Five Things I Learned About Beauty
We have been on a journey chasing after and learning about beauty this last month. I hope your soul has been awakened to beauty in a profound way. I know mine has! Thank you for joining me along the journey!
God has been leading me on this journey of chasing beauty for the last two years in order to understand it, perceive it, and create it.
I thought it might serve you to let you in on what books have most deeply shaped my view of beauty the last couple years. May these five truths, quotes and books bless and encourage you as you continue to chase beauty in your own life! I hope they awaken your soul to beauty as they did mine.
“The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace...Yet beauty’s visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful.
- John O’Donohue in Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
Truth #1: Beauty invites us into an eternal embrace with the divine.
John O’Donohue’s work is a little taste of heaven. His work has expanded my soul to accommodate the divine presence in his writing and ponder deep eternal truths about beauty I had never considered before. You can tell his work emerges from a deep well of solitude, silence, and contemplation. He inspires me to go deeper, to slow down, and to ponder things more intentionally in the world. It’s a great read for prompting reflection and contemplation.
“Beauty points beyond itself, beyond survival to satisfaction. We think of it as the opposite to narrowness, scarcity, drudgery, and constraint. We think instead of what is expansive, generous, abundant, connected, and expressive. Beauty also connects us with the why of living.
“It points to discoveries waiting to be made about the creation. It points toward questions of right relationships, of ultimate meaning, and even of eternity. It points backward and outward and forward to our ultimate Source and Sustainer. When we encounter beauty, we want to slow down and partake of its refreshment, to let it reorient us to our deepest longings and reconnect us to our deepest selves.”
- Makoto Fujimura in Culture Care
Truth #2:
Beauty nourishes the soul.
Makoto Fujimura talks about the essential nature about beauty - how it is vital to human flourishing. His premise is that beauty not only nourishes the soul, but it is generative - it creates life. He also gives a clear vision for the role of prophetic artists in the world and how artists can partner with organizations to bring restoration in their communities. A great read to help us to see past paradigms of our culture which values pragmatism and materialism, to see the eternal values of the kingdom and how beauty and artists are essential for this work.
“Physical seeing is a doorway to spiritual seeing,” - Juliet Benner in Contemplative Vision
Truth #3:
How we see shapes what we see.
Benner goes on to say that when we prayerfully engage a piece of art, “we are invited to participate with the artist to see and experience God in new and fresh ways. When we do so, our senses are awakened and we become more attentive and fully alive.
As we prayerfully gaze on the painting, we enter the scene it depicts - into its time and place. When we do this, all time becomes present time, and we are led into the eternal presence - into the One who is ever present to us. Such openness allows us to be filled more completely with the Spirit and drawn into a deeper relationship with God.”
Benner’s work is a beautiful woven tapestry between aiding us in the work of spiritual seeing with practicing it through paintings in each chapter. She gives us a beautiful model on how to integrate “visio divina” into our lives as a spiritual practice. Her thoughts on contemplation and positioning ourselves to see spiritually through what we see physically is mind-blowing. It’s a great read for devotional practice to slow down and connect with God through art and Scripture.
“We need to recover the true form and original beauty that is integral to Christianity, we need an ideal form, a true standard, an accurate template, a faithful model to which we can look, to which we must conform.
For historic Christianity this has always been Jesus Christ upon the cross...the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which attains in retrospect an eternal glory and beauty through the resurrection, is the axis of Christianity around which everything else revolves. Thus the cruciform (the shape of a cross) is the eternal form that endows Christianity with its mysterious beauty.”
- Brian Zahnd in Beauty Will Save the World
Truth #4: The true standard of beauty is Christ on the cross.
I think I may have underlined at least half of Zahnd’s book as his thoughts on beauty and the theology of beauty are profound. This book more than any other has helped me to articulate my “why” behind my creative work. He also gives a helpful critique of American culture as a superpower, and how our standards for truth, beauty, and goodness have become distorted in the church. He opens our eyes to see that the true form of beauty we should seek to emulate as Christians is the subversive beauty of the Cross.
“Beauty welcomes us in the sense that it is invitational, vulnerable, and unhurried. It tells us we are wanted in its presence…beauty in art welcomes our broken parts as well as those with which we are more comfortable. Beauty leads us to worship by enabling us to live in the real world, the world of trauma and shame that is so pervasive, and then to see through it.”
- Curt Thompson, MD in The Soul of Desire
Truth #5: Beauty heals the soul.
What I love about Dr. Thompson’s work is the expression of beauty through the lens of relationships - relational attachment and connection with God and with others. He walks us through the ways that beauty awakens desire in us for who we long to become.
In fact, Dr. Thompson argues that beauty is who we are becoming. And - how beauty is essential in healing our souls to become that person.
Again, I hope these five truths, quotes and books bless and encourage you as chase beauty in your own life and as you awaken your soul to beauty all round you.
Recap of the five books on beauty:
John O’Donohue - Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
Makoto Fujimura - Culture Care
Juliet Benner – Contemplative Vision
Brian Zahnd – Beauty Will Save the World
Curt Thompson, MD – The Soul of Desire
