Beauty – Sunday, January 19, 1997
How do we measure beauty? What is its essence, its substance, its reality? From the beginning of time, people have looked at landscapes and paintings and words and declared them “beautiful”; even while philosophers have asserted that beauty is something purely subjective, a quality that exists only in the eye of the beholder. And yet, year after year, people pack their belongings into cars and travel to parks and vistas, canyons and waterfalls, museums, and theaters to stare in wonder, to marvel together. At what? This thing we call beauty.
What is this quality we call beautiful? The Psalmist expressed a universal longing when he sang, “One thing have I desired…to behold the beauty of the Lord.”1 The truest earthly beauties speak of the marvelous creations of God – speak of God’s goodness and love. As Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote: “Glory be to God for dappled things…All things counter, original, spare, strange; he fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him”2 God “fathers-forth” things of beauty. From Brown specks on the back of a brook trout to the clouds swirling about the peaks of Kilimanjaro, all the world speaks of the glory of His creation.
Man, too, is capable of beauty. Indeed, our poets and painters share in a small way the greatest of God’s attributes – the ability to create, to mold and shape and breathe life into the clay of our existence.
We restore our spirits when we surround ourselves with beauty. Even the smallest and most unruly of children will cease their squabbling to stare in awe at a sunset or a mountain canyon. Even the wearies of travelers is refreshed by the sight of a nature at her loveliest. Even those lost in the depths of despair can find comfort and solace in the creations of God or man.
We may know just what beauty is. But our souls declare that beauty is always around us. And where we find beauty, we find the light of God.
1 Old Testament, Psalms 27:4
2 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty,” in X. J. Kennedy’s Literature; An introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), p. 585
________________________________________
January 19, 1997
Broadcast Number 3,518