In the 1993 film The Sandlot, one character, Ham Porter, a rotund redhead whose face bears a spray of freckles, says to another, “You know, if I had a dog who was as ugly as you, I’d shave his butt and tell him to walk backwards.” It occurred to me today that in all of its irreverent humor there’s something sort of theologically relevant about that line. Let’s talk today about beauty, and what it means to become beautiful.
I teach writing to third through fifth grade, and my third graders are an endlessly endearing but nonetheless difficult bunch. It’s a class full of various learning needs: ADHD, ASD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and on and on. To be honest, I still haven’t really figured out how to teach them yet, and most classes are full of frustrations of varying sizes. Through no fault of their own, I find it difficult to get a whole lot done with them. I have to do a lot in the moment to maintain my inner peace around them because they’re very, very needy, and they have their needs all at once, directly at whatever adult is nearest them. They’re sweet as sugar, but holy cow, they’re a lot. Sometimes, it’s like herding cats.
But that was different this past Thursday! We wrote letters to their grandparents as a class, and I found that with a little bit of license and freedom, they all really thrived. I almost always leave class with them feeling exhausted, and occasionally I feel discouraged. Not that day. I was so proud of what they’d accomplished, and so were they. “How was class?” their homeroom teacher asked me when I brought them back to her.
“Unblemished,” I said. “Really awesome.”
Although no class with them has been truly disastrous, I had also never had a class with them that I would describe as “good” in a particularly noteworthy way. Still, even without any frame of reference, this, my first really good lesson with them, didn’t feel alien. It felt familiar. Everything felt right, and I knew it at once, even with no previous experience of it. It occurred to me that somewhere behind the reality of the class that I teach must lie a concurring, ideal class that is essentially perfect, wherein all of the kids’ dispositions are aligned with one another, and I execute my lesson perfectly. From this idea of the class, the reality of the class proceeds, and this idea of the class sets up the terms by which it becomes more or less intelligible as itself. Class couldn’t have been “unblemished” as I said unless it had in a sense existed prior, in a state where it was prepared to sustain blemishes.
The existence of this preexisting ideal self is embedded in the language that we use to describe our lives. “It felt right,” we say when things go well. “It all went wrong,” we say when they go poorly. Even without a conscious metric, we are measuring our lives up against a form of things that exists eternally in its perfect state.
When we talk about beauty, we are talking about a return to a former state. Not former temporally; many things that become beautiful have never been so in our lifetime. Rather we are talking about the essence of that being to which it hopefully aspires. Every act of beautifying (or beatifying—sorry, had to) is a restoration.
As I meditated on these things this week, I began to think about angels. I think the most elaborate description of angels appears in the Book of Ezekiel, chapter 1:
As I looked, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming metal. And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had a human likeness, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf's foot. And they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus: their wings touched one another. Each one of them went straight forward, without turning as they went.
Years ago, I tried to make sense of this with a philosopher friend of mine. The part that tripped us up the most was, “Each one of them went straight forward, without turning as they went.” We wanted to grasp a better understanding of why, but first we had to establish a better understanding of what “forward” meant. We went back and forth about it over the course of, I am sort of embarrassed to say, a few hours, and we got nowhere. We wound our way in and out of the topic, occasionally realizing that we had gone so far afield and needed to navigate our way back to the original question: “What is forward?”
It occurred to me today that the project for us broken humans here on earth is one of going backward: we have departed from our former state of union with our Lord and light, and we believers are traversing back to that point. This is our work as beings here in the realm of timespace. But angels are formless intellects with immutable destinies and unchanging fates, which were decided and then occurred simultaneously. There is no way for them to do anything but proceed, ever unified with their state of grace. Their former is also their present. We humans, on the other hand, have to spend our time here on earth walking backward, so that we can reach the place from which we can move forward, ever in step with our God, the Being of our being.
Today, before Mass, I went on a walk with a friend of mine who helps run the campus ministry at one of the universities near where I live. She and I had actually never spent time together outside of parish events until today. We shared our testimonies with one another (though I hold back when people ask about what brought me back to the faith, and don’t tell them about that time I went to hell, because it’s a lot to dump on people, and I am wary of people who air their dirty laundry too early in a friendship). She told me that when she fully came to the faith, people told her, “You look different.” And, you know, of course. Life in Christ is life itself; to live in the faith is to be fully alive. In truth and in beauty.
In all honesty, I was in a terrible mood today except for the time I spent with my friend. The sheer volume of things in my life for which I have reason for gratitude is staggering, yet from the moment I woke up I was having none of it. (GIRLS ONLY PARENTHETICAL: Part of this is hormones; I am always overly critical, insecure, and a little woe-is-me for a day of every cycle.) I had arranged a week ago to meet with my confessor, a very holy man, an hour before Mass today, and I ended my plans with my friend with plenty of time to be there. But when I got to the church, there was a line of three people who had also gotten there early hoping to receive Confession. What was I going to do, tell all those people waiting for God’s grace that actually, Father and I had spoken last week about reserving this time? And what was Father supposed to do, turn them away in their time of need? I just got in line and tried to be patient. But wouldn’t you believe it: I ended up waiting for almost an hour! Each of those people took about twenty minutes to say their Confession.
Well, I already told you that I was in a terrible mood, and so over the course of that hour as hard as I tried, I couldn’t find my peace about it. Instead I began to quietly cry and couldn’t get myself to stop. I was thinking, what the hell! No one is ever that early for the Mass I attend, let alone so intent on speaking with the priest beforehand, and nobody ever takes quite that long to confess, let alone three people in a row! I had arranged this meeting with Father because I really, actually need some help in my soul from someone who knows better than I do, and it felt like chance was slapping me in the face. Ten minutes before Mass started, the final person ahead of me walked out of the Confession room, and Father started to walk out as well, but when he saw me waiting next, he stopped and beckoned me back to speak with him. Most of my Confession with him had to do with being so dour and ungrateful, and at the end of it, he said, “Do you mind if I come closer to you to say a prayer over you?”
I said yes, and he did; he came and placed his right hand on the top of my head and he prayed for me. It occurred to me as we prayed that it was the first sustained physical touch I have experienced since my quasi-engagement was broken a handful of months ago. Ever since then, the idea of another adult touching me in any capacity whatsoever has made me physically nauseous, or else almost visibly panicked. It’s tied to some other crap I carry around with me that got a new ferocity in the wake of dealing with the sudden heartbreak.
“Cheer up, Joan,” Father had said to me earlier during my Confession. “You are young, you are gifted, you are beautiful. You need to have faith that God has set you on this path for a reason. And I’m saying this because it’s true.”
In building relationships with holy people, so many things that were damaged in my life away from Christ have been restored. Physical touch need not be so fraught and laden with pain, and can be given purely for love of you and commitment to your good; and it is possible for someone to bear witness to who you really are and not recoil, not retreat, to actually come closer to you by desire and by request and by will.
God is an aesthete. He made each us with an image of astonishing beauty in mind, and the fact that we have this life to aspire toward and grow to more closely resemble that brilliant vision is a sign of His deep and abiding affection for us. What I received today was the experience of God’s gaze, which sees each of us according to our original beauty even as in the reality of our lives we sin and are mired in sorrow. We have made ourselves ugly and ashamed; God lovingly directs us back to Him, back to who we are, back to a life of grace and mercy in which we can be fully visible, illuminated from every side, and joyful to live in His plain sight.