I’ve been thinking today
about how human beauty is not skin deep: a face with pleasing features, or a
touched-up image on a screen or magazine cover. Various beautiful people in my life - those with
flyaway gray hair, broken teeth, and sallow skin, for example - might be
disqualified by such standards.
True beauty isn’t determined
by societal ideals. Rather, it is more like a transcendent radiance (I think of
Mother Teresa’s persona) that seeps to the surface, an artesian spring flowing from
some deeper cavern below. But what
defines and enables beauty in the first place?
Suffering has a way of
chiseling beauty from the roughness of human experience. Helen Kubler-Ross says
it this way: “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known
defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way
out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an
understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep
loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
That is very true - very
true - and yet isn’t the complete
answer, because beauty doesn’t always triumph.
Quotes from early Church
fathers explain that when the glory of God shines in and through His children,
it creates uniquely personal beauty in each – beauty beyond appearance or
attributes. While we sometimes recognize this in part, and speak of beauty
reflecting outwardly from the human heart, that doesn’t explain what actually
happens.
That’s because it is a mystery. And yet God’s mystery is also His design to
unite His children (and all things in heaven and on earth) to Himself through
His Son. Which is why we celebrate
Christmas, and even, though we may not be consciously aware of it, why we
surround ourselves with beautiful things at Christmas-time.
I have a beautiful friend
who grew up in Germany during and after World War II. Several years ago I helped her write memoirs
for posterity. Her early years provided reason to become fearful and self-protective,
perhaps also bitter and vindictive. But
the Spirit has worked forgiveness and peace in her soul, enabling a holy
perspective and distinctive beauty to define her life.
Another friend’s stifling holistic pain (think soul destruction) has been healed and redeemed by the power of
divine love, and she has become a beautifully glowing internationally acclaimed musician, vocalist, and public speaker. Here's her web site (check out the link to her music, including her new
Christmas album, “Christmas…Not the Way it Seems”): http://www.jeanwatson.com.
Dostoevsky once said,
“Beauty will save the world.” By encountering the mysterious Christ and
becoming “partakers of divine nature,” we enter into His Beauty and reconnect
with the Father who made us for Himself. I like the way St. Iranaeus (circa
125-202) says it: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
Nature’s obvious beauty - the
striking magnetism of mountains, sunsets, lakes, wildflowers, snowflakes -
reflects God’s glory. Yet those things
are not the object of our worship, but a reflection of the One who is.
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