Beauty

I have lived long enough in the church to watch a kind of evolution of Christ-art.  Many of us were moved by the Bloch exhibition at BYU last summer.  He and Harry Anderson [a Seventh-Day Adventist] seemed to capture the physicality of Christ, the energized blood and bone Christ so unlike, say, El Greco. We wanted a true man in our Savior. “Ecce Homo,” Pilate said.  “Behold THE man.”

More recently, new illustrations have further enhanced the Savior’s “beauty.” More than likely His skin color would have been the honey-brown of Hispanics or Palestinians today, I seriously doubt he had blue eyes.  Change continues.  His physical features have become further enhanced:  stronger arms and legs, a man of apparently large stature, silky hair flowing, facial features much closer to early Greek obsessions with ideal proportions, i.e., the length of the space between his nose and his mouth, the length of his arms in proportion to his torso and legs.

I plead for patience when it comes to Christ-art; However, we are fortunate Arnold Friburg did not paint the Savior.  Such outer muscularity, which he felt mirrored the inner spiritual resources of, say, Moroni, would push back the heart-felt Isaiah version of  the “man of sorrows” who is without “beauty that we should desire him.”  Instead, the Great Poet, says Christ, was “rejected, . . . acquainted with grief,” someone the Great Unwashed “despised and esteemed him not.”

Isaiah’s vision stands, then, in stark contrast with the Hellenistic world of which Christ and the early apostles were a part.  Inundated as we are these days with Calvin Klein’s beauty, adds to the swirling, frenetic world of high energy foods and exercise equipment, propelling us into obsessions with health and endurance.  We wear out our knees and ankles before our hearts give way.  But we must, as Yeats says, “labour to be beautiful.” William Wordsworth walked 150,000 miles; most young housewives run that many miles in a month.  But I stray here.

Let me counter my own version of beauty with two examples:  The “Catadores" [garbage pickers in Rio] “art” and Abraham Lincoln.  Be gentle and patient, folks.  This effort comes from a man who just two weeks ago wanted a set of Steve Reeves’ calves in the next life.  Dare I ask Spencer W. Kimball what his take might be on my “resurrection reconstruction” project?  I shudder to think. . . . .

Early in 2010, Vik Muniz, a Brazilian transplant to New York, felt “compelled,” he said, to transform the infamous Rio de Janeiro landfill, the largest in the world, into an art piece.  Moving among the tireless “pickers,” Muniz snapped pictures of old and young, the weary and the dirty, the sad and, strangely, the happy majority.

Watching him and 8 of those chosen for their striking [but not 21^st century] beauty, he greatly enlarged their portraits, outlined them artistically with garbage and then took final pictures, reducing them to gallery size.  Tears sprang to my eyes as I watched the participants stand on a scaffolding, looking down at themselves in interesting poses, their faces aglow.  And they all wept as they saw themselves as beautiful, captured by Muniz’ genius with perspective.  He saw something no one else could see.

The exhibit, along with the contestants, flew to London and around Brazil, where over a million people visited these Catadores, now called “recyclers,” organized into a union.  Now Brazil is one of the most productive recycling nations in the world.  Garbage has become art; art has become money and jobs.

Not too long ago, a young returned missionary from Brazil sat next to me in Sunday school.  I told him my son had served there, and that he had loved the people and the language, and that he still prays in Portuguese and often converses with clients in their beloved tongue.  “You should see the documentary on the Rio landfill,” I said.  It moves slowly enough that you’ll grasp the workers’ conversations, and you’ll see the people you served.”

“A garbage dump?” he said.  “Don’t think that would interest me in the least.  Garbage is garbage.”

William McLellan, the worst general ever to serve in the US army, along with Custer, called Abraham Lincoln the “big gorilla.”  His puerile, envious letters to his wife reek of hatred.  When Lincoln visited the troops after Shiloh, they mockingly described his “extra spindle shank legs, his long underwear showing; his lanky body perched precariously on a donkey.”  This was their Commander in Chief.  And yet they loved him, and yelped and clapped up a storm.

When we speak of beauty, of “perfection” on that “perfect resurrection morning,” maybe we should rethink beauty and perfection.  Does Lincoln want to awaken, looking like George Clooney?  What of that scar at the top of his furrowed brow?  The one for Bull Run.  The second, more shallow gulley after Cold Harbor, the deeper line, embedded in both cheek and forehead, the one for Mary Todd, his bipolar wife who could not stop spending, who could not stop worrying, who could not stop dancing.

And what of the sleepless, melancholy Lincoln himself, weeping for Willie. “My son has been taken from me,” he told Stanton, his head in his hands.  Now as Commander in Chief, he led, but without other Chiefs to follow.  He learned the art of war, teaching himself [a personalized West Point experience], because “no Union office has the guts to “go out and kill Lee’s army,” he confessed to his often divisive cabinet.

Then Grant. Victory.  Election.  Assassination.

I  will not compare Lincoln with the Savior, but I do suggest that our scars, won on life’s battlefield, just may be the “beauty” about ourselves we don’t want to lose.