Tag: beauty

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Faith Life

On The Way To Beauty

Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. ~N.T. Wright

_chick

I’m a seeker of beauty but I struggle to describe it.

Beauty is a word, like love and peace and freedom, that leaves both a lingering scent of promise and the sour smell of past assumptions piled on top.

Beauty is subjective, and the word is misused, but tenacious nonetheless. However we define or deface it, beauty haunts us.

As an entering college student, I was given a test meant to determine which major and profession would fit my interests. I scored high in two areas: Nature and Beauty. In their characteristic, pragmatic way, the test designers pointed to taxidermy as a perfect job for me.

Taxidermy.

I’ve been struggling off-road ever since, distracted not by beauty but its opposite. There are so many reasons in this world to cry foul. I hack away at ugly, and lament its noxious presence, with its twisted intentions and poisonous attitudes sending runner roots into every human heart. Including mine.

I’m wondering now if it’s time to put the weed spray away and try planting beauty where I can.

In France, I met Ted Nuttall, a water-color portraitist of considerable talent and an easy demeanor. Ted paints ordinary people, caught by his camera in unguarded moments. The people in the portraits are beautiful, because beauty is what the painter sees.

I asked, “Do you grow to love these unsuspecting models as you labor with your paintbrush?”

“Opposite,” he replied. “I love people, so I paint them.”

Beauty As A Sign

In his book, Simply Christian, N. T. Wright describes the biblical message,

“a story of what the one creator God has been doing to rescue his beautiful world and to put it to rights. And the story…indicates that the present world really is a signpost to a larger beauty, a deeper truth…not just the beauty of God himself, but the beauty which, because God is the creator par excellence, he will create when the present world is rescued, healed, restored, and completed.”

I’m a pilgrim, a planter, and a teller of the story, and at every turn I choose the cause of beauty or the thief that would destroy it.

Are you planting beauty, or distracted by the ugly?

 Photograph by Melanie Hunt
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Faith

Sabbath Quiet: Beauty Ancient And New

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. ~St. Augustine.

Rock and Pool of Water

 Beauty So Ancient And So New

Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!

Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you, and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong, I, misshapen.

You were with me, but I was not with you.

They held me back far from you, those things which would have no being were they not in you.

You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;

you lavished your fragrance, I gasped, and now I pant for you;

I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst;

you touched me, and I burned for your peace.

St. Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo, North Africa.

A restless wanderer from the faith of his childhood, Augustine left no pleasure or philosophy unsampled, seeking to satisfy the deep hunger of his soul. He wrote in a prayer,

Very bitter were the frustrations I endured in chasing my desires, but all the greater was your kindness in being less and less prepared to let anything other than yourself grow sweet to me.

After a long, tumultuous struggle, the young man surrendered to Beauty, to the God who never let go of him, the only one who can truly satisfy. The quoted prayers, and Augustine’s story can be found in his book, The Confessions.

Photograph taken near Soda Springs, CA by MC Hunt

 

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Culture Faith Life

Beauty In Ugly Places

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. ~John Muir

sarah's painting

Sarah took up a brush one day and coaxed her fingers to paint the beauty her eyes had noticed. Look to the right to view the lovely result.

Another friend, in response to a difficult  move, has listed in her journal,  “Five Places To Find Beauty Here,” and walks through an unfamiliar landscape choosing to look when she longs to lament.

Fellow blogger Rebecca posted about cultivating hope as she would a tiny garden, learning to find the unexpected beauty where, at first glance, there seems to be none. You can read Rebecca’s blogpost here.

They are beauty’s advocates.

A life time ago I was a music teacher. Then, as now, in the face of brutal budget cuts and indifferent parents, teachers of  the Fine Arts clung together for support. We argued for a child’s need to wrestle with Beethoven, to stand with pride before a clay pot well-shaped, a haiku carefully crafted. Good music, art, and literature remind us we are not machines, nor animals bound to brute instinct and mere survival.

Beauty teaches us to look beyond the obvious, to train our hearts to hope.

Beauty In Ugly Places

Ultimately, the desire for beauty beneath ugly’s smear is a hunger for God, and for a world finally made right. (Revelation 21-22) We are not, the world is not yet what it was designed to be, but there are signs of what is coming. By tending our tiny gardens, by cultivating beautiful, grace-filled, justice-serving, art-making, people-embracing lives we become for others the hint of a new dawn.

But not if we only have eyes for the ugly.

How does your life point to beauty? Where has ugliness blinded you?

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Faith

Sabbath Quiet: Beauty’s Song

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from. ~C.S. Lewis

Beauty on the sea

O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great.

There go the ships and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.

These all look to you to give them their food in due season; when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand they are filled with good things.

When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.

When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.

May the glory of the LORD endure for ever; may the LORD rejoice in his works–who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke.

I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being. May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the LORD.

Psalm 104:24-35

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