4/19/14

From Jim McGuiggan... BEAUTY & THE BEAST


BEAUTY & THE BEAST

Down the years many thoughtful people have observed that no one can free us from our ugliness unless he or she loves us even in our ugliness . Of course, they learned that from the all-wise Lover of Humanity.

The Disney screen adaptation of Madame de Villeneuve's story, The Beauty and The Beast, tells how a selfish and self-centered prince ruthlessly denied shelter to an old lady on a wintry night because her appearance repulsed him. When he discovers that the old woman is really a beautiful enchantress he apologizes; but his loveless apology is rejected and she turns him into a hideous beast. His outward appearance now reflects his inner ugliness [which says that the enchantress didn't make him ugly—she only exposed it].

The horrific appearance would disappear, the curse said, if he could learn to love and be loved by someone in his ugliness. Years pass and he falls into despair, losing all hope that anyone could ever love a beast like him.

When the Beast captures one of the villagers, the man's beautiful daughter, Belle, offers herself as a ransom to free her father. If she wants him free, the Beast insists, she must stay with him forever. Belle falters, asking him to step into the light where she can see him. He does and she recoils in horror at the sight of him but for love of her father she gives her word that she will stay with him.

Moved by Belle's love for her father the Beast tries to please her and by and by the desire to please her becomes something deeper. Though he's aware that his rage sometimes drives her from him, still, it enters his mind—the wish, the half of a broken hope—that she might be the one who can cure him. But he overhears her say in a fit of private temper that she wants nothing to do with him. Dismayed, he rumbles to himself, "I'm just fooling myself; she'll never see me as anything but a monster. It's hopeless."

Gaston, the handsome but vain, spiteful and cruel villager who wants Belle, gathers the villagers and works them into a fever that serves his own selfish agenda. "Kill the Beast!" He spreads his own inner darkness and the villagers go out to do just what he wants them to do.

But in the end, it isn't the villagers or the corrupt-at-heart Gaston that kills the Beast; it's Belle and the love she comes to have for the Beast. She doesn't deny his ugliness but she comes to see beyond it. ["Love covers over a multitude of things," a man of God once said.] In loving him she kills the inner beast and the visible beast vanishes along with it.

Her willingness to recognize lovely things about the Beast, to see possibilities where others, repulsed and fearful of his influence on their community, try to kill him—that's what saved the monster. And her commitment worked wonders for the Beast becomes a fine and honorable young prince. Love not only saved, it transformed!

Yes, yes, all very romantic, very appealing, very touching—but mere sentimentality, the Gastons of the world sneer. "Ugliness is ugliness and we need to save people from it!"

But God nor life allows us to believe that! The Bible is filled with the descriptions of our race and ugly isn't too strong a word for our state; beastly is not too harsh a description of our condition. That's true, but there's Someone who moves in the world seeking to save it not only from visible beastliness but from the handsome and starkly vain, spitefully jealous and vindictively sly Gastons who compare themselves too favorably with the beasts. There is one who even now moves about the earth transforming beasts into kings and queens in a royal priesthood. One who [so to speak] killed himself rather than rallying support throughout the community to: "Kill the beast!"

It's at this point, I'm convinced, that we are most unlike Christ. It isn't that we lack power—it's that we lack heart, or perhaps our tiny love pools have no depth and dry up, leaving in their place a little hole where the wind can stir nothing but the dust that remains. All that's there is the form of godliness without the heart, words that rattle out of mouths that speak everywhere to make a convert and when that's accomplished the convert is twice as heartless and dry and spiteful as the Gaston who made them [Matthew 23:15].

It didn't seem to enter Gaston's head that inside he might be as hideously ugly as the Beast was outside. The Beast deserved nothing but to be mangled and left a bloody wreck. It was all to save Belle, don't you know! It was holy work, saving work and it was to be done by gathering a feverish clan and making them feel as Gaston felt. And there's lies the special danger the Gastons are in! Though driven by envy and spite that's born out of that envy, they persuade themselves that their destructive malice is the will of One who dies for beasts. And because they believe this and fervently embrace that conviction they can't repent of it—how can you repent of doing the will of One who loves Beasts?

And that's what makes John 9:39-41 a spooky piece of scripture and Christ's love almost incredible. 

                                          Love knows no limit to its endurance,
                                          no end to its trust,
                                          no fading of its hope;
                                          it can outlast anything.
                                          It is, in fact, the one thing
                                          that still stands when all else has fallen.
                                           
                                                  1 Corinthians 13:7-8, J.B. Phillips
      
   [Taken by permission from my little book: WHERE THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS.
          Howard Publishing/Simon & Schuster, 1999]