Meet Hannah

Meet Hannah

To talk with Hannah Baker is to be inspired. To talk with Hannah about beauty is to be transformed. Hannah and her husband, Jared, recently returned from living for four-and-a-half years in Marseilles, France. While in Marseilles, Hannah partnered with a faith-based non-profit to help launch a French-based anti-trafficking association. Part of her work included investing in relationships with women who had been trafficked, as well as teaching English and literacy classes for adult learners at a local community center.

I am not sure what it is about Hannah that makes her so fascinating to talk to. It could be because of her diverse, international experience or perhaps because she’s so thoughtful about and invested in each person she meets or experience she has. Hannah has a way of transporting you into glimpsing the expansiveness of beauty and even the expansiveness of God. I invite you to keep reading. You’ll see what I mean.

the interview

Melissa: How do you define beauty?

Hannah: For me, a basic definition of beauty is: things that transport you; that takes you outside of yourself and is inspiring. That can be any number of things…things that make you stop and go “wow” and make you want to pause and absorb it. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with physicality or anything like that. It could be qualities, characteristics, nature, those kinds of things.

Melissa: Where do you see beauty in the world?

Hannah: That’s such a hard question to answer because [I see it] everywhere. I mean the world is just bursting with it. For sure nature. I am experiencing autumn for the first time in years and I’m just overwhelmed. I just want to be outside all of the time when it’s sunny and it’s just gorgeous, how nature speaks to us. I really experience beauty through creativity; everything from when you read a really good book or have beautifully crafted words or something like that. Often times, I’ll be like “I need to absorb that and just stop for a minute and experience that.” Of course, visual arts, that sort of thing.

But I think I am really drawn to the process of discovery and the creativity that comes with that. Some of my most beautiful moments in my life are when I am in a situation where I am discovering something or experiencing something new for the first time or going deeper into an experience and you have this moment where it’s like “oh my gosh, the sky’s the limit right now. Anything could happen. We are in the midst of a process and we can create or it can be created around us.” Then seeing how that develops and where it’s progressing to.  I think that’s a beautiful thing, the whole process of discovery.

So, that can be with people too. Like, learning about people in a deeper way. As you get to know people, different characteristics or qualities of who they are come out and it’s like “oh, that’s a cool discovery. That’s why this is important to you or that’s why you think this way about things.” And, to me, that’s a really beautiful process, I think because it enhances intimacy and connectedness with people. That’s true for people and environments too. That’s why I think nature speaks to me and a lot of other people. As you discover it and immerse yourself in it and learn it, you are developing intimacy with the landscape. But that’s where I see beauty, ultimately in that connection and that intimacy.

If we’re going to talk about people beauty, you have people who are very attractive physically. Physically beautiful. But if they don’t have the character to back up that beauty, you could say, it’s not beautiful. Who among us really want to spend our time with someone who looks physically beautiful but is mean or unkind or doesn’t care about other people? What I think is such a beautiful thing is quality of character and especially people who seem to know who they are. People who have an inner sense of “this is who I am” and who kind of exude, I don’t want to say self-confidence, but who are in tune with themselves, who are aware of “these are my flaws, this is a weakness in me, I’m not comfortable with it, you shouldn’t be comfortable with it either. These are my strengths. This is what I do really well and I can offer this as a gift to the world.” And people who know that about themselves and who are comfortable with that about themselves, I think are some of those beautiful people because you just want to be by them. They are attractive. They draw you in and it makes you want to become like that.

Something that I often think about is this church we were attending in California. They had a ministry to adults with Downs Syndrome and every single Sunday, these women would take the front row in the service and they’d be so incredibly engaged. People weren’t up dancing or anything like that, but they were. Because they didn’t care. They weren’t self-conscious and they wanted to worship God. They were fully living into what they felt their way of being in the world is. They were comfortable with themselves, at peace with themselves, and comfortable with however anybody in that congregation was going to view them. It didn’t matter because they knew who they were. I remember one Sunday watching them get up there and dance and longing, “I want to do that. Right now, of everybody in this service, everybody who has it together, I want to be exactly like those people dancing on that stage.” They were just so at ease with themselves and that is such a beautiful, attractive quality.

I think that’s another aspect of beauty actually. There’s an element of longing in beauty. If you see something that’s beautiful or characteristics of people or nature, you also kind of want it. You gravitate toward it. Maybe some of us would want to possess it. I don’t know. I think that’s what collectors do, right? But just this idea that there’s something beyond me that is really attractive to me and I want to be a part of that. I think that’s where longing comes into our interactions with beauty.

Melissa: I love that.

Can you talk about an experience you’ve had where you’ve experienced brokenness, either currently or in the past.

Hannah: There’s some real stuff that’s going on in life right now, but I think at the heart of that is…in the midst of difficulties, whatever they may be, if I have support and a strong connection with people, it’s okay. It doesn’t make it okay, but somehow it’s a sense of God doesn’t fix it for you, but God is with you in it. And I think there are people around us that can be in that role with us. So, when I am talking about brokenness, the way I experience that most deeply is when I don’t have that connection with people in the hard times.

At a very young age, I grew up moving a lot. Many more times than I even know I’ve consciously had to think, “I don’t know where I’m going to live next week.” Just living with a lot of ambiguity in life. I don’t want to say rootlessness, because I still have had connection but, as far as exactly where I lay my head at night, that has often been up in the air. I think that’s part of my life journey, that’s the life I have, the life I’ve been given, and also the life I’ve chosen as I’ve gotten older. Just being in a place where it’s okay to not know and that has been a source of a lot of pain and brokenness over my life. Looking around and seeing that so many people seem to have it together and recognizing it’s not that I don’t have it together, it’s just that my togetherness looks different.

I have found that God has given me a capacity and peace to be okay with ambiguity in life. So, that’s an experience of brokenness I have had pretty consistently throughout my life. However, when people are able to meet me in that, I feel like I am thriving in that even. Like, “I love my life, I love that it doesn’t fit the norm.” Going back to the idea that beauty is creativity, this is a creative process, my life is. I am crafting a story here. I don’t where it’s going to end but this is the journey and it’s really beautiful.

Melissa: What lies about beauty have you experienced?

Hannah:  Certainly you have the surface-level lies about beauty. As a woman in America, it’s very hard not to absorb what the media or the culture tells you: this is what beauty looks like. So, the struggles with weight or skin tone or do I have gray hairs? But on a deeper level, being told that there is only one way of being beautiful. I just keep coming back to creativity. One of the greatest gifts God has imbued into humanity is our ability to self-decorate. And, so, for someone to say of another person, “your way of being beautiful in the world isn’t legitimate,” is horrible arrogance. And way too often we are hearing that message. That you don’t work, that your beauty doesn’t work. But that’s our divine right. To self-beautify, however we feel comfortable as creatures in the world. As created in the divine image, I think we have that right to be creative with ourselves in our bodies.

I think a lie we often hear is “you don’t fit what I define as beautiful.” But that’s arbitrary. I wish we could all be free from feeling like we have to conform. Because beauty in essence, the creativity of it, is that it’s non-conformist, but that’s exactly the opposite message that we are told.

Melissa: Have you had any experiences that have transformed your ideas about beauty?

Hannah: Having lived around the world and traveled, really quickly you see that what one society’s standard of beauty is, is not another’s standard of beauty. I think that’s been such a gift, to be better able to recognize the lie that there is only one type of beauty, because I have seen that that’s not true. It’s manifestly not true around the world. People are so diverse in how they represent and present themselves to the world. And their opinions of what is beautiful is so varied that how can we even say that there’s only way of being beautiful? So, I think that’s really transformed it. I’ve just been so moved by different cultures’ ways of being beautiful. They’ve really touched me and struck me as like “wow, we’d be so poor if we didn’t have this in the world.” And I think one of the tragedies is that we aren’t able to experience all the cultures to see the great diversity that we have in this world.

Any definition we have for beauty is probably too narrow. Beauty is whatever transports the human spirit and that’s an infinite number of things. And we could all give each other a gift by allowing each other to be transported by the things that transport us and not putting our standards or ideas on other people. Because what moves me may not move you and that’s why we have such diversity in art.

Melissa: I’m wondering if it’s because somehow the vastness of beauty corresponds to the vastness of God?

Hannah: Yeah, well for sure even if we can’t name it, it just shows that it’s so far beyond what we can handle or what we can possibly understand as limited people. But, yeah, it’s pretty cool if you think about it, that all of these things that draw us, are facets of our creator. It kind of makes you just be in awe of the creator. You know? And the fact that God chose intimacy with us because God finds that to be a beautiful thing, to be in relationship with us. I mean it’s no wonder we find beauty there too, because that reflects God’s interaction with us.

Photo credit: Rebecca Wynia