Pierced to the Heart

The world of film is mixed with the worthy and the not, the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. So, for film to play a role as a channel for growth, we need a framework for engaging with film. How shall we sort through the ugly to hear the truly beautiful, especially when often we misguidedly see ugliness as beauty? Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and in art these surface as goodness, truth, and beauty — there is a deep connection between the heart of God and the heart of art. Fyodor Dostoevsky saw clearly how beauty is the battleground where we will be won (or not) to the heart of God. Our hearts are formed by our understanding of beauty, so we must understand beauty clearly. Principles of Beauty include:

• Our heart’s guide is Beauty. God’s ways are not arbitrary. He doesn’t simply set His ways randomly and capriciously, He loves ways that are good and true and beautiful. These form a unity: A thing is most beautiful if it is also most good and most true. Let “Beauty” (capital “B”) refer to the sum of all three, which is our heart’s desired destination.
• Beauty is often hidden inside ugly. As much as we might like to see only the nice and the pretty, sometimes seeing ugly helps us to see Beauty. The Ultimate Beauty, that with the most goodness, truth, and beauty, is the Cross, yet the Cross, in itself, is very ugly.
• We can learn God’s ways both positively and negatively. Seeing and experiencing Beauty, we can be drawn toward loving Beauty as God loves it. By contrast, as we see and experience ugly, and as we come to understand why it is ugly, we learn to hate what God hates and we are propelled away from ugly toward loving Beauty as God loves it.
• Engaging with film should be a two-way relationship. Certainly, when we watch a film, the film should give something to us. But a good film will also ask something from us. We should seek and welcome a film’s challenge for us look closer, think more deeply, be enriched by the Beauty around us, and grow.
• We must receive a film before judging its content. To hear what a film is asking of us, we must lay aside our expectations and prejudices, enter the film’s world, and see from the film’s perspective how both clean and ugly content relate to what the film is doing. Only then can we fairly discern the appropriateness a film’s content. Only then are we open for the film to take us some place new and show us something about ourselves.