Beauty Consecrates



John O’Donohue’s book entitled Beauty: An Invisible Embrace begins as follows: “We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender.” Not all awakenings are wonderful. However, throughout the book even as our lives are so framed, Beauty surrounds, infiltrates, whispers and simply is and so is God. I read this book again and again and replace Beauty with God. 
I know I have written about this before and the thing is Beauty keeps calling me, beckoning me, saving me. And so I want to spend a few days as I did with redemption on Beauty and how it shapes or frames our lives. Whatever the awakening, to reality to mystery, we move toward a surrender in which there is a freedom because we have been formed by the awakening instead of our attempt to capture it. Beauty consecrates mysteriously...

Let’s begin with Shelley:
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hue and harmonies of evening, -
Like clouds in starlight widely spread, -
Like memory of music fled,-
Like aught that for its grace ma be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, - where are thou gone? 

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