Opera and Glory

Someone showed me one of the best videos I have ever seen on YouTube. Here's the link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=DelJrP3P7tA
Here's the synopsis:
The guy comes on stage and is a little nervous. The judges obviously are not expecting much. Then he nails the piece and blows the whole crowd away. British people are crying! That is saying a lot.

I think it is interesting that every single person in the audience recognized two things: beauty and excellence. Something can accidentally be beautiful. It can be beautifully constructed, yet not by the skill of excellence, but just by chance or beginner's luck. A two-year old can paint a beautiful picture, but it comes from accidentally not mixing all the colors together in an attempt to eat them. Real beauty is accentuated by excellence. When a disciplined, skillful painter combines all the colors and textures on a canvas to make a picture, a different sort of beauty emerges. Beauty becomes compounded and intensified by excellence. Like this opera piece, people can all recognize beauty. C.S. Lewis, and many ancient philosophers thought it was morally upright to look on beauty, and be moved by it.

I believe they were correct. If we are not moved by beauty, something is amiss morally inside of us. Now, if we are not crying "Encore Paul! Encore!", I do not think that is a sin. But if we are not moved deeply by beauty (natural, moral, and aesthetics/art) that deadness of heart betrays the numb condition of our moral affections. We are trivial, banal, conceited, and irreligious of God's glory displayed in creation and through mankind's natural talents for creativity. (Just on the flip side, there are many people who would cry at the Opera and still be as ruined morally as those who cannot recognize beauty, this is merely one diagnostic, not the only).

At the root of our hearts, we are not moved by the beauty of the Person of Christ. "He has no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him." We do not applaud for his excellence, we do not stand for his skill, we do not notice the innate beauty of the one who created all capacity for artistic beauty to be a small reflection of his self-possessed majesty. Why? Because our hearts are trivial, banal, conceited, and irreligious of God's glory in the person of Jesus Christ. Many religions notice the beauty of Jesus in his morality and treatment of people, but they do not worship Him. The sacrilege of that mindset is like walking up to the judges of "Britain's Got Talent" after Paul Potts performance and waving a drawing your two-year old made of your pet cat. It is out of place to appreciate the subjective beauty of your child's artwork (however genuinely precious to you), in a place where the objective beauty of music is being applauded. How wrong-headed for us to appreciate the subjective beauty of ourselves over the objective beauty of God's glory in this; the theatre of His existence.