Let it be lovely

Blurry photos, Joy Oladokun, Jean Batiste, a happy memory, and why it matters

The morning of the election, I drove to the grocery store and noticed something spray-painted in yellow on the road just down the hill from our house.

It wasn’t until I was on the way back from my errands that I could read the scrawling cursive:

“Grab ‘em by the p…sy,” it read. Except that horrible word wasn’t edited.

I walked across the street to our voting location, which happens to be our church. I’m sure I’ve voted in a church before. Lots of churches offer their premises as voting locations. But, frankly, I was uncomfortable with the political signs lining the gym where our kids laugh and play and we have fellowship meals, but most distressingly, with some of the comments I heard in line as I waited to vote.

One man, obviously hoping for a laugh, shouted that they were checking IDs in the building and if anyone was “illegal,” he hoped ICE would come by.

The whole day felt tainted by ugliness.

***

There is a blurry picture of me in the collage of photos and images I tacked up in my office. In the photo from over twenty years ago, I’m standing on a rock in a creek bed, surrounded by fern fronds and other lush plants that dangle into the frame. And I’m looking up to the side, the light hitting my face from out of frame.

It might sound silly, a little self-referential, to have a picture of myself as inspiration when I write.

I’m not always sure why I keep it. My friend Jen took the picture back when you had to print out pictures to get a look at them (hence the blurriness), and when I saw it the first time, I noticed my perceived physical flaws and how eye-rollingly dramatic my pose was.

Still, I kept it.

The picture is situated up on a bulletin board surrounded by a photo of my mom at the same age, a Celtic cross, an illustration of the Celtic Trinity, a black and white photo of a relative’s grave, and a Franciscan cross my friend Amy bought me in Assisi.

Yesterday, I scrawled out the words “Let it be lovely,” and tacked them up beside the photo.

These words are from a song by Leslie Jordan that I often play before I start writing.

Let it be lovely is a prayer, a reminder of the ways my words have power inside of me and beyond myself.

I might have no control over how my words are perceived. I don’t always have control over the reasons that I write or even how my story shifts in surprising ways. But I do have power over the words that I send out into the world.

***

When I was a graduate student in Scotland, where that blurry photo was taken, I didn’t know the power of art in the world. I just knew I loved beautiful, fantastical stories and beautiful spaces.

I didn’t understand the significance of the privilege I had that allowed me to be in those beautiful spaces.

Beauty can be a way to hide from the world. I know, I’ve used beauty as a way to avoid thinking about ugly things. Or for getting lost in romantic musings to the neglect of the real world or real people around me.

There is certainly a place for finding refuge in art. But when I hear “Let it be lovely,” I don’t think as much about beauty as an escape.

I think about the beauty of a well-crafted story about a painful episode in someone’s life, reminding me that God is with those who suffer, that there is pain and sorrow in the world that is far outside of my experience. And that God doesn’t look away, even if I might want to.

Or a gorgeously wrought painting of a skull to remind me that I am finite.

A heart wrenching memoir by a man who is dying, his love letter to the child he leaves behind.

The beauty of someone coming with black spray paint to cover over ugly words on the road.

A quilt crafted by a sewing circle to send to those who might need a blanket.

In her song, Why it Matters, Sara Groves sings of a statue still standing in a town after war and violence has left destruction in its wake. The statue, a work of art left behind in a “war torn town” is important.

Groves calls this piece of art a “protest of the darkness and this chaos all around.”

And it “matters.”

***

Author Kristin Du Mez quoted a sermon by her pastor recently. He was preaching on Acts 17: 16-34, when the apostle Paul was in Athens, standing by the Areopagus. Paul is debating the leaders there about their idols.

The pastor says that in order to speak effectively, Paul had to understand his audience.

Paul wasn’t just reading the Bible, he was reading the great poets and philosophers of the culture. He was reading the newspapers and observing the billboards of his day. He knew that that’s where we find the soulful longings of a people, the glimmerings of truth they have in their hearts.

The soulful longings of a people.

This is often what we find in good art, whether it has been made by confessing Christians or not. We find the goodness and the ugliness, all that we desire, beating inside the human heart.

When we live in a violent and death-denying culture, when there are ugly words and unchecked power and unimaginative cycles of hate, the efforts of beauty and art matter.

Well-crafted words, sketches, good food, a poem, a journal entry, paintings, songs, quilts, stories, even photographs that are blurry. They matter. They matter not because one piece of art will change the world (or maybe it will) but because it matters that we still have the hope to create.

It matters that we see and witness to the truth of the human experience and that we still look for beauty and goodness when all seems lost.

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OTHER THINGS THAT MATTER

• I just finished reading Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time. The struggles of a man who ages so slowly that he has lived for many centuries.

• Joy Oladokun’s album Observations from a Crowded Room. Madeleine L’Engle says there is no sacred or secular art. Only good art and bad art. We all need good art that challenges our views of the world, that helps us see how others experience the world, that expands our heart in love and empathy.

• I’m listening to the audiobook version of The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods. I’m not finished yet but I love the lilted voices of the readers. Also, it’s full of old books.

• Read Karen Gonzalez’s latest substack on what she’s noticed about the ways people talk about immigrants and immigration both in the U.S. and in Mexico.

  “…we all have the need to belong, and all immigrants have historically suffered the pressure to abandon their own people, language, and culture and assimilate.”

• Jean Batiste playing the piano to a tune he’s never heard before…mesmerizing.

• A beautiful memory of my children.

• I’ve begun reading The Lord of the Rings series to my youngest children. In that vein, I fully believe this is excellent parenting (and a really good goal).

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And finally, a live recording of my sisters and me when we get together (after being apart for several months).