Beauty will save the world?

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Beauty will save the world?

"I believe the world will be saved by beauty." 
So says Prince Lev Nikolyaevich Myshkin, the protagonist in Fyodor Dostoevsky's, The Idiot. Of course, that this is not true in the absolute and literal sense is something of which Dostoevsky was fully aware. 
It is God who saves the world - only God: 'for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life' (John 3:16).

In these days, our world is filled with much that is intensely ugly - violence, corruption, division, racism, anger, poverty, gaping inequality, hunger, war, displacement of peoples, exploitation, diminished respect for life, out-of-control consumerism, climate change and destruction, an ongoing pandemic. 
There is so much pain, so much hurt, so much heartache. So much is broken. So much seems beyond repair. We are tired and we are raw from all the ugliness. Darkness threatens to overwhelm the light. It is difficult to sustain hope. We long for the dawn to come. We long for good news. 

There is good news. This troubled, broken world is the world God loves, the world God saves, the world God is close to. 

In a world no less broken, no less troubled, God entered into history. Jesus was born into and died in a time and place filled with brokenness. With Jesus, death and brokenness did not have the last word - Jesus rose from the dead - and so we know that, for us too, death is not forever. 

In all that is ugly, there is still beauty. In all that is dark, the light still shines. In all that is death and destruction, there is still new life and growth.  

This is good news, the best of Good News. God-with-us really is with us. 

So, will beauty save the world? Yes and no. 
Not in and from itself but because it is of God and from God, beauty will save the world.
Beauty reminds us that God is and reminds us who God is: Emmanuel, God-with-us. 
Beauty reminds us that resurrection is real, that darkness and sorrow and even death have an end but joy and love and hope and life do not.
Remembering and knowing that, we can rediscover hope. 

Beauty will save the world 
along with music and poetry and love 
because they point us to God 
to God who is always with us and always for us
because God so loved the world and God so loved you. 


               




      










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