Thanks Rachel. Beautiful.
I pastored and led worship for many years in a congregation that was one of the loudest I knew; we had a group from our home for the mentally handicapped, and a large number of street people who would regularly offer commentary during my messages.
The commentary only made the messages feel more profound, I think. Life interwove with life, ideas with application, with messy, forgiving life together.
My favorite messy moment? Once when I was in Winnipeg at a great church that served prostitutes and native glue addicts, a little, old bent over street woman came up and stood beside me while I spoke.
She was half my height, and held my arm. I put my hand on her back. We smiled at each other, and she stayed with me through part of the message, then wandered off the stage.
There is so much joy in the buzz, in the energy, of life together. Why would we trade that for great graphics?
Rachel Held Evans | Blessed are the un-cool.
NOTE: I am also a musician and artist, so I appreciate the “creationality” of churches that care about aesthetics, presentation, astute design and expressive architecture. It is the mingling of these that almost never occurs, because often those whose tithes could resource the excellence don’t want to be at a messy church.
It has been my privilege to know many who do though, and they have my deepest love and respect for directing their resources toward serving the poor, the outcast and me.
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This may seem like a trivial commentary on a commentary, but I get confused sometimes about what is cool and what isn’t. I get that ‘blessed are the un-cool’ basically means ‘blessed are the messy’—but then it seems we are saying ‘messy is cool’, no?
Don’t get me wrong; I agree with you. We should pay attention to both loving the outcast (perhaps even the frigid, dusty old conservatives) and the aesthetic (whether in a stained-glass cathedral or in a 50’s fundamentalist pew). I just don’t understand sometimes how we discern what is beautiful. It seems sometimes like beauty only exists in ‘thin-places’, moments of the unexpected, or in times where the usual is disturbed. Can beauty not be found in the integrity of the repeated, the mundane, and in the formal and restrained.
While I agree that it is better to be authentic (being just as much a ragamuffin on the outside as on the in) than to appear to have it all together on the outside—by far!—but what happened to a desire for social cohesion, respect, propriety, and prudence? With some—I don’t think this of you, Dan—but with some, to be conservative and old-fashioned is truly be the excluded un-cool. This is dangerous. Do we not have arms to reach both ways?!
There is nothing trivial in your thoughts here, Ryan.
Beauty, as you say, is indeed found in many places, and it will take great hearts and minds to speak well of balance in an age of polarities.
Some must react, and redefine beauty for themselves. It’s a necessary adolescence we go through time and time again when something we loved, we now resist, something we deemed cool we now find repulsive.
Yet, through it all, the wide-reaching arms never find peace resting in one camp. We see the gifts in all things, celebrate them as we can, and then step forward in the world that God has uniquely given to us to serve.
The tyranny of our own tastes can beguile us along the path to become the kind of person you seem to be describing.
Both ways. Yes. Having know you, and watched you, I can say this with confidence – “Reach for us, and paint the future. We’ll follow.”
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