . . . and that it did not matter what we chose . . . communicated that the matter must not be of real importance. We felt free to “like what we liked” and to develop ruts and habits in our tastes. Believing beauty was just a matter of opinion left us faddists, cranks, or bores.
My Nana believed that her whole life should be controlled by God and should please Him. The God she knew and who spoke to her loved beauty and had definite opinions about it. You could fight about art in Nana’s church! Since it was not just a matter of opinion, such disagreements, like doctrinal disputes, were meaningful.
When some in her church worried about Christmas frills, she argued for decorations and won. She instinctively knew that the God who made the West Virginia hills wanted the church to be beautiful. When cranks preached against going to a hair salon, she went ahead and got hers “done up” because she thought they were wrong. They made Biblical arguments for their points of view; she heard them, disagreed with the arguments and did her hair!
God kept forcing her to expand her notions of beauty, moving her from West Virginia to New York making her learn “foreign ways”. . . God made New York, therefore it must be beautiful, and it was her job to learn to enjoy it and she did!
On the other hand, my own experience and education accepted the importance of morality and truth, but ignored beauty. Beauty was my turf, not God’s.
My Christian education gave me a great passion for truth and a longing for goodness, but it didn’t talk much about beauty. Churches were utilitarian and classrooms ugly. My mother and I sensed something was wrong when our church voted to lower the vaulted ceiling in the sanctuary with a drop ceiling and fluorescent lights, but didn’t know how to trump arguments about practicality.
Nana’s generation built arched ceilings and put in stained glass as they could afford it, because they believed God deserved their “best.” What was their best? Objective standards of beauty guided them in constructing their own churches that were simple, but in the craftsmanship and care showed beauty. There was no good reason to build a spire on their little building, but it made an artistic statement and was beautiful, so they built it.
The next generation had more schooling and more up to date ideas. Couldn’t church be in a strip mall? Why waste money on aesthetics? And after all, my secular education agreed: beauty is just an opinion. It is not real, but “in the eye of the beholder.” This lesson was actually part of my elementary school curriculum!
I can still remember my fifth grade teacher, wearing an imposing zebra pant-suit, giving us a fact-opinion work-sheet. She certainly had opinions and it would have taken a braver student than I was at the time to oppose them. Statements about beauty were opinions. Facts were “scientific” statements about the world. Art and music education were not about what we should like, but tried to guess what we did like. Our generation of teachers tried to be “groovy” ten years after it was not cool to say “groovy.”
Nana had been taught just the opposite in her one-room schoolhouses. Victorian art critics, like Ruskin, may have been moving away from God, but they still maintained an inherited Christian belief in real beauty and aesthetic standards. Thirty years later such belief filtered down to the school books still used in West Virginia in the nineteen twenties. Literature was not picked to relate to the student, but to elevate the taste of the reader. Nana was taught to want the finer things and that one could develop cultural and aesthetic literacy.
Of course Nana did not face commercial television which was driven by a profit motive to seek quick changes in what people would consider beautiful. If people decide what is beautiful based only on opinion, then fashion can be changed quickly. Quick changes in fashion lead to spending. . . and spending leads to profit. As a result, “new and improved” trumped eternal concepts of beauty in the thousands of thirty second ads I watched.
My education, church, and culture never exactly argued beauty was subjective (a matter of opinion). Everybody just assumed it and I went along for the intellectual ride.
But what if I was wrong? C.S. Lewis, that great Christian apologist and story teller, was my favorite writer and he said beauty was real. Later I began doctoral work studying the father of philosophy, Plato, and he said beauty was not just in my head. In fact, I discovered that all the Fathers of the Church believed the same. Friends that thought themselves too fat or too thin . . . and who killed themselves to be beautiful in the culture’s eyes frightened me. What was wrong with us?
But what disturbed me most was Nana herself. She lived a life and was really beautiful in a way that my opinions and cultural standards could not accept.
Nana thought God made demands on her aesthetic sensibility, though she would not have said it that way. I thought it didn’t matter what I liked if it was “true” or “good.” Nana thought the medium mattered as well as the message.
What if she was right and I was wrong about beauty? This began my philosophic quest to understand if beauty was more than just “frosting on the cake.” Despite my beliefs, beauty is, I think, important, outside of and greater than self, and experiencing it is vital to my spiritual health.
Real beauty or standards in aesthetics is not a popular idea. Even Christians react, almost violently, to it. I shared that reaction at first . . . until I realized the power certain stories or experiences had on almost everyone. This shared experience of beauty or ugliness suggested beauty was real and not just in my head. The Bible made it obvious that God had opinions about beauty and that it was not just “frosting on the cake” but a vital part of living.
Beauty motivates desires and desires can lead to a divine romance or to ruin.