What Difference Does it Make?

An encouragement from Mars

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

As Kalos Arts enters a new year of encouraging the pursuit of Beauty among the people of God, we must be renewed again in our vision and our passion. Being fallen mortals, we are as prone to discouragement and distraction as anyone else. Each ‘page’ turned on the calendar is another season of blessings forgotten, insights faded, passions cooled. But we know that the work of Beauty, creating it and beholding it, is an eternal work. It’s value does not sit suspended in the feckless brine of our will, but in the foundations of our being. The passage of time cannot erase that which we bear as God’s image. Whether we declare it boldly in winsome words, or we acknowledge it shamefully in hidden desires, the pursuit of the Beautiful is forever in our nature. So, we patch the leaky bucket of motivation and remind ourselves by the year, month, day, and even hour that the work of Beauty is a high calling and worth overcoming the entropy of distraction and sloth to cheer and aid it’s revealing in the work of the faithful.

With 2026 crystallizing for our Board, we conducted our strategic planning for the year in late February and made our plans. Being a new organization, we are ever at risk of losing our way amidst the many alternative pathways we might choose. Having evaluated our work last year in light of our mission and our current standing as an organization, we are choosing an emphasis on deepening our engagement with the communities where we have a presence.

This begins with our focus on offering the Messiah as a shared experience in PA and CO. This is a core mission for us and one that we will continue to mature and, in coming years, expand. When we absorbed the Chester County Christian Chorale, we made a commitment to the vision of its founder and to the regular sharing of the power of this art work. We know from those who join these events that the experience of being immersed in a live professional performance of Messiah is both aesthetically and spiritually enriching. Amateur and professional musicians alike share in re-embodying this music everytime and everywhere we present it. We continue to embrace the way this brings the Scriptures and Christ to bear into communities beyond the walls of the institutional church, and we relish our part in it.

With that as an operational foundation, we are excited to reach deeper into communities where we have relationships through a series of salons. If you are unfamiliar with this word, it is essentially an intimate setting for people to gather to encounter artworks of all kinds. With target attendance numbers ranging from 50 to 100 guests, these events break down the barriers between artists and receivers through a combination of theological inspiration, practical instruction in art, and living art works embodied up close. Often in homes, these salons offer Christian hosts an opportunity to practice the fading virture of hospitality and welcome believers into fellowship around Beauty. With a location and date, Kalos helps organize all the aspects of spreading the word, lining up artwork and artists (Musical, Verbal, Visual) to prepare an unforgettable evening. We depend upon the relationships in our extended network to find locations so we focus where our extended membership lives and works. Our hope is to present at least five salon events in 2026 in CO, MN, and PA. Some will be musical concerts with Piano and String Quartet, some will be visual art work focused, and some will include verbal arts (recited poetry). All will share a common grounding in our identity in Christ and move past simply being an art exhibit or concert by engaging upon this shared foundation. You will not need to understand or know a particular artist or art form in order to find these events compelling and impactful. Ultimately , the quest to encounter Beauty is one we all share, and it is this quest that anchors our salons. Subscribe and follow us on social media to keep up to date on our calendar of events.

A third dimension of our mission in 2026 will be the solicitation of regular verbal art submissions from our growing community. We believe deeply in the power and relevance of poetry and writing and our Verbal Arts mission will advance through regular guest articles on substack. We are excited to share our platform with writers who share our commitment to Biblical Anthropology historic faith. We recently posted a call for submissions. If you are interested in learning more about the process you can read it here:

With our emphasis on Messiah Sing-alongs, Salons, and Verbal arts we are suspending our conference plan for 2026. We are eager to expand these regional offerings next year, but we recognize that we have more to do to make our mission tangible and manifest in the communities we currently serve. Success in the three mission areas will help us build a greater foundation for sustainable growth and expanded geographical reach. If you have thoughts or ideas for how and where we might grow, please email us! We welcome your ideas, admonitions, and encourgament.

I will close by finally sharing the advice from Mars I received this week. I decided that I would lay aside a large part of my online reading during Lent. I wanted to unplug from the relentless merry-go-round of news and outrage so I could reacquaint myself with reading in paragraphs rather than fragments. I turned my attention to several books which I had previously read. When I completed those, I thought I would revisit the Chronicles of Narnia as it had been more than a decade since I read them to my young children. As I began, I found myself less interested in re-reading them at this time and realized that I should instead read Lewis’ Space Trilogy for the first time. If you are familiar with these books, then you will know that the first takes place on Mars. You don’t learn this until well into the story, but it is not really spoiling the tale by saying so here. It is from the mouth of one of the primary characters that the unexpected encouragement came, as it were, from Mars.

In Chapter Twelve, the protagonist, a human named Ransom, is on Mars in dialog with one of the indigenous beings, a hross. They are discussing the nature of mating among the strongly monogamous alien hrossa, and the much more wayward inclinations of humanity. It is in this dialog that Lewis’ characteristic profundity and spiritual depth shows up in the words of the hross, named Hyoi:

‘You mean,’ [Hyoi] said slowly, ‘that he might [mate] not only in one or two years of his life but again?’

‘Yes.’ [replied Ransom]

‘But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do not understand.’

‘But a dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?’

‘But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.’

‘But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?’

‘That is like saying “My food I must be content only to eat.”’

‘I do not understand.’

‘A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The seroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then—that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?’

‘Perhaps some of them do,’ said Ransom. ‘But even in a poem does a hross never long to hear one splendid line over again?

…

[Hyoi resumes,] ‘the poem is a good example. For the most splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you thought. You would kill it. I mean in a good poem.’

This short passage packs in a powerful idea, that the first direct encounter with something beautiful is only the beginning of its full effect. With so many opportunities for experiencing writing, music, and visual art in our time, each encounter can appear fleeting and without import. Lewis is challenging us to reconsider what these artworks, as encounters, really mean. Although your sensory encounter with a piece of music, visual, or verbal art may quickly end, its full effect has only started. Even the smallest encounter with Beauty continues to resonate in your soul. In some hidden way, that encounter will stay with you forever, rippling in the waters of your soul long after the first splash appeared.

The work of Beauty is not simply to create moments of transcendence which reverberate as encounters with God. These encounters form us. As we make and behold, we are setting waves in motion that shape all our subsequent experiences. All the more reason to cherish the voices of our brothers and sisters in Christ whose love and trajectory is ever closing toward the Eternal One in His Splendor. Let us resolve make 2026 a year of shaping and amplifying the lifetimes of formation that follow our experiences in Beauty together.