Posts tagged beauty

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Not to fear beauty.

“A woodpecker with a cry as sharp as a dagger terrifies the lesser birds, while he is himself benevolent and harmless. 

The beautiful kingfisher in dazzling flight rattles like a bird of ill omen. 

So we fear beauty.”  Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

…will I behold what I cannot hold?

I have a GIVENNESS NOW not to fear beauty.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The beauty of the beast.

“It appears to us that of all the fairy tales none contains so vital a moral truth as the old story, existing in many forms, of Beauty and the Beast.

There is written, with all the authority of a human scripture, the eternal and essential truth that until we love a thing in all its ugliness we cannot make it beautiful.”  G.K. Chesterton, Twelve Types

…until we love a thing in all its ugliness.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the beauty of the beast.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The beauty of the boa.


“But there is another spiritual activity that develops and liberates its hidden powers of action: the perception of beauty.

I do not mean by this that we must expect our consciousness to respond to beauty as an effete and esoteric thing.  We ought to be alive enough to reality to see beauty all around us.  

Beauty is simply reality itself, perceived in a special way that gives it a resplendent value of its own.  

Everything that is, is beautiful insofar as it is real - though the associations which they may have acquired for men may not always make things beautiful to us.


Snakes are beautiful, but not to us.”  C.S. Lewis, No Man is An Island

… the resplendence of the real.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the beauty of the boa.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The fragility of beauty.


“The man who invented the plastic rose is dead, 
Behold his mark.
His undying flawless blossoms never close 
but guard his grave unbending through the dark.
He understood neither beauty or flowers,
Which catch our hearts in nets as soft as sky
And bind us with a thread of fragile hours;
Flowers are beautiful because they die.
Beauty without the perishable pulse
Is dry and sterile, an abandoned stage
With false forests.  But the results
Support this man’s invention: He knew his age;
A vision of our tearless time discloses
Artificial men sniffing plastic roses.”  Peter Meinke, Ladies’ Home Journal




They are beautiful because they die.






…don’t sniff plastic roses.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the fragility of beauty.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The demands of beauty.


“Genuine love…is demanding.  But its beauty lies precisely in the demands it makes.  Only those able to make demands on themselves in the name of love can then demand love from others.”  John Paul II, Message to Young People, Cuba, 1998

The Reverend John Young-Jung Lee, a minister of The United Church of Canada, probably never met Karol Wojtyla when he was pope of the Roman Catholic Church, yet he must have understood the “demands of beauty”, as he addressed his congregation on the Fourth Sunday of Easter in 2008 with these words:  

“Toward the end of Leonard Bernstein’s musical work entitled Mass, there is a scene in which the priest is richly dressed in magnificent vestments. 

He is lifted up by the crowd carrying a splendid glass chalice in his hands. Suddenly the human pyramid collapses and the priest comes tumbling down. His vestments are ripped off and the glass chalice falls to the ground, shattering into tiny pieces. 

As he walks slowly through the debris of his former glory, barefoot and wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, he hears children’s voices singing off stage, 

“Laude. Laude. Laude. Praise! Praise! Praise!”

His eyes, transformed by God’s grace, suddenly notice the broken chalice. 
He looks at it for a long, long time. 

And then, haltingly, he says, 
“I never realized that broken glass could shine so brightly.”


He concluded his sermon with this exclamation:

“What beauty! 

Can we see the light of Christ that shines in his brokenness? 
No matter what situation we are in, we have the beauty of the Creator. 

Whatever situation, condition we are in, we have God’s beauty in us. 

There is no exception. 

Life is a gift. When we find God’s beauty in us, life becomes a gift. 

Jesus invites all of us and says, 
“I came that you, all of you, may have life, and have it abundantly.” 

This is God’s blessing for all of us. Thanks be to God.”


The beauty of genuine love does lie precisely in its demands.

The demands of beauty,
…beauty given precisely as “gift” to be received precisely as “gift”.

The demands of self, in the name of love,
…what beauty!

There is no exception.

Thanks be to God.


I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the demands of beauty.