Beauty and Counseling (Part 3)

I’m sometimes asked how I got into counseling as a profession. One answer is that if I took my life where it is today, put it in reverse and backed up that long circuitous road to near the inception, I would say the foundation being laid was watching my parents love people in their community. There were many manifestations of that love, but the relevant one here was seeing my parents sitting at our oval kitchen table offering to others what I now call kitchen table counseling.

My parents were not professionally trained to counsel others. They just cared. And they cared enough to act. They read and studied their Bible and mapped that storehouse on to their depression-era childhood and then, particularly for my dad, reconciling the face-to-face horrors of war at sea in WWII.

I would say that what my parents were doing was one long object lesson of participating with their God in the re-beautification first of their own lives and then in the lives of others. Let me explain.

In Part Two of her small book, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry makes an extended argument that a deep psychological shift occurs within a person when one encounters beauty. Scarry says that beauty stalls our ego long enough to compel us in a move outward in two ways. First, by stopping us in our tracks to where we lose immediate self-interest. Think of that star-filled night sky or that intense red sunrise. Scarry then says, “we undergo a radical decentering” where the mental space we were using to protect or promote ourselves is now freed up to attend to the needs of others. She quotes Iris Murdoch who refers to this process as “unselfing.”

Now let me see if I can connect some dots that are buzzing around in my head. The Christian faith is full of ironies. To be first in God’s kingdom, practice going last. To be strong, become weak. To be wise, become a fool. Here is another: one of the surest signs of godliness is a willingness to sit with what is not God. It’s the path that Jesus took. The road less traveled. I will describe it as the path that goes from a cradle, to a cross, to a cube.

The cradle. In my October post, I cited Isaiah witnessing the seraphim crying, “Holy, holy, holy” around the throne of God. The holiness of Jesus is so exalted that he captivates and holds our attention as all beauty does. It makes sense, then, that Scripture invites us to “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” (Ps. 29:2, NKJV). This is why Saint Augustine used the pronoun he did when he prayed, “Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new.”

Now consider how that ancient Beauty arrived: as a newborn who needed to be fed. Paul says Jesus “emptied himself” (Phil. 2:7, ESV). He did not stop being beautiful. He set aside the external display of his beauty and entered our poverty. Professor Natalie Carnes, in her article, “Embracing Beauty in a World of Affliction,” notes that the church’s painters have long loved to depict this, as in Correggio’s Madonna Nursing, where Mary holds to her breast the God who needs nothing. Some in the fourth century said it was unfitting, even unbeautiful, for God to stoop so low. Carnes notes that Gregory of Nyssa answered that nothing could be more fitting than for God “to come to the aid of those in need.”

The cross. When God stooped, he went all the way down. Isaiah says that the Servant had, “no beauty that we should desire him” (53:2, ESV). He was tempted, deprived, rejected, lied about, abused, and finally tortured to death. Carnes observes that during Holy Week the Church sings of Jesus as the fairest of the children of men and as one with no external beauty at all. This is not a contradiction but a mystery. She is careful to say that suffering itself is never made beautiful. What is beautiful is the love that goes out toward the suffering.

For example, Gregory’s brother Basil built what is often called the first hospital for exactly this reason. As Carnes puts it, God ends up in hospitals because God is love going out toward the afflicted. This is what I was getting at when I referred to the practice of kintsugi in Part 1 of this series. Beauty is found in the imperfections. The risen Christ keeps his scars, and the scars inform his beauty.

The cube. In Scarry’s book, she tells of a friend who, as a child in India, was baffled by Aristotle’s claim that justice is pictured as a perfect cube (p. 94). All he understood was that it had something to do with equality in every direction. Scarry goes on for a while in explaining her thought that “beautiful things give rise to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect [i.e., fair in appearance] but in the sense of ‘a symmetry of everyone’s relation to another’ [i.e., fair in justice]” (p. 95). To get a glimpse and taste of this, sit with Isaiah 11 and be captivated.

In my September edition of this series on beauty I cited the real possibility that Plato read Moses. What then would his most famous student, Aristotle have read? And why cubes? Just so happens that the Holy of Holies in the Old Testament was a perfect cube (1 Kings 6:20). Fast forward to the end of history, and the city of God in its final form is metaphorically described as a cube (Rev. 21:16). Why a cube? Because this is where the Lord distributes his justice in all directions equally. All wrongs will be made right. No detail is overlooked. All the way down. It’s taking all that’s un-Godlike in this world and making it beautiful.

Which brings us to us. If the Beauty of heaven was willing to sit with the broken, then Christians who follow him will do the same. Carnes recounts how Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena each initially recoiled from the sight of a suffering person’s wound. But then rather than walking away, they drew near in mercy. Their revulsion didn’t just fade. It became a new way of seeing, and they saw beauty in the person in front of them.

This is Christian counseling. You do not have to be professionally trained. You do have to be personally affected repeatedly. Unless you’re seriously self-deceived, you’re at least somewhat aware of the parts of your life, whether physical and/or metaphysical, that are ungodly and ugly. The more self-conscious you are of that, the more that awareness negatively affects and infects your efforts to help others. And others notice without saying anything about it.

But the more you let the one who is Beauty into your life, the more “decentering” and “unselfing” occurs. You progress from being obsessed with your ugly parts to that ugliness being more like an annoying black fly that keeps coming around. The more captivated you are by God’s Beauty, the freer of self you become so that you can then turn your attention to the needs of those around you.  

Care, in other words, does not wait for beauty to appear. Care is where beauty becomes visible. Be present. Listen. Be patient. Transfiguring is difficult and slow. You should know this in terms of your own life. But having experienced the repeated cutting and curing of Beauty’s presence, you can enter the wounds of others as a faithful friend.

Because the prophet saw it coming long ago: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news” (Is. 52:7, ESV; cf. Rom. 10:15).

PS: As this calendar year nears its end and some of you think about year-end giving, if you’d consider financially supporting my work of beautifying what is broken in the lives of others, I’d be grateful.