under the trees

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Beauty isn't just a thing that we choose in the Orthodox Church. It is almost a necessity in the way we orchestrate our sacred spaces. It is a necessity in redemption. Redemption is necessarily beautiful. It's why the Orthodox Church does not depict the crucifixion showing Christ as a bloody mess. The artwork (iconography) of the Orthodox Church is not concerned with depicting material reality, but reality above reality, what we would consider to be true reality. Look upon the cross with awe at the beauty of the love of God who has "trampled down death by death" and given life to those in the tombs as the Orthodox hymn of Easter says.

For us, the crucifixion is not an outpouring of God's hatred for us on Jesus and thereby making it "even." We view it as Christ re-establishing communion between humanity and divinity. So He became fully human with full human experience, including suffering and death. And for us, when ultimate life, enters death, it is like light falling on a shadow.

Lately, I've been noticing how everything I was seeing in social media was a reaction. This is not a judgment on whether the reaction was good or bad, but rather to state that this is what most of my social media feeds were and still are. They are either this or memes. People seem to either be disagreeing or cynically delving into the escapist meme culture we've created on the internet.

Both dynamics made me uneasy. I saw that I too began to fall into that pattern. Either I didn't agree with something or I was making fun of something or posting jokes. While I think all three of those things have their place, I noticed that I myself wasn't really doing anything, that even "my" reactions were just regurgitations of what someone else wrote or said.

Above all, I didn't really see any beauty in any of this. The quotes people posted were generic. The "spiritual" stuff was like watered down milk. People triumphantly posted memes and quotes from Twitter as the end all to any diverging point of view. I wouldn't say that all of this was ugly objectively, but more so an unordered mess.

I started posting photos just to practice photography and get my photos out into the world. People started liking them. After a while, I started to add a little bit of creative writing to it. And I kept at it. And after a while of doing that, I realized that I hadn't seen anything truly beautiful on social media in quite a while. I don't know if what I make qualifies as that, but I think my need to create something in the midst of everything took some sort of subconscious awakening.

We have all of these resources and we so rarely create, even if we just posted stick drawings, if we said we were going to post a drawing a day or write five sentences a day. Prince Mushkin of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel, The Idiot, foolishly exclaimed, "Beauty will save the world."

And I believe such foolishness. I believe that beautifying spaces necessitates love and concern, that to make a space beautiful, you must create within yourself the capacity to take in the beauty. That loving beauty means loving others, loving the soil you walk on, even if it is a small and insignificant addition to the world around you. Why? Because there is no such thing as insignificance. Everything affects everything, and we have the inclination to assume that goodness and beauty greater than evil. It is why the infamous Orthodox book on prayer is called the Philokalia, meaning, "love of the beautiful, the good." Let us be such people, lovers of the beautiful, the good.