Beauty
Beauty is the hospitality of God.
“As God knows what we really love, he uses those loves to waken us!” - Leighton Ford
“When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.”
The hospitality of beauty is one thing that takes us beyond.
It takes us into our unsure and unknown spaces.
Beauty causes us to reach and stretch and wrestle and long.
Ron Rolheiser writes that we wake up in the world with a “holy longing”.
“We sense we are incomplete … cut off, a little piece of something that was part of a whole ...we experience ourselves as white or yolk, separated from our other half.”
That fuels our restlessness, which is at its core a longing for God who made us for himself.
The rest and peace that we are called to live in is not static like the rest of the dead.
It is peace “like a river” - constant, yet flowing.
Beauty plays a role in both the rest and flow.
Beauty helps us to live in the now and the not yet.
Beauty is vital - not optional, for our souls!
We are not just physical beings - but we are physical.
We are not only spiritual beings - but we are spiritual.
God has created us a wonderful whole and knows the language our wholeness speaks. It’s the language of beauty. Perhaps we are born with this capacity and over the course of time and growing we lose our ability to speak it.
If we allow it, God will teach us to speak this language of our soul again.
“I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.” -Anne Lamott
Beauty is also a Mystery. We don’t know the future and cannot see our need.
Beauty helps us to have perspective on who we actually are and the space we inhabit in this small universe. It slows us down to teach us.
Beauty pulls us onward when the temptation is to only do and be what we know beauty says “There is more!”
Beauty is the thing that calls us forward and is both the protection for us as we walk toward what we do not know, and also that thing we are walking toward!
God is beauty.
God does beauty.
Beauty is not to be understood or controlled.
Beauty is discovered, stumbled over, surprised by, and fallen into.
It is synonymous with God’s presence.
God is always present and calls us beautiful.
We only really see that we too, are beautiful when waking up to God’s presence.
For it is in the presence of the God of beauty our own beauty shines.
God is the atmosphere where our essence clarifies, where all falsity and pretension vanish.
Here, we are utterly enfolded.
No words needed; no actions required;
For everything is here.
John O’Donohue
Ways to open your life to beauty:
Sabbath-keeping is a door opener to understand beauty.
Silence and Solitude are some other way-makers for opening us to beauty. Being in the space where you have intentionally stopped noise and are alone but not lonely.
Turn to the beauty that comes through music.
Going into the outdoors. Go out as often as you can; in doing so you will experience healing beauty.
Through the gift of children. These little people are small but carry such large perspective and such a wide-lens that opens us up again - over and over again to imagination, possibility, to hope and a future. Children bring beauty to the soul.
Sitting around a table with friends. This is a place of beauty and healing.
Rachel Carsen says in her book Silent Spring
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. “
May you have open eyes and hearts, and a soul that fills with longing as you listen to the call of beauty in your life.