Beausage

Some of the blogs that I follow are design/marketing blogs. I find it fascinating how the pros work to stay cutting edge – blending form and function, story and sales to present products that, in theory, meet our needs and we want to snap up.

Diego Rodriquez’ design blog metacool, had a post about a new term called “beausage”

Here’s what Rodriquez had to say “It sounds French but it's not; instead it's a synthetic combination of the words beauty and usage, and describes the beauty that comes with using something.

Beausage is:
Roman amphitheater steps whose faces are worn away by the tread of thousands and thousands of shoes
Stone chips on the hood of a Ferrari 250 which has been run hard and put away wet
A bike seat whose adapted form reflects that of its owner's posterior
The look and feel of the cockpit of the old Mercedes pictured above (a jumble of replacement gauges and parts, obviously used a lot) -- that's 91 years of beausage!”

What a wonderful concept – there is a seasoning that comes with age for the tried and true. This is why I like our lovely old building at Covenant-First. This is why I read Puritan books and like 19th century theologians (and enjoy reading the early church documents of the 1st-4th centuries). Sure we have to have theology address the times – sure we have to speak to contemporary events and contemporary people. Of course we must use contemporary language and metaphor to speak.

But there is a beauty and richness that comes from not just dabbling in the things of the past, but allowing them to be our guide and teacher. The Holy Spirit has been operating in the church for these past 2000 years, and we have much to learn from our antecedents. As CS Lewis says in the Screwtape Letters, we are very prone to “chronological snobbery” in seeing truth only in the most modern things. Have Christians been wrong on things in the past? Of course, and we certainly don’t want to succumb to the errors of the past – however knowledge of the past brings to light the errors of our age.

So go and read old books – Spurgeon’s sermons, and Puritan writings, and Augustine’s Confessions – and learn.

Soli Deo Gloria
Russell