Sabbath Devotional :: There is Beauty All Around

My favorite moment in the film “Babbette’s Feast” is at the beginning of the feast from the film’s name. The feast is being shared by the lowly parishioners of a tiny country church in 18th-century Denmark. The foods, prepared by the French immigrant maid, Babette, are utterly exotic and strange to the villagers, who have lived lives of uncompromising plainness. As they taste the first course of this real French meal, they look around the table, wondering if what everyone is tasting is as sublime as what they are tasting. As the courses follow, the villagers blink in disbelief, transfixed with the sensory delight of beautiful food, the likes of which they had never imagined. They sip and slurp and savor each wondrous dish as it is brought from Babette’s kitchen. They eat and drink till they are full.

With contentment, they push away from the table at the end of the meal, bundling up against the winter’s chill to return to their homes. Still marveling at the experience they have just shared, they find themselves joining hands in newfound comity, spontaneously singing a reverent hymn under the winter moon. Babette, still in the kitchen, wipes her brow in satisfaction at having completed this project for the villagers she loves. She reveals to the stable boy that she has spent every penny she has on the meal. She has given everything she owns to realize this one perfect moment of inestimable beauty, in an ultimate gesture of service and love.

As a member of the Church, I have often felt like one of these villagers, seated at a beautiful gospel feast. I recently wrote a short piece for a blog explaining why I stay in the Church. “There is beauty all around,” I wrote, borrowing the title line from the beloved hymn. I described how I am “continually smitten by the beauty of the restored gospel: The beauty of belief handed down through generations. The beauty of prayer. The beauty of priesthood. Beauty in service. Beauty in scripture and heroes. Beauty in testimony. Beauty in fellowship at weekly meetings. Beauty in trials and opposition. Beauty in believing and waiting. Beauty in sacrifice and discipleship. Beauty in a Savior for all of earth’s children.”

The Savior loved Beauty. When Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with fragrant oil, Judas said it should have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus rebuked Judas and responded with “The poor always ye have with you.” Beauty has a power to change us in ways pragmatics do not.

For me, the church is as a protectorate and a “keep” for Beauty. Elder Neal A. Maxwell descriptively called making covenants and keeping commandments a “high romance.” Doctrine and theology are important, but in my life, it is transcendent experience with goodness, truth and beauty that ultimately brings me closer to God. As believers, when we step through the doors of our perfectly normal churches, we are really crossing, as CS Lewis imagined, through that magical wardrobe, to a new world of the divine and supernatural, full of spiritual realities. In it, we counter the lie of modernist materialism, the belief that the only thing that exists is the physical. And, in doing so, we revive the greatest tool for belief: beautiful experiences with the Spirit and communion with God.

It’s my observation that society is losing patience for Beauty, preferring the new, modern and fashionable. Dean Abbott said that “Beauty reminds us that we are more than mere matter and that we long for meaning from outside ourselves. And that is why modernity hates it.” Beauty often is an opposition to contemporary life. Beauty is the Ideal. John Keats, the poet, observed that Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, but beauty can seem subjective, unpragmatic, costly, even counter-cultural to “the way things are these days.” Even so, Christ commissioned us to show faith and follow him as the Ideal, despite “the way things are these days.” Don’t commit adultery, he said, but also do not even look upon another with desire. Someone steals your coat? Give also your cloak. Do not kill, but also do not even be angry. Someone threatens/offends/hurts you? Offer the other cheek. Think not what you’ll eat or wear. Consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, arrayed more beautifully than Solomon in his glory. Your life is impoverished/chaotic/inconvenient? “What is that to thee? Follow thou me.”

Christ sealed his point while on the Sea of Galilee, in one of the greatest object lessons of all time: he beckoned Peter to walk across the water to him, as if to say “ignore the way that water ‘really is,’ Peter, and step out of the boat” — a profoundly unpragmatic and unmodern request. Christ said, “if you love me, keep my commandments.” He didn’t say, “if you love me, keep my commandments, but don’t worry about it until first there’s a chicken in every pot.” He established The Ideal, our spiritual golden mean: perfect proportion and unblemished perspective. Then, He gave Beauty a name: “I am the Truth, the Light and the Way.”

I am hopelessly drawn to the aesthetics of the Latter-day Saint life. “Man does not live by bread alone.” We cannot JUST attend non-stop to the necessities, the mechanics, the duties, the work of life. There’s so much MORE. Living the gospel lets us pause and connect with people who are also on the quest for MORE. To live a beautiful life, and be witness to the most beautiful story ever told, seems to me the best counterforce to evil, despair, and hopelessness, and is one of the greatest dividends of living the gospel. The restored gospel brings me closest to this good and Godly beauty than anything I’ve seen elsewhere in the world. As we sing in Primary (and in my stake, we sing it in canoes on the lake at Girls’ Camp):

Fair are the meadows,

Fairer the woodlands,

Robed in the flowers of blooming spring;

Jesus is fairer,

Jesus is purer.

He makes the sorrowing spirit sing.