The sheer beauty of creation – an antidote to cynicism

“It all seems to happen at once,” someone said to me at church this morning, reflecting on the last couple of months in her family.

Watching the news, it’s hard not to feel the same way. The first two months of President Trump’s office in the White House have turned the news cycle into even more of a roller-coaster than expected. Those pictures of the Ukrainian Ambassador to the US watching with her head in her hands as Trump and Vance laid into Zelenskyy in the last week of February summed up how most of us were feeling. It’s genuinely impossible to predict what will have happened by the time you read this.

Amid newspaper columns despairing of the tearing up of the old world order – and the ongoing soundtrack of the failings of the NHS, the woes of the economy, and the cost of HS2 – a different headline caught my eye yesterday: “Scaffolders and servicemen thank me for crying on TV,” writes Keith Brymer Jones of The Great Pottery Throwdown in the I newspaper. “Ah now,” I said to myself. “That’s the kind of piece I can bear to read.”

The Great Pottery Throwdown fills the January to March slot in my household’s annual rotation of competition-format-TV-shows-with-the-word-“great”-in-the-title. In many ways, it’s the same as all the others – a dozen or so hopeful contestants on a journey and a host doing silly time calls. What makes this one different is that it has a judge who wells up almost every episode. The weight of the pot in his hands, the detail of the mark-making, the character expressed in the pot’s form, the evident progress made by the contestant – all of it is liable to move Keith to tears.

“I suppose it’s process I cry over really,” he writes. “The process of creating something beautiful, especially if said maker is proud of what they have done.” And the thing is, viewers love it. (“I have walked past building site and blokes, usually scaffolders, shout out ‘Oi, you’re the bloke off the telly that cries’, ‘I love that show’, ‘Well done, mate, I love it when you cry, big man’.”)

We live in a deeply cynical age. Cynicism – that inherent posture of distrust, an assumption of self-interest in others – is the tone of so much of what we watch and read. It’s the undercurrent of many of our conversations; even the tone of our work meetings. I look two paragraphs up and realise I can’t even write an Evangelicals Now column without an edge of cynicism creeping in. Maybe such distrust is justified. And yet in that pottery workshop, as Keith cries for the umpteenth time at the sheer beauty of a created thing, we glimpse something different.

There’s a concept in theology called the transcendental properties of being: namely, unity, truth, beauty and goodness. The idea is that you can find truth, beauty and goodness in any thing that is – simply because it is. They’re “features of any and every particular thing precisely insofar as it exists”, according to G.K. Chesterton. And that’s because God Himself – the ultimate being – is the source of every created thing.

In other words, there’s an inherent beauty to the things around us – however marred by sin they may be. As Keith weeps with joy at the sight of a well-formed pot, he reveals that he believes as much. And as I close the news website, look up from my phone and stare out of the window – basking in the sunlight as winter gives way to spring – it becomes a little easier for me to believe too. The world is still beautiful. God is still beautiful. It will ever be thus.