Mission: Transcendence

What bothers you? What makes you angry? What do you think ‘just ain’t right’? These are questions I asked of our vestry at our retreat this past July. The aim was to introduce the idea of “holy discontent,” a deep dissatisfaction with the way things are that spurs us to respond to God’s calling. When I first asked these questions of myself—what bothers me, what makes me angry—several answers came to mind: slow drivers who “sit” in the middle lane for miles on the interstate, how there’s never enough lumber carts at Home Depot, and how shows on AppleTV inexplicably start 4 minutes into each episode and, according to Reddit, no one else has this problem.

To be sure, none of these “discontents” rises to the level of warranting a holy crusade—well, maybe bad drivers. But when I reflect further, other, more substantial concerns present themselves. I think of how few people in our community know Christ, how almost all the churches around us are struggling, how religion is in decline in the West and how denominational leaders refuse to even acknowledge this fact. I think of the political hyper-polarization and how so many people feel the need to declare their political opinions through signs in their yard, stickers on their cars, and flags in store windows. I think too of the epidemic of loneliness and hopelessness afflicting our fellow citizens, and of the anxiety many people today feel about not measuring up to other’s success or, worse, not measuring up to what they beive they are capable of, not realizing their “inner genius.”

In truth, though, these problems are not discreet issues, but manifestations of the same phenomenon. They’re “symptoms” of the same underlying “disease.” They all stem from a “loss of transcendence,” a disinterest in (even a rejection of) anything beyond this world. Everything that is, or at least everything that matters, is right here. There is nothing more.

The dismissal of transcendence is obvious in the general irreligiousness, but its effects can also be seen the hyper-polarization (if this is all there is, then we have to make sure our cause, our side, previls). It is what is at the root of the epidemic of loneliness and despair (there’s nothing greater to hope for, no higher authority to guide our life by). And it is what is behind the obsession with being recognized (we’re only as happy as the attention we can attract).

So, how might we address this? It’s clear, we can’t attack the loss of transcendence directly, through rational argument, any more than we can argue for God directly in society today. So how do we break through? How do we encourage people to question the assumption that this all there is? More to the point, how can we reawaken people to transcendence in a way that it gives us an opening to share the Gospel?

The answer, I believe, is hinted at in the word itself, transcendence, or rather transcendental. In ancient Greece, classical philosophers, reflecting on the nature of existence, identified three “transcendentals,” three transcendent principles that are behind and above reality itself—the good, the true, and the beautiful. These three principles, goodness, truth, and beauty, they thought, are what is highest, most important, most real.

Centuries later, Christian theologians adopted the transcendentals and attributed them to God. God, they asserted, is not just good, true and beautiful, but Goodness, Truth, and Beauty itself, and thus the source and cause of these qualities in the world. All that is good, true, and beautiful in creation have those qualities as a reflection of their Creator. They noted too that humanity, being made in God’s image, not only shares in those qualities, but is uniquely able to perceive them. We’ve been created with reason to understand Truth, conscience to grasp Morality, and taste to experience Beauty. In fact, we are only happy when we are sharing in these transcendent qualities, when our hearts and minds are seeking them.

Nothing could be more at odds with the spirit of our age than this view. Rather than being objective realities we seek to know, truth, we are told, is subjective, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and actions are good based on what they do for me or how they can advance “the cause.” The result is a breakdown in morality, in commonsense, in trust in institutions, not to mention an onslaught of ugly “art.”

It is here that we find our opening. Transcendence may be dismissed, but the transcendentals—the good, true, and beautiful—continue to exist and to attract us. Few people can honestly say they have no interest at all in these transcendent realities. So, here we have an opportunity to engage with non-believers, to connect their yearning for the good, the true, and the beautiful to God who is goodness, truth and beauty himself.

More than an evangelistic strategy, though, I believe God is calling us at Good Shepherd today to focus our collective attention on these transcendental realities, so that we can become what the world needs, what it seeks, what it yearns for—a community that communicates, that celebrates and shares, the good, the true, and the beautiful. Going forward, I see us making the transcendentals the focus of our common life and ministry, orienting our life and activities around participating in and promoting them. Everything we do, everything we work for would relate to either goodness, truth, or beauty.

For example, under the heading of promoting “beauty,” we could host events celebrating both natural beauty (hiking Buttermilk Trail, visiting gardens, beautifying Forest Hill Park) and the arts (attending concerts, performances, art exhibits, partnering with the studio across the street). Under the heading of the “good,” we could explore what makes for a “good life,” “good government” and a “good society” by rediscovering the language of virtues and visiting the state Capitol and St John’s Historic Church. And we could examine what constitutes a “good relationship” with the earth by touring Polyface Farm, a holistic, restorative farm in the Valley. And for “truth,” we would continue to offer sermons and classes and Bible studies, but maybe we focus them not just on information but on wisdom, on how we can recognize and conform ourselves to the order established in creation and revealed to us in Scripture.

Now, I recognize that this is a brand-new idea, and a rather heady idea at that, especially if you’re not familiar with Greek philosophy. And I expect some might immediately object, saying we already have a mission: “To know Christ and make him known.” Why do we need a new one? To that, I would say: Yes, we do have a mission, a good one. And I have no intention to change it. Heck, it’s chiseled in the stone above the 43^rd street entrance. But I would ask, How? How do we “know Christ and make him known”? What I am proposing is that we “make Christ known” precisely by celebrating, promoting, teaching the good, the true, and the beautiful. That is how we can make Christ known at this time, in this place. Indeed, that can be what makes us different. While other churches go wide, hosting large flashy events, we go deep, down to the very foundation of reality, that we might make known the gracious nature of God manifest in the world.

As we seek to “make Christ known,” I think we have a particular opportunity to reach others through appeal to Beauty. I recently read Evelyn Waugh’s book Brideshead Revisited, from the 1940s. It’s a dense, meandering book, but it also contains, I think, an intriguing avenue to faith. 

To begin with, the ‘Brideshead’ of the title refers to this lovely manner house in the English countryside, owned by this fabulously wealthy family. To Brideshead comes the narrator of the novel, Charles Ryder, who's a student at Oxford. He's an aesthete, an artistic type, and, like many today, a sort of casual agnostic. He comes to Brideshead through the invitation of his friend Sebastian, and he is overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the place. He takes in the delicacy of the Bernini-like fountain, all the painting and the sculptures and the artistic program as a whole. At the center is a chapel, which is a riot of Baroque decoration. Charles is an agnostic. But he loves the beauty of the place. And he is drawn back again and again throughout his life to commune with this extraordinary place.

Now, in the course of those visits, he meets Sebastian's family, including Sebastian's mother, Lady Marchmain, who is a very devout Catholic. And from her, he becomes familiar with the moral demands of Christianity, especially as it pertained to Sebastian’s increasing problems with alcohol. While Charles opposes Christianity for much of the novel, he eventually comes to appreciate the indispensability of its moral claims and then its validity. He comes to see Christianity as a coherent philosophical system, and at the very end of the novel, he kneels down to worship in that chapel, which previously he knew only as an admirer.

I’m just barely summarizing this extremely rich story. But it’s to make this point: I think the best way to evangelize today—and Evelyn Waugh caught it—is to move from the beautiful, then to the good, then to the truth. And to get that backwards is to evangelize very ineffectively. 

I mean, we live in a culture that celebrates individual freedom and the liberty to make up your own mind. So if you begin with the true— “Here's what you should believe, here's the truth of things”—hackles go up, almost automatically. “Who are you to tell me what is true? It may be true for you, but not true for me.” Or worse, you begin with the good—"What you're doing is wrong. Here's what you should be doing.” No one likes to hear that. No one ever likes to be told that he or she is doing something wrong.

But, if you begin, as Waugh suggests in Brideshead, with the beautiful, there's something non-threatening, even winsome about the approach. You say to someone, Look at the National Cathedral in Washington, look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, look at Michelangelo’s David. I'm not telling you what to think or how to behave. Just look…at Sainte-Chapelle or La Sagrada Familia. Just read The Wasteland or the Divine Comedy. Or listen to Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s St Matthew Passion. It's hard to resist the power of the beautiful to draw you in.

Or, if you’re more sports-minded, just look at the swing of Rory McElroy or the jump shot by Michael Jordan. If you like sports, you know how beautiful these moves are. Beautiful is non-violent, unabrasive. It's alluring, attractive.

And once you’re caught by the beauty, then it begins to work on you. You want to conform your life to the beauty that you see. You want to live in a way that's congruent with the beauty that you’ve taken in. That's how you move from the beautiful to the good. You want to participate in it and that means changing your life. Only now it's not someone from the outside telling you what to do. It's the beautiful working on you and changing you from the inside.

And once you’ve changed because of the beautiful, now you begin to understand the world that made that beauty and goodness possible. Now you understand from the inside the dynamics of the truth of the thing.

When Charles comes in to Brideshead, he’s entranced by the beauty. It took him a long time, but eventually he came to see the goodness of the Christian way of life. And then finally he got the truth of it. First, the beautiful (how wonderful!), then the good (I want to participate!) and finally the true (now I understand!)

Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the great theologians of 20th century, took this very seriously, the aesthetic starting point. He said Beauty seizes you. It changes you, and then it sends you on mission. So you see a beautiful movie, and it affects you. It changes you. You want to participate in that world, and you want to tell people about it. You become an evangelist of the beautiful.

I think today, especially in our postmodern culture, which is so relativist, so suspicious of dogma, whether intellectual or moral, we need to rediscover the importance of the beautiful. Beauty is able to sneak past what C. S. Lewis called the “watchful dragons” of our culture, to break through our defenses and jadedness to reach out to us and draw us to God.

Goodness, truth, and especially beauty are ways in which we recognize God’s presence in the world, whispering to us about higher things, giving us glimpses of a reality beyond, that transcends everyday life. As Christians we are called to share in that transcendence and to share it with others, to be a community that communicates the good, the true and the beautiful. This is what I believe we are called to do—to be—today, and I invite you all to join me in it. Thanks be to God!