Beauty (Encountering It)
“Beauty touches on some combination of qualities, difficult to quantify, of pattern, design, form, shape, color, sound, light, integrity, and relationship. It appeals to us at multiple levels, speaking to our intellect and our logical capacities as well as our emotions and spirit…When we encounter beauty, we want to slow down and partake of its refreshment, to let it reorient us to our deepest longings and reconnect us to our deepest selves.” (Makoto Fujimura)
“Our encounters with beauty allow us to ‘see’ God’s at work in our lives once more, to be healed from the blind despair wrought upon us by our pain. Beauty does not deny our pain, in fact, I’d argue that part of beholding beauty is also telling the truth about our grief. But Beauty is a form of theodicy that allows us to look up from our grief and recognize where, how, and when God has been good (historically), is good (immanently in creation and incarnationally in the Spirit-driven action and creation of others), and will be good as we follow the forward motion of the Resurrection into a remade world. Beauty, as an argument against evil offers an encounter with Christ, whose Incarnate beauty restored the broken world and is at play even now in creation, in our experience of art, music, and story, and in the incarnational presence of others as we are encountered by Christ in our neighbor, ‘lovely in eyes, and lovely in limbs not his’.” (Sarah Clarkson)
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” (C.S. Lewis, Dr. Mary S. Ford)
“…how we relate to what we encounter also partly determines whether it is truly Beautiful…it is not by seeking to create a beautiful image but by falling wholly in love with Beauty that we ourselves become Beautiful. In this, what we do and make discloses both God’s and our own Beauty to the world. By forgetting the world and ourselves, we help to save the world–and we ourselves (or our art) become immortal…Christianity is an experience of saying yes to what is truly beautiful. The puritanical, legalistic, and fundamentalist strains of modern Christianity have left our culture traumatized by a Divinity that is not beautiful…Beauty has the ability to take us out of ourselves, out of the mundane reality of life, into a place beyond ourselves. In a culture that continually tries to make us believe there is nothing beyond the confines of this world, Beauty has a particular role in leading us to our true home of Heaven.” (Timothy G. Patitsas, Jonathan Jackson)
“I once read a book where a person was surrounded by beauty, but he called it scenery. The other person he was with had never heard of that word. He said it was a strange word that he didn’t like the sound of and asked what it meant. The first person explained that it meant beauty was something extra, something nice, but something we could live without. The second person was astonished and asked how someone could live without beauty and not succumb to despair. Sometimes I wonder if the epidemic increase in anxiety and depression, and I guess in some cases despair, is linked to our inability to see and experience beauty when we encounter it. How horrible it must be not to be able to see and experience God, who is Beauty and is everywhere present and fills all things.” (Sacramental Living Ministries)
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