Beauty Into Clichés

It seems that the faster the pace of our lives, by necessity, the more attenuated our focus becomes, consuming the majority of our cognitive and emotional bandwidth – in turn, shrinking our lived out experience until it fits into the reductive universe of our own creation. And then invariably we complain about the quality of life we live — as if life were somehow just happening to us, as if we play no significant role in making it that way. Which, of course, is the inevitable complaint that one most naturally makes out of the reductively self-referencing world they have chosen for themselves. And this is just one of many ways we allow our lives to get off track.

But the ever-present temptation to desire control, is by its very nature, an inescapably reductive tendency, because we can’t control everything. So we end up attempting to convince ourselves that we can somehow limit our exposure to undesirable outcomes – until we begin to filter out all experiences we feel uncertain about. But the problem is, the very same emotional compression that protects you from experiencing emotional lows, invariably constricts your experience of the emotional highs — leaving you in the predictable in between . . . a place where your fears and desires can easily be repackaged and sold to you by consumerism’s parasitic marketplace.

This is how everything distills down to the lowest common denominator. This is why we are expected to speak to one another with a 4th grade vocabulary. And this is how we devolve into allowing culture to turn beauty into clichés. Because in a fast food world, sweet and salty is what sells. It’s why Mona Lisa keychains and tropical sunset placemats sell. It’s how love gets reduced to mere sentiment, and truth is nothing more than someone’s opinion, and justice devolves into a cultural grievance bureaucracy. Because when everything is drained of its transcendence then everything becomes an empty avatar devoid of meaning.

With a consumerist’s sleight of hand, these avatars imply the existence of transcendent meaning without actually referencing it – attempting to coopt its significance while disconnecting it from its source. That’s why we’re prone to accept the cheap knock-off of reality, instead of the fully-formed existence God created us to experience. So in a culture desperate for us to see ourselves as consumers, willing to buy the ideas of what’s meaningful and significant that it’s selling – going through the motions, and speaking the empty rhetoric is all a part of the smoke and mirrors that keeps us trapped in the in between . . . and keeps us complicit participants in the charade culture has become.

A pretentious banality is what we find when we look for meaning apart from God. In 2 Timothy 3:2-5 Paul gives us a glimpse – “For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.” And in Romans 12:2 Paul juxtaposes conformity to the world with discerning the will of God and what is good, by a renewing of our minds – which is to say, we should all climb out of the clown car the world keeps stuffing us into and experience our lives as God intended . . . a life where the love of God is at the center of everything.

. . . making beauty into cliché