OK, I admit it; I read a bit in the bathroom. Right now, the
book is merely title Beauty by John O’Donohue. At my continuing education
program this year, I took a class on the arts and theology. So, lately, I have
been playing around with the notion of beauty in life. I appreciate getting
this space as it allows me to try to work through some points at the outer edge
of my ability to even put my finger on something I take for granted constantly.
Beauty seems to apply to a pleasing pattern of elements that create a sense of
harmony and completeness. In particular, when can we even use the word in a
world where preferences get bandied about like facts? Do we have areas in life
where we can agree on the beautiful, or are we consigned to only individual
perceptions of beauty? After all, we no longer can agree on the factual, as
major public figures continue to deny the best evidence we can muster if it
disagrees with their previous position.
With the media age, we see pictures of beautiful people all
of the time. I do not get inured to it, but repetition can make even the
breathtaking mundane, I suppose. At the same time, we make qualifications, a
natural beauty, an enhanced beauty, a face alone or a sculpted body. For models
the ideal body type seems to approach a painful thinness and gorgeous women are
consigned to the “plus-sized’ model category. the words itself gets thrown
around enough that women seem to doubt it when it is applied to them.
Someone asked me recently what I thought about the Alton area. My first
response is tha the grinding poverty depresses me. My second response is that I
enjoy being able to take in the bluffs upriver and riding my bike along its
levee. To clear my head at work, I will walk along the river and take in it
changing contours. (In fact, I am drawn to it when I finish this piece and
polish my sermon a bit). What draws me
to it? I am always taken by h its sheer width to Missouri . At the same time, its variety catches
my eye: its eddies, its surface changes, its shifting colors, even the trees
that floated and collected during the floods.
As I write this, we are getting ready to read the story of
the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. I would
say that the Samaritan did a beautiful thing. We see the ugliness of violence
day after day. Here our eyes are assaulted by the rusting hulks of factories
and the decay of once fine public building within shouting distance from the
City Hall. The act of the Samaritan is both good and beautiful. it makes actual
an aspiration toward compassion. to me, it is a beautiful thing to do as its
sequence fits a pattern that makes the compassion whole. The parts of the act
fit together toward its enacted good. Just this week, our eldest daughter’s
friends acted beautifully in helping her move.
At a spiritual level, I suppose that beauty is an element of
the holy itself. I Our youngest turns 21 next Saturday. I recall that she was
born in the late afternoon. so the sun struck her body as it emerged from the
womb. To be present in the face of a wrinkly, red, squalling infant is a
beautiful moment. It was a holy moment, as was the first time I got to hear the
whoosh, whoosh of her heartbeat on the early ultrasound device that heralded
the presence of a new life forming. This is an appropriate time to close. What
are beautiful moments, acts, and sights in your life right now?
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