how often do we speed past the beauty that is right in front of our eyes? how often do our tasks, our appointments, our busy days impede us from soaking in the ever-present beauty that surrounds us in our everyday lives? these are questions that i have often asked myself and constantly find myself praying—”God please let me slow down enough to enjoy the beautiful things no matter how big or small that you place in my path throughout the day that speak of your love for me.”
strangely enough these are some of the questions that the washington post sought to answer in with an interesting experiment explained in the article ‘pearls before breakfast’. they took the world-renowned, 39-year old, violin prodigy Joshua Bell and placed him in the midst of morning rushour in the L’Enfant Plaza in the heart of Washington DC to perform for 43 minutes to see what people’s response would be—to see if they would notice beauty in the midst of their rushed lives… this was their conclusion:
There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.
this is just one more challenge that the church must overcome in our communication with people… overcome the busyness of life long enough to allow the beauty of the gospel, and the beauty of God’s creation to seep into life. but how can we communicate these things when we ouselves are not good at slowing down enough to notice and revel in the beauty that surrounds?
it’s time for us in the church to begin recognizing beauty, enjoying beauty, creating beauty and communicate beauty to the world around us because it is in this that the gospel can be found and should be communicated.
(article ht: justin)
another great quote from the article that i missed the first time through:
If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?
Related posts:
- the beauty of incarnation.
- fall.
- A beautiful prayer
- oh joy… it’s greek time!
- mars hill (part 2) —isn’t she beautiful?
Parallels the Nooma Silence.
good call.
see, the washington post isn’t always “evil” and can actually be informative!
This is very important. The part about the children trying to stop was especially interesting. If all goes well I have a series coming up on my blog the first week in June that will deal with children and childhood. This is the sort of stuff I’m looking at. Also, just last night I was thinking again about how I tend to think in terms of what I’m preparing to do “someday,” rather than taking full advantage of what is before me today. Finally, the part about beauty is something I think American evangelicalism in particular needs to reconsider. Our bunker mentality has been evident even in our recent styles of church buildings.
i look forward to that series!
i wonder if we focus so much on the future in our culture is because we’ve been taught/trained to see the world through unsatisfied eyes. we’ve been told to never be satisfied with our situation, with our circumstances and always try and make things better. in doing so i think we end up focusing so much on the future that we miss out on the beauty that’s right in front of our face.
you bring up a great point about church buildings… there’s something that i’ve been chewing on about that for a couple of days that i plan on posting tomorrow… but i’ve talked with people in the past about how much we’ve lost this idea, this notion of the “sacred space” with our buildings and instead have moved towards multi-purpose warehouses that focus on functionality and do nothing to capture beauty or a sense of “otherness”.
The church I served in New Mexico had a building that looked from the outside like a warehouse, and inside it was so practical it was sterile. I’ve also noticed that we don’t building church structures like we used to…built to last. The cathedrals of Europe are a famous example, but there are others. Here in the northeastern U.S. there are a lot of really solid, beautiful buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries. The Kirtland Temple (if you know Mormon history) is another remarkable building from earlier days in the U.S.
why is it that we build such “sterile” buildings? is it because we’re cheap? is it because we don’t care? are we to pragmatic and care more about functionality than what we can communicate through architecture?
i wonder what effect this has had on the church… i wonder what the consequences of this have been… not to bash modernism, but this is all their fault.
It is my opinion, and I could be very wrong, that the escapism of American-style evangelicalism makes us build cheap and simple. The belief is that this world will be destroyed and we’ll spend eternity in heaven (not what the Bible really describes) so why bother buiding something beautiful? Also, there is the thought in some circles that pretty buildings are for Catholics and mainliners, not evangelicals and others.
good call on “escapism” which is certainly on the rise thanks to ‘left behind’ theology…
i wonder how much that is found within the bounds of the general congregation, or if its leadership that pumps that idea through. sometimes i wonder about where the intelligence of the average congregation lay and how they connect the dots.
About church buildings, remember that most of them up until the early 1990′s were financed and planned primarily by the WWII “builder” generation. They were going for function and practicality, which probably factors in as much as the content of their faith (eschatology, etc).
[...] and i have started to hash some thoughts about this in an earlier post but i wanted to get some of your [...]