Show Vs. Tell

I just spent an hour or so down by the water, enjoying the warm weather and the fact that it is the weekend. Almost every time I make the walk down to waterfront, i'm reminded of the deepest longings of my heart-longings for community, beauty, and rest. I feel privileged to live in a place that reawakens, rather than stifles, those deepest longings.

A few months ago I had lunch with a friend of a friend who lives in Lynn, MA. Lynn is kind of like the underbelly of Boston, a place of industrial refuse, faltering shops, and-well-people just like you and me. It is not exactly the most glamorous place to live, but rather a place in need of repair and a place with sparsely planted beacons of hope. This friend shared with me that she and her husband, a PhD student at a nearby university, had a difficult time living there because they share a deep love of aesthetic beauty, and sometimes in the midst of the brokenness of Lynn it was easy to lose sight. They keep chickens in their backyard, and dream of moving one day to a small farming community. However, for right now, this is where they are supposed to be and they will plant themselves in this community and work to foster it through their time there, as hard as it might be for their aesthetic inclinations. This friend showed me a once favorite corner coffee shop, one of the "beacons" of Lynn, which couldn't make it due to hard economic times. The shop had closed down literally a week or two before I set foot on its premises-certainly a sad tale for the community. Meanwhile, this friend also took me to another favorite place in Lynn, a little gallery/studio of sorts called RAW Art Works. This place, in the midst of a broken and struggling community, provides an outlet of hope and redemption for the community's youth. As I explored the main room of this building, the passionate core of me was hit as I considered art's power to uplift, empower, and nurture.

Art is a vehicle of beauty, and as Miroslav Volf suggests in a lecture I recently listened to, of reconciliation (http://store.internationalartsmovement.org/volf.html). Beauty and creativity are no small thing in a world marred by sadness, brokenness, and neglect. They stand as icons of a better tomorrow. Today, as I was walking down to the water I was thinking about the aforementioned conversation/afternoon and my own longing for beauty. It's not easy to find or create beautiful things, and we can't force them upon others. Just like that coffee shop in Lynn, sometimes we make them and they don't work. Although we're doing something "good for the community," we're not guaranteed success. Not unlike my friend in Lynn, though, I feel a mandate upon my heart to step into the milieu and create despite the bleakness and distress of the world around me. Simply standing back and lamenting the status quo does nothing to change things, and i'd do well not to forget this reality.

After I came home today, a little thought came to mind: the power of beauty lies in the fact that it shows; it doesn't tell. People who are often not open to explicit truths and messages may find themselves opened to new avenues of thinking and experience through expressions of beauty. How many people do you find walking through a beautiful garden, or a well-planned, well weathered community like Old Town, and turning up their noses? Not many. That's why, even in the midst of hard economic times, King Street was packed today, and even though the sky was overcast crowds gathered near the water. Beauty does something spectacular to us, whether it's the natural beauty of the world around us, or the particular beauty of a well-crafted object.

In order to be agents of hope, then, I believe we cannot merely tell, we must also show. And in taking the opportunity to show the world that things can be better we will show ourselves as well. In the world's places of despair, structures and symbols of beauty-not unlike RAW Art Works, or the massive lawn scattered with frisbees and pets along the Old Town waterfront, will remind us of what it means to be fully human.