Beauty Scars

I used to feel guilty for needing beauty in my life, but I don't anymore.

It was the dullest, most depressing care home, and yet I knew that it was 1000x better than most. While the walls were some nondescript muddy colour, and the sunlight barely made its way through the tiny windows, it was, at least, clean. The carers were good. The olds were looked after. It was the most anyone could hope for given the dire state of care homes across the country.

But my WORD it was depressing. I felt a mixture of deflated and suffocated as I walked down the dark hallways to our great uncle’s room (my husband’s great uncle – mine by marriage).

He was in his nineties, and after being rushed to the hospital following some major health issues, he never returned home. Instead, he was transferred from a hospital in Manchester to a care home in Wales to spend the rest of his days bedridden. A man who once climbed mountains in Switzerland had now loss the functional use of his legs.

I’ll never forget Season 1 of The Crown, when Winston Churchill argues with the artist who depicts him – quite accurately – as the aging man he’d become.

“It’s cruel!” Churchill cries out.

To which the artist shouts back “Age is cruel!”

It is. It most certainly is.

Our uncle was going in and out of awareness. Some days he could hold conversations, some days he couldn’t. Some days he remembered us. Some days, he didn’t. Age is cruel.

We didn’t live nearby, so our visits to him were seldom compared to my in-laws, who quite faithfully saw him most days. I expected us, of all people, to have faded from his memory. But when he looked at my husband, his eyes lit up.

“Hello, Christopher.” I can still hear his voice.

My sweet husband and his twin brother are objectively the pride and joy of their family, and rightly so. But in my very biased opinion, there is something special about my husband that has particularly infected all the olds with delight: in recent years, he found his career as a Stonemason after what felt like an eternity in a soul-sucking office environment. Now, he gets to use his hands to partake in an ancient trade and create things that will be around long after he’s gone. It’s incredible. And our uncle thought so, too. He barely remembered who I was – though I’d been on the scene for a decade by now – but he did remember this relatively new fact: Christopher is a Stonemason.

He asked all sorts of questions, and my husband pulled out his phone to show his uncle photographs of the work he’d done. Again, our uncle’s eyes lit up. While he’d been talking in circles for much of the visit, mentioning and re-mentioning memories from his career in civil engineering, every time he went back to discussing Christopher, he had something new to mention. Some piece of art that once spoke to him, or a work of masonry that he’d always admired.

I know that in studies of dementia, there have been incredible findings of what people seem to remember, despite the deterioration of their brain. NHS England have even published a piece on how music, specifically, can trigger “golden memories” for those whose minds are fading fast. There’s a stunning video of a ballerina with Alzheimers who remembers the entire choreography to Swan Lake when she hears the music score. I still can’t watch it without crying.

I know that it can be a bit of a lottery when it comes to what our brains might hold onto and what we’ll lose as the years pass, but as I watched my husband chat about masonry and art with his uncle, I saw a flicker of the brave, intelligent, adventurous man who once scaled the Swiss Alps.

C.S. Lewis said: “We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

I believe that art and beauty are such divine gifts; but growing up in the vanity culture of Southern California left me feeling guilty for how much I ached for beauty – not just to feel beautiful myself but to be surrounded by beautiful things. I would spend hours painting my phone cases with nail polish and covering my desk with photographs and stickers because I just needed the colour and the splendour of beauty around me in order to feel whole.

This divine hunger inside me feels like a fragment of the “eternity Christina” who would have existed before The Fall. Before beauty itself became commodified and used to play off of our insecurities for a slimy profit. In a world where 20-year-olds are getting botox, and lip injections, and constant fake tans, I think we’ve traded our healthy love of beauty for a counterfeit. There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel beautiful; there’s only something wrong with allowing beauty to be defined by those who only stand to make a profit out of us.

But it’s not just how beauty has been corrupted by selfish, corporate motives. It’s how it has been made to feel like some sort of indulgent luxury – something only the rich get to enjoy. Something that is a fool’s errand to chase – especially if you want to create beauty as part of your career. I can’t tell you how much I resent the implication that artists are the ones who starve, as if a world of nothing but grey walls wouldn’t starve your soul to dust.

When I look at the photos from my pastor’s mission trips, I don’t just see the poverty or the need: I see insanely stunning landscapes. I see technicolour glowing off the rippling water and mountains that dance and sing the way David describes in the Psalms. I see the same when I go out for a long hike in the Peak District and the electric hills of Hope Valley create this indescribable, swelling feeling in my chest.

Beauty, in its God-form, is far from a luxury only afforded to the rich. It comes in abundance. In droves. When we step back from the noise of capitalism and re-ground ourselves in its true form – a reflection of the Almighty – something eternal wakes up in us. The good, loving, abundant, compassionate, slow-to-anger-and-abounding-in-steadfast-love-Ancient-of-Days designed us this way. Even as our bodies decay, it is the things which enriched our lives with beauty that are remembered.

Beauty overflows from who He is. We’re designed to hunger for it, not just because we’re designed to hunger for Him but because He has commissioned us to join Him in making culture, creating beauty, spreading His light to the world.

Last week, before my British Citizenship ceremony, I got this real bee in my bonnet about finding the right dress. The photos from this day would, I hope, be ones that I showed my grandchildren, and I wanted a dress that had Biblical significance. I wanted to tell a story through colour, so I was looking for a dress that was either blue (to represent the Word of God), purple (to represent priesthood), or gold (to represent victory and the glory of God). I was up until 1am before I finally gave up and ordered a dress on sale that looked nice enough and had flecks of gold against the cream background. When the dress arrived, it was completely different from the photographs in the best possible way. The dress was all three Biblical colours: blue, gold, and purple.

I hadn’t felt so beautiful since my wedding day. And it felt so intimately personal, like God wanted me to feel that way. Like as I aimed to use my beauty to tell a story of His goodness, His light shone through me all the more.

Everyone has been talking about Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, and while I’ll always be a loyal Swiftie, I found her countless stanzas of tortured poetry about past boyfriends far less intriguing than a song she wrote about the pressures of beauty.

In Clara Bow, she writes: “Beauty is a beast that roars, down on all fours, demanding more.”

Contrast that to Psalm 19:1: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

Beauty literally overflows from everything God does. It doesn’t demand more of us. It doesn’t take. God’s beauty – just like everything else that comes from Him – gives.

There’s a quote from Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters that sums it up perfectly, I think (and by the way, we’ve looked at this particular letter already on my C.S. Lewis podcast, just… you know… in case you were curious).

“One must face the fact all this talk about [God’s] love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills feely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

If the broken version of beauty is one that sucks away, “roaring on all fours, demanding more,” then God’s version of beauty is one that is “full and flows over.” One we can, as Lewis puts it, “receive into ourselves, bathe in, become part of.”

We lost my husband’s uncle last year, but I’m so glad that as I sat in his dull, colourless care home room, watching him speak to my husband with light in his eyes, I wrote down a note in my phone to remind me that in these brief moments, it was art, and beauty, that brought his soul to life. It was the fingerprint of the Almighty that sung through his memories.

Beauty is air in our lungs, reminding us that the goodness of God is not simply in existing, but in delighting, living, dancing, singing.

All my love,