Ravings on Beauty

In one of the groups I attend the talk came around to beauty. Now that is a topic we can get heated discussions about with various people representing various age groups, each being extremely loud and assertive in raving that their idea of beauty is the one and only.
It brings to mind something that happened in the days of Moses who went up on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments. Moses was gone for an exceedingly long time, something like possibly two weeks. and the Hebrew people were left to their own devices and became restless. Two weeks was an awfully long time to be without a leader, spiritual or otherwise, and they decided to build a thing of beauty that they figured would be a joy forever. When the golden calf was finished, this thing of beauty was inaugurated with much hoopla and given over to the masses for their use in addressing their God named Jahweh.
In the middle of all the great dancing and prancing and caterwauling and what else could pass for duly worshipping God, Moses appears with in his hands the rules of living Moses received from God Himself. Moses sees what is going on and is mightily disturbed. He acts just like your parents acted when they had been absent from home for a week and left the house in the hands of their son to safeguard and sonny-boy on Friday night invited his entire group of friends to come over and have fun with the stash of wine bottles and stronger stuff. These "friends" did not let this invite get stale and when Mom and Dad came home in the middle of the night.......well, it could have been forwarded to Shakespeare who would have fashioned it into a great sonnet.
The point is that the Hebrew people considered the calf a thing of great beauty that was supposed to be used in their worship of God and Moses looked at the same golden calf and considered it a piece of blasphemy. In our day and time we have sopmething similar going on, and for our example let's take music because I know more about music than about painting or writing poetry.
Church music was created 'way back to help in the deeper worship of God. It did so for those people back then (apparently because there came so much of it ad nauseum) so, thankfully, a new type and style of music for the church was introduced and brought to the glory of God through the works of Bach and a few others. It was good and glorious for a while until people had had enough of it and the music of the streets in the big cities came to claim ownership to a slice, resulting in a convenient weakening of the text and an accompanying weakening in the worship experience of the populations.
I belong to the older school. To me the praise music of Bach, Handel et al is glorious and I think leads me straight to the throne of God. Also the music of some 20th century composers such as Ralph Vaughn Williams (who started out as a church organist and found the traditional English church music to be a bore of the first order) can be for me an entrance to the throne of God.
But as I said I belong to the older school. I listen to the praise songs from the young generation and find them to be musically poor to the extreme, and their texts border on the nonsensical, a lot of syllables saying and meaning nothing. But I am told the young think differently of it.
Stay tuned. I may have opened a can of worms that might lead to a very worthwhile interchange of opinions and ideas. You are invited.