A night on beauty
Last night I had such a food shovelling moment, with a friend who came from work, at Thai La-Ong in Newtown, that I was literally still chewing a piece of Mussaman beef as we walked up the street to Moore Theological College for the next Centre for Christian Living lecture on Beauty.
This was a good evening. Andrew Cameron spoke on beauty (you can read an introduction to what he was covering here) and Melinda Tankard-Reist joined us also to discuss issues of body image for women in today’s world. Then afterwards I found myself in discussion with one of the Collective Shout women and also Ainsley Poulos, who’s giving a talk on beauty somewhere sometime soon.
As someone who has no need for hairdressers, considers their time and resources spent on beauty treatments minimal (relatively speaking), and is happy to buy clothes at Vinnies, I don’t tend to feel as though I am too lost in, or influenced by, the beauty culture (except for when I go up to Level 5 of my company that is, where the girls seem to think work is some kind of fashion parade, and I just want to go back to Level 4 in my Vinnies pants). But I did have to ask myself why it is I go jogging etc (which is a good part self-maintenance, but also a good part exercise value and physical activity outside to save me going mad having to sit at a desk inside all day) and realise that there are greater subtleties. However, it is truly alarming what is going on amongst teenagers, with public shaming of ‘ugly’ people on facebook and wherever and whatever else (Melinda Tankard-Reist had stats that I was blissfully ignorant of on that world). I feel like I got out of the teenage years before the current obsession with physical beauty gained its full momentum, and for that I am thankful.
Andrew did acknowledge that physical beauty is a real aspect of the material order, is a good gift in all its forms, and that there are some universally accepted, objective features of physical beauty in humans (I thought this was good - no use pretending otherwise!).
But we were then give three antidotes to the culture of physical human beauty we live in. Very briefly (I didn't write much down):
The first was - Beauty! And finding our way back to the older way of seeing beauty in everything. Our culture is fixated on one kind of beauty, and has largely forgotten all its other forms. He gave us his great quote, from Seeing the Form, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, that:
We can be sure that whoever sneers at her [Beauty's] name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past - whether he admits it or not - can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.
The second was thankfulness (1 Tim 4:4-5). Thankfulness can calm us by drawing our attention to what we've been given, and yes, we can be thankful for beauty in others.
The third was character. Andrew used 1 Peter 3:1-6, which gets and gives us a beating, when it was actually intended as balm for a woman's soul, not a wrap over the knuckles. Christlikeness does tinge a person's appearance.
The conclusion on that was that we can step out of the toxic beauty culture we are in, which is not so much wrong, but just very limited.