I’ve always been enthralled by the elusive nature of beauty. It’s a title of highest honor, given to the plastically improved supermodel standing haughtily in a $10,000 Prada dress and stilettos or applied to the sublime kaleidoscope of sunrays that bounce off the Grand Canyon at dusk. Never the less, the characteristic of conceptual beauty that has always estranged me has been its nature of impersonality and distance. Such beauty isn’t something to engage in, it’s something to be admired from a distance. Thus, the love created for beauty is fabricated on partial truths into a flimsy romantic ideal.
Embarrassingly, I’ve found that many of my passions and desires are often founded on these partial truths, the aspect of reality that I have allowed myself to see. Since I was a little girl, I’ve had a love affair with the city of Paris. My childhood days spent speaking “pretend French” (aka gibberish) to my imaginary French friends gave way to years of diligent study of the French language and culminated in a spontaneous weekend getaway to Paris with a close friend just months ago. Though I claim a love for France and its culture, my infatuation extends only to the touristy fantasy that the media and my own bias have created to satisfy my romantic urges and neglect a necessity for holistic love.
I cannot understand true beauty lest I first grasp this holistic love. I am commanded to love God and love my neighbors and yet such a checklist of responsibilities often results in a quick, easy romantic love with a people group half way across the world that I can speak about but never to and that I can love without ever being hurt.
When I claim a culture to be beautiful or something for which I “have a heart,” what am I really saying? If that is my understanding of love, then my idea of the beauty of a different culture and missions is nothing more than my face on the glossy cover of Christianity Today bending down to lay a hand on an impoverish Nicaraguan child or a photograph of smiling dark faces that I hang above my mantel next to my sports trophies and family portrait.

Time and time again, I have found myself wondering if my “heart” for Africa comes from a true and honest desire to understand God better through the hurt of the African people or if my love comes from a purely romantic ideal of missions. If I am never truly willing to get dirty in the ugliness of pain how can I love someone holistically? How can I truly love my neighbor from behind a fence or across an ocean or in the “bad” neighborhood that I am willing to take the train to once a week but could never in my right mind call home?
How can I say that I have a heart for the poor and never stop to think why it is that they find themselves in such a circumstance (hint: laziness is the wrong answer) or call social justice a liberal issue and refuse to interact with the city for anything more than sight seeing or dinner? The time I spent in Angola, LA with my African American brothers doesn’t warrant me an understanding of the persecution of the African American community as a whole. We can’t be so quick to label a single, finite exposure as a comprehensive, cultural experience and even then experience doesn’t necessitate understanding or appreciation.
Love is hard. It’s scary to open up the door for vulnerability and establish a dialogue of accountability, yet it is vital for spiritual growth. It’s easier to send my Compassion child a check every month and feel like I’m loving the people of Rwanda rather than walking the streets of Chicago and wallowing in the guilt of injustices that I have been ignoring.
Living for 20 years next to Waikiki, I grew up hating tourists who come to Hawaii with a starry-eyed perception of paradise that they gained from movies like Blue Crush or Hawaii Five-O , spend time on the beach or at some tacky hula show and never try to understand the true beauty of the islands. Sadder still, aside from my close friends, I’ve only had a handful of dialogues about my home since coming to Wheaton. Little light is shed upon the strength of the Hawaiian people to persevere as they watched white Americans destroy their homeland and force a democracy upon the Hawaiian monarchy. Missionaries brought with their “white man’s gospel” disease and destruction and today, the Hawaii you know, is one where native Hawaiians have been forced off their land, where native plants make up a third of the nations endangered species list, where their language and culture are slowly being forced into oblivion, and where their story has become one of little interest as the world popularized the image of a dark, voluptuous hula dancer on a white sandy beach, over the broken, tear stained face of an elderly Hawaiian man whose childhood home had just been bulldozed to create space for office buildings. People call me “Hawaiian” and yet I force them to call me a “local.” I cannot claim their culture but in hearing their stories and being a recipient of both tears and smiles, I have come to embrace the beauty of their traditions and, in so doing, learned to appreciate my own.
In traveling from the west coast to the Midwest, to the South and to the east, my mind has been blown away by the plurality of subcultures living under a single American stereotype. It’s almost frightening to think how loosely we throw around such terms without reflecting upon the insidious wounds that they are inflicting upon ourselves and others. We pay lip service as retribution for our lack of involvement in understanding.
Beloved, our actions have consequences. When we dare not strive to live for holistic love, we encourage a painful deception about God. If such romantic love will suffice a requirement to care, does our God love us in such a way, from a distance, away from the dirt of sin and brokenness, refusing to accept our faults by loving only our successes? Beloved, let us proceed with caution and with care. As Martin Buber put it, let us have an “I-thou” not an “I-it” dialogue and in so doing be motivated into action for justice to love our brothers and sisters while simultaneously encouraging each other towards a closer relationship with our Maker and perhaps, we would see that the face of Beauty is scarred not by the blade of a plastic surgeon but bruised by the blow of a tyrannical government, broken by the crushing inundation of constant grief, clouded by the imminent threat of death, or worse yet a tortured life, but bathed and overflowing with Christ’s redeeming love.