Today was a particularly beautiful day in New York City. After a week of cold, damp weather, which had driven everyone inside as if to announce the presence of fall, today the sun broke through the clouds and invited people back outside-despite the chill in the air.

I spent most of the morning painting at the New York Academy of Art, and then I had lunch outside at a French café near the school. It is hard for me to imagine how life could be much better. Perhaps a morning painting in the French country side, and eating in a French café in a small village might top today, but New York has charms of its own. The sun reflecting off the wall whereby I sat kept me warm. The mushroom omelet, salad, and coffee were tres bon. At a nearby table, I listened in on a wonderful conversation, by a particularly handsome family. The daughter offered as profound a critique of the Iraqi war as I have heard. She contended that "the fundamental requirement of a democracy is that it gives people the information they need to make fair decisions; this the Bush administration failed to do by withholding information."

I like collecting such bits of wisdom in the way some people like collecting stamps or tea cups.

After eating I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to drop by and look in on some of the special friends I have made since moving to New York-Edouard Vuillard's, The Album, Paul Cezzane's The Card Players, Pierre-Auguste Cot's, The Storm, and Rosa Bonheur's The Horse Fair to name a few. I had planned to start writing this article as soon as I made a quick round of visits, but a special exhibit of El Greco and his deeply mystical paintings of the life of Christ and the Virgin Mary held my attention most of the afternoon. Before I knew it the museum was closing and I was back out on the street.

Now it was dark and cold. I found a restaurant that served soup to warm me up. Two elderly women were the only other occupants. The one was unusually ugly, and the other disturbingly bossy-sending the bent woman with her large nose and severe overbite on one errand after another for her, while refusing to allow the servile woman to look at her magazines. The women wore expensive clothes, but seemed alone and cut off from life, except for their strange dependency upon each other. The ugly woman finally left to buy fruit across the street despite the sharp objections of the bossy woman, who trailed off after her.

By now I was beginning to feel that my day of satiation with beauty represented a particularly pernicious pleasure. My personal quest for beauty seemed at odds with loneliness and misery I had just witnessed. However poor I am monetarily, my own life seemed decadent in face not only of two lonely old ladies, but the beggars I ignore on the subway, the soldiers and civilians dying in Iraq, not to mention all the misery and sickness that is hid from view. Perhaps, the responsible life is one that takes upon itself the ugliness, brokenness, and pain of life. Is that not the call to take up one's cross and follow Him who had no comeliness or beauty?

Forced back onto the street, because the restaurant was closing, I was mulling in mind the question of the moral responsibility of beauty, when I noticed an odd sight of a well-dressed man in a black suit wearing what appeared to be brand new black high top tennis shoes. The look was definitely not haute culture. The man was Jewish, wearing a Yarmulke. I might have dismissed the incident as an example of poor aesthetic taste, but as I continued down the street, the sidewalk was populated with were more and more similarly attired people, all hurrying in the same direction. My curiosity was pricked by the sight of so many badly dressed people, all almost running in the same direction. I felt like I was in the middle of a Hitchcock movie. The tennis shoe wearers all converged on a synagogue where they were searched with a metal detector. Talking to someone in line, I discovered the reason for the bad taste in footwear. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and the wearing of tennis shoes was sign of penitence.

Perhaps the wearing of tennis shoes once a year to the synagogue cannot dispel evil from the world, but the question of identifying with the broken and outcast still stands. Perhaps rather than painting pictures or spending years learning how to play musical instruments or write literature, we should make a more frontal attack on evil by manning soup kitchens, establishing medical clinics, serving as legal counsel to the poor, building shelters for the homeless, or hastening the end of suffering by preaching a last day message to a dying world. Perhaps we have reached a point in the world's history where the pursuit of beauty is irresponsible.

To frame the issue in terms of the title of this article, can an apocalyptic sensibility celebrate the beautiful without doing injustice to the misery of the world?

After several days of mulling over this question, my answer is not just yes, but a determinate yes. A Christian apocalyptic is not only compatible with beauty. It demands beauty.

Most of the Twentieth Century represented a long exile from beauty in the arts. Pablo Picasso's two great masterpieces, Guernica and Les Domoiselles d'Avignon set the stage for what followed. In the first painting Picasso reacted to the German bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica in 1937, by restricting his palette to black, gray, and white-the tones of newspaper photographs that publicized the world's first bombing of civilians. Picasso's images of a woman holding a dead child, another trapped in a burning house, and the screams of men and animal alike became a prophetic warning of the horrors of war that followed to this day. In his other painting Picasso followed a long tradition in western art of painting female nudes as objects of beauty and desire. In Les Domoiselles d'Avignon, however, Picasso's women wear masks with hard, piercing stares. Here again, Picasso set the stage of a century of critique in which sex seemed cut off from the affection and love that was idealized in western romance.

Today Picasso's art, which at first shock his contemporaries, seems tame and even beautiful. Twentieth century art is full of masks, dismembered bodies, fractured objects, empty landscapes, flat or blank surfaces. In an endeavor to speak the truth it has had little room for beauty, which is dismissed as sentimental (the merely pretty), economic pandering (it sells things), or irresponsible (it is at odds with misery and ugliness). Yet without some point of reference that stands outside of the post-modern critique, the critique itself has become meaningless. We have criticism without standards of criticism, irony without any real difference to serve as a foil for the irony, fragmentation with no hope of restoration, ugliness with no contrasting beauty to expose its ugliness. The result is a flatness of life-a dulling of the senses. In a word we have come to live in an anesthetic (non-sensing) society. Without an aesthetic of beauty, the world indeed becomes nonsensical. Beauty serves as the final critique of criticism. Beauty prevents the creation of a religion made out of negativity.

Unlike much of modern art and criticism, biblical faith is not merely a religion made out of negative criticism, or ironic numbness. The book of revelation is a book of praise. Between every major section of the book there is an anthem of praise ( 4:11; 5:9-14; 11:16-18; 15:3,4 18:20; 19:6-8). In the very act of singing the darkness is driven back. Theatrically, through song and visual representation a clearing is made in the midst of the congregation's suffering, where at least for the time of their celebration, all suffering and evil is driven from the world.

Personally, I am musically challenged. I could not even recognize the music to "Happy Birthday" once when it was played on the radio. But when I listen to Beethoven Ode to Joy, or Handel's Halleluiah Chorus, I am transported in the way that early Christians must have been transported into the heavenly realm when they came together to sing the hymns of Revelation.. More often I become transported into a world of redemption through the visual arts, where I loose all sense of time painting or going to a museum. I think this sense of transporting beauty must be also what the Psalmist must celebrate when he praises the beauty of entering into the sanctuary to worship. Kant described beauty as a pleasure that has no immediate practical end. It is a pleasure that opens on eternity. Such is the worship describe in the book of Revelation.

Secondly, Beauty itself serves as a critique of the rude, the ugly, and cruel. Throughout the book of Revelation we find this ironic twist whereby a lamb conquers a vile beasts and demons. We also find contrast between the rest offered by God to the saints, and threats and fiery destruction breathed by the Dragon and those who carry his identity. In the end, God, the lamb, and the saints enter into a paradise devoid of crying and sorrow, whereas the dragon, the beast, and their bullies are tormented in lake of fire.

Bear with me for just one more point. The Greek philosopher Plotinus defined the ugly as that which makes soul "shrink within itself." We call those things ugly that we turn away from in disgust or alienation. James Hillman, in an essay entitled "The Practice of Beauty," has suggested if the ugly are those things we turn away from, then perhaps this may suggest that what we turn toward may become beautiful. We often find those things beautiful upon which we focus attentive care. The whole history of art is comprised of taking the ordinary, the everyday, and even the cruel and ugly and by care and attentive empathy transforming such into objects of great beauty. Here we can recall images not only of martyred saints, crucifixes, heroic battle scenes, but Vincent Van Gogh painting of a pair of muddy peasant boots comes to mind. Van Gogh's careful attention to a worn pair of muddy boots transformed them into iconic images as rich in symbol of faith and perseverance as that of any painting of the saints or apostles.

Theology, likewise, functions best as an art-rather than a code of law, an empirical science, or philosophical proof. Discord, violence, and even the ugly are seldom overcome by direct assault. Liberal churches for the last twenty years have led the way in social reform, but their pews are largely empty. Conservative churches are packed, but the world is little served by their battles over truth. Adventism, with its central doctrines of Sabbath, Sanctuary, and Second Coming could offer the world an open space in an otherwise dark and gray landscape where glory and beauty might shine through. In the art of caring, rather than in preaching or arguing, the ugly can become beautiful, caring for the hurting can become a sacred sacrament, and providing sanctuary for the outcast can become an act of worship. With such attention, no man or woman is finally ugly. No loss is finally lasting. And no fracture is finally irreparable. That is the beauty of beauty. That is why we need more than a theology of truth. We need as well a theology of beauty.