Beauty and Counseling (Part 1)

For more than three decades now, the tag line for Grace Harbor has been, “Navigating Life with Truth.” Navigating played off the nautical theme yet also reflected the reality that people seeking counseling are often asking for guidance in the midst of their struggles. Truth played off the Biblical theme that Christians regard their Scriptures and Jesus as Truth codified and incarnate. Jesus, then, is the enfleshed beginning and end of all truth, and the Bible is the instrument and primary source by which we find guidance as we tack and jibe through life. But I’ve been playing around with the idea of modifying Grace Harbor’s tag line.

How does “Navigating Life with Truth, Goodness, and Beauty” strike you? My problem with the line is that it’s too long. But the line sits easy in my heart. Let me explain. If you’ve ever heard the expression, “the good, the true, and the beautiful,” it’s because these are considered the transcendent values upon which Western civilization was built. Historians can trace these three values all the way back to Plato, who, supposedly, was the first to put these down in written form.

As an aside, I long wondered if the Apostle Paul ever read any of Plato’s writings. Given Paul’s elite education at the feet of Gamaliel, given that Paul quotes non-Christian, non-biblical writers in his own letters (cf., Acts 17:28; Titus 1:12; 1 Cor. 15:33, and possibly others), we know Paul read widely. I then wondered what books and notes were in the satchel when Paul writes to Timothy, “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments” (2 Tim., 4:13, ESV). Oh, those books and Paul’s personal notes. I’d love to peek inside!

But then some time ago I read an article by Christian theologian Peter Leithart entitled, “Did Plato read Moses? Middle Grace and Moral Consensus.” Leithart works to answer the question, “How is it that I and the unbeliever share certain moral principles?” The standard answer has always been natural revelation. Leithart agrees but goes on to make the strong and somewhat lengthy argument that, “a plausible historical case can be made for the conclusion that the Greeks, and ancient cultures generally, had contact with special revelation [parts or all of the Old Testament], and that the influence of special revelation, direct or indirect, on their philosophies and cultures cannot be ruled out.”

There is much in Leithart’s article I want to explore via my own writing, but I will save that for another day. For now, I want to keep all of this bound by the true, the good, and the beautiful. Especially, though, the beautiful. But why?

Partly because the true and the good get far more attention than the beautiful. (I may get to those reasons another day.) Also because the creative in me desires to add life and color to what can sometimes be reduced to the transactional. And partly, too, I can frame counseling as that which requires engagement with the effects of the debasement and deconstruction of beauty. I call it, “sitting with sin.” Much of what I’m interested in and work to effect is the restoration of beauty in people’s lives and relationships.

To begin unpacking my interest in the intersection of beauty and counseling, I’ll note that the true, the good, and the beautiful form an inseparable union. Beauty is defined in some ways by asking if the thing in question is also both true and good. Like watching the swiftly rising sun break over the ocean will satisfy all three values. Take one of those values away, and you compromise the others. For a counseling example, let’s say a man is married and begins an emotionally intimate relationship with last year’s now-desperate Most Beautiful Person of the city. I might agree that person is physically beautiful, but I would also say it’s neither true (the husband has a covenant relationship with his spouse) nor good (at some point this will do real harm) that a married person should be relating in that way with a person of the opposite gender.

Hold that thought.

I now want to bring Makoto Fujimura into this short essay. For context, I first heard about Makoto from Tim Keller back around 2002. Makoto is a world-class painter who also served as an elder for a season at Keller’s church in Manhattan. Born in the United States, Makoto has a Japanese heritage.

In more than one of his talks, Makoto refers to a Japanese concept called Kintsugi. By Makoto’s telling, if you’re in a typical Japanese home and a plate or bowl gets dropped and breaks, they do not throw it away as most Americans would do. Instead, the Japanese gather the shards, lightly sand any rough edges, mix a special resin, and slowly, carefully, artfully glue the shards back together. It can take weeks and months to complete the process. The final layer upon the sealed joints is a mix of resin and gold dust, with the effect being not just a restored plate but a work of art. In fact, they consider the result to be not a repaired plate but an entirely new plate.

Do an image search for Kintsugi and be awed.

By the way, Makoto believes that Kintsugi is an artifact of the ancient influence of the Hebrew scriptures upon Japanese culture. This harks back to Leithart’s argument of how far-reaching an impact those Hebrew texts had spread. I’m speculating here, but does that not make sense for the appearance of the wise men at the birth of Jesus? The Bible says these wise men and their entourage came from the East (Mt. 2:1). Okay, but how far east? From the land of the rising sun?

Now back to the fictional guy I mentioned earlier who is emotionally attached to the pageant person. In the spirit of John Bunyan’s, Pilgrim’s Progress, let’s call her Miss Skindeep. She won the contest at Vanity Fair. And let’s name our guy Mr. Foolheart. Someone at their workplace tipped off Mr. Foolheart’s wife as to what’s going on. Eventually the truth comes out, it’s not good, and the Foolhearts end up in the Slough of Despair. Mercifully, two travelers by the names of Knowledge and Experience, find the Foolhearts and pull them out of their darkest place. With work remaining, the Foolhearts find their way to the office of a marriage counselor.   

In their initial contact, the Foolhearts learn that the owner of the counseling practice is Dr. Good Shepherd. The Foolhearts find out that Dr. Good Shepherd is away for a time, but he has trained subordinates with treatment plans for the broken to work through. It will be slow, sometimes tedious, with challenges throughout, but their junior counselor explains that Dr. Good Shepherd has an alchemy called kintsugi and, when practiced humbly, it possesses great promise to heal, restore, and grow. In fact, Dr. Good Shepherd was clear to say before he left that when practiced, kintsugi will not only put their marriage back together again, it will make their marriage stronger and more beautiful than it was before.

Acknowledging I’m generalizing the Foolheart’s story for sake of space, let me try to tie all of this together. When the Apostle John refers to Jesus as “the good shepherd” in John 10, the word “good” there is the Greek word, kalos. According to Strong’s lexicon, kalos can mean both “beautiful” and “good.” Beautiful there can mean beautiful to look at (except Jesus had no physical distinction), and it can also mean beautiful “by reason of purity of heart and life.” Further, “good” means “excellent in its nature and characteristics, and therefore well adapted to its ends.”

As I wrote in my first paragraph, we know Jesus is truth incarnate. We also know he is good personified. And now I hope it’s clearer that Jesus is also beauty substantiated. See the risen Christ and behold his nail-scarred hands and feet. He is kintsugi. And he can do the same for you.

Because all those who genuinely love the Lord’s truth and goodness will surely desire “to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4, ESV).