Ugliness Redeemed
Brokenness Can Lead to Beauty
By Jill Penrod
As a Christian writer, I get occasional complaints from Christian readers about my fiction. A few readers get upset when the theology isn’t exactly what they believe. Some think there’s too much spirituality. Some think there’s not enough. But the complaint I hear the most is that my characters sin. They fail. They’re not perfect, and some readers don’t want to see sin portrayed in their stories.
For example, a year ago I wrote a Young Adult (YA) book about a boy who spray-painted walls in an abandoned warehouse district. I called him a street artist, because by the end of the book that’s what he was—a young man paid to spray paint giant murals on buildings at the request of the owners of said buildings.
Before the book was released, I received an irate email informing me that I was wrong to use the term street artist for a criminal. This reader had had her property damaged by graffiti, and the idea that I would entertain a kind word for such a person galled. In her opinion, I was glorifying sin, and she was proudly leaving my email list and no longer buying my books.
I’m glad she never read the book, because the truth is God treated young Noah with a whole lot of mercy, healing him instead of punishing him, blessing his hands even after he used them to cause harm. Noah never went to jail. Justice didn’t really happen. Instead, he was redeemed, forgiven, and loved. That reader would have been very disappointed in the clemency shown to Noah the vandal.
Brokenness as the Starting Point
We say that Christian art has to do with beauty, and that’s true. But it also has to deal with the ugliness of this world in which we live. Beauty is in redemption, in a broken world being put back together. Broken people, broken systems, a broken planet all get to be restored. And to tell that story, the story that matters, sometimes art has to portray the ugly. The dark. The broken. The starting point.
No, not every image or song or book includes ugliness, but the best creations are made when the creators understand that broken starting point, even if it’s not portrayed. To speak of beauty without dealing with the ugly isn’t honest. Art that starts elsewhere isn’t real or healing; it simply pushes reality under the rug.
I get myself in trouble all the time for leaving messes on my rug.
Jesus dealt with ugliness and beauty right there on the rug. He touched lepers and unclean women. Worse, he did it in front of crowds. The whole throng had to stop and witness him interacting with the wrong people, the prostitutes and the lepers, right there where everyone could see.
He didn’t hide them away or ask them to come under cover of darkness. He didn’t think the mercy he showed undermined the truth of holiness, because later he paid for those people, just like he paid for those we choose to show mercy to.
He looked ugliness in the face right there in the light, healed souls and bodies, made them beautiful, and set them free. Time and time again.
Embrace the Ugly
Sometimes I drag my readers into the darkness to watch me rescue a broken soul or remedy a broken way of thinking about the world or myself or God. Some of my readers don’t like that. I know other artists face the same dilemma. Sometimes we show only the light, but sometimes the tale has to begin in the dark.
We’ve all seen photos of ruined urban areas, dark and bleak, with a single flower growing from a crack in a floor or a single beam of light setting a tiny spot ablaze with beauty. That’s Christian art. That’s the gospel, life in the dead space and light in the dark.
True art embraces the ugly. It exposes it and redeems it. If it doesn’t, it’s propaganda. I prefer art. And as Jesus touched the ugly visages of dead eyes and fractured ears and lame legs and created beauty there, I’m pretty sure he was all about redemption, not propaganda.
At the end of the book about my young vandal, Noah paints a mural on the side of a big, steel warehouse church, and I’m going to let him and Maddie, his best friend, finish this for me. I had all kinds of wise words about art and beauty and ugliness, but I think we’ll let my redeemed vandal speak, the one who was mercifully forgiven and given something amazing to do by his Father:
I’d painted a giant, empty cross on the building. I realized the resurrection was probably the most important event in the Bible, but what had touched me, what had finally reached my cold heart, was the selflessness of the sacrifice. The mural had an empty tomb on one side, so I wasn’t ignoring that part completely, but the focus was a cross in an overgrown field. It was leaning, rotting, nothing fancy. It still carried blood stains and nail marks. A torn sign was posted on the top, too faded to read.
Around it, though, I’d drawn hints of a battle. I’d placed the image on a gradient from darkness to dawn, dawn happening right above the empty tomb. In the darkest corner I’d put shadows, almost ghosts, my idea of what angry, evil, demonic forces might look like. Then as it got brighter, those shadows grew paler and brighter, stylized angels who were mostly wings of light. The demons and angels encircled the whole scene, with the eye falling ultimately to the empty tomb and the sunrise over it. A few green plants grew around the tomb, the only real signs of life and growth in the entire image.
Later Maddie, Noah’s best friend, weighs in:
The big mural of the cross, while simple, was also one of the most emotional paintings I’d ever seen. Darkness and light, battle and hope, defeat and victory, all on one giant wall. The pastor said people showed up at the doors just to see how that mural related to faith, and he admitted it was hard to live up to the promise of that mural.
Yes, that promise of the deeper realities, the promise of what’s true but still not clear—our imaginations give that promise form and bridge gaps between seen and unseen, here and not yet. And to do it well, we have to see the comparison, the road from the ugly to the beauty.
(Quote from Prompting Noah, 2024)
Jill Penrod is a Christian writer—mostly fiction—in several genres, including romance, fantasy, and YA. She also copy edits, working with new writers to help them see their first books in print. She’s written her whole life, stapling pages together to create storybooks as soon as she learned to write. Now she has over sixty books at major retailers. Find Jill’s work –including four free full-length novels—at JillPenrod.com.
Photo by Silvestri Matteo, courtesy of Unsplash.