The Glorious Welcome of Beauty

One of my favorite mantras is: remember to be in this world, not of this world. I have been praying with this a lot lately. As the crises and anxieties and germs (actually and metaphorically) swirl around us, it is hard not to engage and get caught up in the madness. Yes, I live in this world and am thus exposed; and yes, I need not be of this world and may live contemplatively as I try to locate myself and my home in God.
What does that have to do with Beauty you might ask? Well, when I am able to reside in that gap between the world as given and the world as promised, I am most assured and blessed when Beauty appears and reminds me It never left.
As we traverse the gap between awakening and surrender (see yesterday’s post), between the visible and invisible, between day and night, Beauty/God holds us. Our awareness might vary, ebb and flow, but Beauty is changeless. This is a philosophical and a theological postulate. Yet it seems to me that it is not only a mysterious one but one we test in our responses to life.  
What if we were to live our lives as though permeated by an eternal Beauty not of this world already and yet glimpsed in this world? This construction of Beauty illuminates our way Home and waits for us and greets us with a glorious welcome. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Say My Name

Image
  Respect the dignity of every human being. It begins with their name. It honors who they are. It speaks their name lovingly. Say My Name by Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi ( A Torres Strait Islander and Tongan storyletter. They descend from the Zagareb and Dauareb tribes. ) My name was my name before I walked among the living before I could breathe before I had lungs to fill before my great grandmother passed and everyone was left to grieve My name was birthed from a dream A whisper from gods to a king A shout into the stars that produced another that shone as bright They held me without being burnt, humming lullabies in pidgin My name was passed down from my ancestors They acknowledged my roots grew in two places So, they ripped my name from the ocean and mixed it into the bloodlines of my totems My name has survived the destruction of worlds and the genocidal rebirthing of so-called ones It’s escaped the overwhelmed jaw of the death bringer Many a time It has survived the conflicts that r...
Read more

Tragic Optimism

Image
Tragic Optimism...there it is, another one of those paradoxical couplings! But it speaks to me somehow, resonates really, as our time of disorientation and disillusion continues in lengths for which we have no comparison. Except perhaps in history as in slavery or holocaust or the Bible as in the Exodus! Tragic optimism is a term coined by Victor Frankl which came to life after 9/11 when research on resilience found a strange and strong meaning in these words, a synergism in their inherent tension. While telling similar stories and confessing similar emotions that which separated the resilient from the not so resilient was a capacity to make tragically optimistic meaning of the horrific event, to acknowledge pain and tragedy while holding hope, the thing which does not disappoint, the thing with feathers! Tragic optimism then seems to be much like the Christian virtue which Jesus modeled of holding sorrow and love gently together. It is a healthier psychological framework of...
Read more

What is in the Waiting?

Image
“ I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope” Psalm 130:5 What is waiting, besides you and me, in this time of isolation? Much has been written about what we will do when we are sprung! Haircuts, restaurant visits, gyms, hugs, jobs, in church worship, book group actual gatherings, ...just to name a few of the things for which we are waiting. But what is waiting for our attention differently; what have we learned? What is in the waiting? Is there a spirituality of waiting?   Waiting on God is a favorite topic for many mystics. It might be wondrous and contemplative. But during this time of Covid 19 waiting is more often than not connected to anxiety and fear. We wait for results, we wait for financial news, we wait for cures.   Much has been collapsed into the phrase, “I cannot wait to get back to normal!” To which I respond: Wait! What!? When confronted with this kind of waiting or any translation of waiting which aligns it with “norm...
Read more