How to heed unexpected encounters with beauty
LETTER BY BRIAN MORYKON
Perhaps you’ve heard this story.
In 2007, a violinist played classical music in a D.C. subway during Friday morning rush hour. There’s nothing unusual about that; musicians often busk there. What made this special is that the violinist was Joshua Bell, considered by many the best in the world.
Donning a sweatshirt and ballcap, Bell played with passion for 43 minutes on a priceless violin. (Actually, it had a price: Bell paid $3.5 million for the 1713 Stradivarius, a violin handcrafted by the most legendary luthier in his most golden era.)
It was a social experiment set up by The Washington Post. Journalist Gene Weingarten wondered, “In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”
(Spoiler alert here… if you haven’t read the article, it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning gem. Weingarten’s follow-up article to set facts straight is also worthwhile — it’s notable how we want to reduce nuanced stories to bite-sized “moral-of-the-story” myths.)
So what happened?
Well, most of the 1100 people who passed by Bell didn’t give him a second listen. They missed magnificence. Of course they did. They had someplace to be. We shouldn’t judge too harshly. As the article points out, context matters. Expectations matter.
The same kinds of people who blew by Bell in the subway on Friday paid $100 a ticket on Tuesday to hear him from a nosebleed seat at a concert hall. It’s not that they weren’t hungry for what was on offer — many would have gladly paid for the privilege of paying attention in another context. It’s that they weren’t prepared to encounter beauty in an unexpected moment.
I’m thinking of another unexpected encounter with beauty.
Henri Nouwen was visiting with a friend in her office when a poster of a painting on the back of the door caught his heart. In it, a blind, bearded old man embraces a tattered, kneeling young man. Nouwen’s friend said, “Oh, that’s Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son.”
While Henri didn’t linger long in that moment, he didn’t let it pass him by either. He knew it was an invitation from God illuminated by Rembrandt’s masterpiece — an invitation he followed into a life-long journey of receiving and re-gifting God’s healing embrace.
The arts — songs, paintings, poems, stories — can touch a deep place in us that nothing else can reach. They can crack open crusty doors of the heart where the Holy Spirit can enter and heal. But for art to do that, we have to make room to give it our attention. Carolyn Arends points out that when we do, the arts can disciple our senses and train us to pay attention in all of life.
So maybe the lesson of the subway and the poster isn’t that we must always be prepared to enter fully into beauty at the very moment it presents itself. There is, after all, a time and place for everything — including catching a train on time.
Maybe the lesson is to continually look for God’s invitation through beauty — to notice and pause, even if just long enough to know you are being beckoned. Then, like Nouwen, not to forget but to follow the beckoning wherever it leads. For him, that was all the way to Russia, where he sat for hours with the original painting in the embrace of the Father. For you and me, well, you never know — but I promise wherever he leads will be worth the journey.
So, Lord, awaken us to beauty when it crosses our path. Help us not to neglect your invitations but to heed and steward them. Give us the resolve to make time for the arts, for we know that to enjoy and create beauty isn’t an add-on to real life; it is an essential part of what makes us like you.
Brian Morykon
Director of Communications
P.S. The Renovaré Book Club is one place to cultivate awareness of beauty through deep reading. Early bird pricing ends this Sunday, September 1.
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LET’S DIVE IN...
CURATED BY CAROLYN ARENDS
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1.
A Beautiful Adventure: The Gift of the Arts in Spiritual Formation is a four-part video series produced by the Henri Nouwen Society. In it, I (Carolyn) explore many of the things I am learning (as Renovaré’s director of education, as a musician, and as a Christ-follower) about how art and beauty can serve as allies in our life with God. The series (which you can watch asynchronously) becomes available on September 7th, and you can register for free here.
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2.
One of the key arguments of the A Beautiful Adventure series is that there are no uncreative humans, because each of us is made in the image of the Creator. For some evidence of our creative instincts, check out musician Bobby McFerrin demonstrating the universal resonance of the pentatonic scale.
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3.
In this six-minute excerpt from a Renovaré webinar, acclaimed artist Makoto Fujimura and Renovaré Ministry Team Member (and art-lover) Margaret Campbell talk about the interplay of their engagement with Scripture and visual art — and the importance of “standing under” either if we want to gain understanding.
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4.
Jeremy Begbie is a theologian and musician who has written several books exploring the conversation to be had between the arts and theology. (I particularly enjoy Beholding the Glory: Incarnation Through the Arts, which is a collection of essays Begbie curated.) In this short video clip, Begbie explores four ways music shapes us.
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5.
The Anselm Society is a wonderful collective of art lovers, artists, readers, and writers seeking “a renaissance of the Christian imagination.” Check out this blog post featuring excerpts from arguably the best twentieth-century book on faith and the arts, Madeline L’Engle’s Walking on Water.
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6.
I’m grateful for the way that Renovaré’s True Impressions resource uses exquisite cyanotypes to help us pray with our whole selves, including our eyes.
Carolyn Arends
Director of Education, Renovaré
WORTH QUOTING
“Our failure is not that we chose earth over heaven: it is that we fail to see the divine in the earth, already active and working, pouring forth grace and spilling glory into our lives. Artists, whether they are professed believers or not, tap into this grace and glory.”
– Makoto Fujimura
Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering
(source)
TO CONTEMPLATE
Six Sunflowers
Vincent van Gogh 1888
(source)
Henri Nouwen writes: “Look at the wonderful, exuberant flowers painted by the famous Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. What grief, what sadness, what melancholy he experienced in his difficult life! Yet what beauty, what ecstasy! Looking at his vibrant paintings of sunflowers, who can say where the mourning ends and the dance begins? Our glory is hidden in our pain, if we allow God to bring the gift of himself in our experience of it. If we turn to God, not rebelling against our hurt, we let God transform it into greater good. We let others join us and discover it with us.” (source)
TO PONDER
When was the last time God spoke to you through something beautiful? What did God say?