Altogether Lovely

And Other Notes from Home . . .

Sometimes it’s called “gulag architecture,” referencing the almost-deliberately ugly buildings that seem typical in some places: squat, square buildings built with nondescript materials, a few irregularly-placed windows, and a disdain for ornamentation or beauty of any kind. Often surrounded by cement instead of trees or fountains or gardens, these buildings—often new government buildings, or office buildings or data centers, or strip malls—do little to encourage a sense of joy or pleasure in one’s surroundings. Easy to maintain, perhaps . . . but ugly.

If we have a choice, why wouldn’t we choose beauty?

Here’s a lightly edited throwback column from the February 2000 issue of St. Peter’s Parish Paper:

Altogether Lovely

“O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth.“– Psalm 96:9 (KJV)

My grandparents lived in a little house with a kitchen hardly bigger than a closet. Grandma loved to feed people, especially her family, and regularly produced feasts from her closet-kitchen. Whenever we stopped in, the first thing she said after a big hug was always, “Could you eat a bite?”

Since there wasn’t room in the kitchen for a big table, Grandma used a card table in the living room for company. She had several tablecloths specially made for that card table. She added a candle, or a small bouquet of flowers from Grandpa’s garden to the table when she set it for guests.

I asked her once why she fussed about making the table pretty.

“Well,” she said, “I love having you all here. And I like things to be pretty.”

Grandma’s good food, served at a card table transformed with her best tablecloth, set with a candle or with Grandpa’s flowers from the garden – those gestures were the language of their love for us.

How often love speaks with something delicious, or something beautiful!

In a collection of essays, For The Beauty of the Church, Joshua Banner quotes Alexander Schmemann: “And when, expecting someone we love, we put a tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do this not out of necessity, but out of love.”

It is easy to under-estimate the value of beauty in our lives. We tend to think of it as an “extra” that, strictly speaking, isn’t really necessary.

But Scripture makes it clear that God Himself values beauty.

His specifications for the building of the Temple include clear instruction that skilled craftsmen build and create the implements of worship and furnishings of the Temple. The priest’s garments were to be richly ornamented. The Ark of the Covenant was delicately covered in gold. And the singers and musicians, God said, should be skilled as well.

As if that in itself weren’t enough, consider the ways God threads beauty through all creation. There are many different expressions of natural beauty, everything from lush forests and fields to the spare beauty of deserts and the murmuring beauty of oceans and lakes and streams. There are lovely things to see, to smell, to hear, and to feel – beauty all around us.

Why? Why did God go to the trouble of making His creation so beautiful? And of commanding the Temple where He would be worshiped, and the implements and habits of worship, to be beautiful as well? And then, asking us to steward that beauty, to invest in it and maintain it?

Recognizing, creating, and maintaining beauty is not usually a slap-dash affair. It is an acknowledgment that what God has created is good, and worthy of our attention and appreciation. It is a gift, a holy use of giftedness, skill, and material. Such beauty is a blessing.

We can train ourselves and our children to recognize and appreciate what is beautiful, to see and hear beauty. We can share our delight in beauty with those around us. We can call out the gifts and talents of those who are able to create beauty in words, in music, in materials of all kinds. We can be deliberate about appreciating and building on what is beautiful.

Often, choosing beauty is costly in time, in resources, in effort.

But Grandma had it right, I think . . . making something beautiful is a way of expressing love . . .

-- Holly Schurter

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Around here, May is a month of birthdays, Proms, end-of-school celebrations, anniversaries, and graduations. There is a lot of cake and a fair amount of ice cream, and later in the month, a kick-off to picnic season, even if the picnic is just on the porch. Spring and summer are holding hands, and we all enjoy the best of both seasons!

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Going through accumulated stuff in the garage is an education. I find things I didn’t know we had—things that may, just possibly, have been squirreled away by children who, for one reason or another, didn’t want to take them to a new home but didn’t want to get rid of them, either. One of those “things”—found just a few weeks ago-- is a set of gently used bocce balls.

No one will ‘fess up to being the owner (perpetrator of squirreling away?) so now we have a new game to learn. Surely some grandchild would like to teach us, right?

What is your favorite outdoor game? Croquet? Badminton? Perhaps a small putting green back by the basil?

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Thanks for stopping in to read these Notes from Home. Please stop back in next Friday for Fiction Friday, and Chapter 15 of Borderlands, to find out if there are any lingering effects from the brawling at The Playhouse. And have a blessed Mother’s Day!