Weekend Reflection
Beauty
"What may be most missing in this highly technological world of ours is beauty. We value efficiency instead. We want functionalism over art. We create trash. We bask in kitsch. But beauty, right proportion in all things, harmony in the universe of our lives, truth in appearances, eludes us. We paint over good wood. We prefer plastic flowers to wild flowers. We reproduce the Pieta in plastics. We forego the natural and the real for the gaudy and the pretentious. We are, as a people, awash in the banal. A loss of commitment to beauty may be the clearest sign we have that we have lost our way to God. Without beauty we miss the glory of the face of God in the here and now.
Beauty is the most provocative promise we have of the Beautiful. It lures us and calls us and leads us on. Souls thirst for beauty and thrive on it and by it nourish hope. It is Beauty that magnetizes the contemplative, and it is the duty of the contemplative to give beauty away so that the rest of the world may, in the midst of squalor, ugliness, and pain, remember that beauty is possible. "*
Today, may Beauty find its way into your heart.
And may you give away some of the Beauty you find to someone in need of their own.
Blessings to you for a glorious weekend ...
(*Excerpted without permission from Illuminated Life: Monastic Wisdom for Seekers of Light by Joan Chittister.) Sr. Joan is one of the women I most deeply admire, a contemplative feminist and activist who does not mince words about how we "should" be living today. This book, now a spiritual classic, provides an A-Z alphabet for the spiritual life. Whenever I need a bit of inspiration for my day, I go there. Within its pages I find her powerful, yet poignant reminders on the "virtues" of contemplative living: Awareness, Enlightenment, Faith, Humility, Kindness, Silence and more. The paragraphs I presented here are from the section on "Beauty." Visit her website: www.benetvision.org Read more...







