Beauty vs Entertainment
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Today we meditate on the need for Beauty and why Entertainment is not beauty.
Eoncourage JM’s book Beauty – What it is and Why it Matters
Beauty is the recognition of some important spiritual truth in material form.
Examples –
· The way the story of the Prodigal Son – expresses the Mercy of God;
· The Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by our sins and for our salvation is the chief expression of the love of the Redeemer for us;
· The Count of Monte Christo expresses the power of Divine Providence and Hope.
As humans we are body and soul – we are embodied spirits. So we wish to see immaterial (spiritual) truth and goodness embodied. Beauty brings deep truth and goodness to us in physical form and that is what all art seeks to do.
We were made for truth and goodness embodied in sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. There are three forms of Beauty:
1. Patterns expressed in music, dance and decoration
2. Functionality manifest in architecture, and culinary
3. Representation – through stories and pictures
Beauty is about bringing you to the heart of reality (to the heart of God) through your five senses.
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God has given us an almost unending flow of beautiful things in our world. Too often we don’t notice or appreciate them. That is because our ability to appreciate beauty is in proportion to our ability to receive it. We are not trained to receive beauty.
Therefore, we need to train our ability to perceive the good in things through our five senses.
The first way to take in beauty is through the eyes – our sense of sight
Go outside with a hot or cold drink of your choice, be still and sit in silence, then train your eyes to experience God’s natural beauty. Look at the trees, the flowers, dogs, rabbits, birds, squirrels or a lake. Water is the best! Mowers and leaf blowers were invented by the Anti-Christ!
Then develop your ability to appreciate beauty by hearing. Pick your favorite instrument and listen to recordings – better live if possible. The guitar – I love Plini, the guitarist not the philosopher, or Erik Mongain – or the saxophonist Derek Brown, or the piano. And practice listening.
Taste. Try this. Don’t talk or watch or listen or read anything while you eat. Just experience the food.
Touch. Use your hands and pay attention. Have an object you are familiar with, something your hands know well and use it often. This is why working with your hands and manual dexterity is so important. Take for example a favorite pen. Hundreds of studies have shown that by writing the words and ideas pass through the body and remain with the intellect more when we write than by a keyboard and word processer. I love how certain coffee cups feel in my hands. Weightlifting forces me to be attentive to the feel of the bar, my grip and the wrist angle. So whether it is a golf-club, tennis racquet, spade or trowel for gardening, there is a key connection between our hands, our brain, the sense of touch and the experience of beauty.
Smell triggers memory like no other sense. It is a way to bridge the gap between the past and the present. Use your sense of smell and describe the aroma. To describe something is to own it more fully. Smell your food or drink before you ingest it. It both prolongs and intensifies the delight.
We need beauty but our ability to appreciate beauty is in proportion to our ability to receive it. Therefore, we need to train our five senses to perceive the beauty that is all around us already. Take it all in and don’t miss a thing.
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Entertainment is different from beauty because it does not present to the 5 senses deep truth or goodness. Rather entertainment presents to the senses either
A. Superficial truth and goodness – Romantic love is good – so a Romantic Comedy from 60 years ago is good – but not a Rom-Com today
B. Falsehood – need an example
C. Evil – Horror flick, Gangster or Crime shows
All three can capture your attention BUT prevent you from entering the goodness of yourself, the world and God.
Because entertainment is a movement away from the deep but challenging truth and goodness of reality, we refer to it as vegging out – as an escape – “I can’t handle any more life so I need something to distract me from reality, something shallow, pointless or disordered.”
This is the deadly sin of sloth or acedia which is the resistance to the greatness to which God created you and called you.
This life and this world are a summons to greatness.
Beauty invigorates and renews our energy for greatness.
Jacque Maritan – the great philosopher said: “The beauty of the natural world makes man feel small and heroic at the same time.”
Too often however, we deafen ourselves both to our smallness and greatness by drowning ourselves in entertainment.
Entertainment drains men of all their energy and power for greatness. What young man ever set ambitious goals after hours of streaming Netflix, You-Tube or video games. But true Beauty will lead a man to do great things. Beauty is the source of manliness. Entertainment makes men weak.
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An experience of beauty makes you see the inner glory of things more easily because you will have practiced seeing the inner spiritual splendor and power in the things in the ordinary world.
Entertainment, by contrast relies on overstimulation of images which causes you to never learn to see the glory of ordinary things.
That is why stuff like home-makeovers and Pinterest don’t improve your life but cause you to become disenchanted with your ordinary life because your life doesn’t look like what you see. Entertainment takes away your ability to see the beauty, truth and goodness of ordinary life – of your own looks and body, and husband, and home, and children…
Read the Hunger Games or watch the Jason Bourne movies and your life and wife, work and home and kids look boring by comparison.
Why? Because there is no spiritual truth you had to work to see in these images or events depicted. But it takes real effort and thought to see the truth and goodness of ordinary life.
By contrast, when we read Lord of the Rings or watch It’s a Wonderful Life we find we are training ourselves to see the greatness and goodness – training ourselves to be amazed at the goodness our life and the world all around us.
We want things to be easy, but Beauty is not easy. We want to coddle our minds and feelings. But beauty takes careful thought and effort to make it and it takes time, effort and thought to appreciate it. Entertainment is brain and emotional candy. It is an escape from reality that is pleasurable but not nourishing. If you watch and read and listen to trash, your powers to know and appreciate truth and goodness will atrophy.
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Let’s get practical and give you some guiding principles
If it is not a thoughtful reflection and celebration of deep truth and goodness, then why are you participating in it.
If the answer is b/c I enjoy it, then ask “Why do I enjoy something that avoids truth and goodness?” Because that is an escape from reality and the source of reality is God.
(Now, humor or the absurd is a great way to lead to deep truth and goodness – but that is for another meditation)
People are exhausted, overwhelmed and intimidated, so they want an easy escape or distraction.
Beauty provokes deep emotion. Beauty is surprise at goodness. Our response to what is surprising is to be thrilled. Our response to what is good is to rest in satisfaction and say – This is it!
This is what I experience when I put in the effort to climb to the top of a mountain and sit down and rest in the thrill of the 360 degree views!
We all need Beauty – but where do we begin?
Begin with a detox.
A person addicted to alcohol can’t appreciate a good brandy. A person addicted to the stimulation of entertainment can’t appreciate beauty. Both need to abstain and detox first. We need to abstain or fast from media to learn to appreciate beauty.
So start with silence. Then fast from video in all forms one day a week. Turn off all sound in your car. If you can’t do these things it’s because you are addicted. Practice being still and quiet.
Dostoyevsky was right when he said Beauty will save the world. But we need to train our ability to enter into Beauty!