the Beauty of Our Unfolding Life


“Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.” John O’Donohue

Beauty with a capital B is saving me. The quote above is taken from an interview John O’Donohue had with Krista Tippett ONBEING (I cannot recommend it more highly). When I read his book entitled Beauty, I was struck by the sensation that every time he used the word “Beauty”, I was reading God onto it. Like synonyms or  like concepts from diverse languages, I realized that Beauty is as good a definition of the undefineable and immeasureable God as anything else. God is Love, God is Mercy, God is Grace, God is Beauty. And on and on...
What really intrigues me, however, is that Beauty may be about “substantial becoming” and that gives me hope for us and for the world. Like God, Beauty simply is. It is we who dance with it, moving closer then away, gazing at it then glazed over. To engage in this dance of becoming we must pay attention to words like “unfolding, homecoming, grace, eloquence, fullness and emerging”. 
I appreciate being saved not by a moment of standing in awe of a wonder of the world (Though Petra was amazing and redemptive!) but by a process of going deeper with and into creation which is infected with Beauty as it is with divinity. 
May Beauty infect us!

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