Scrupulology: Beauty

4/16/13

Beauty

Call a fuchsia cashmere sweater luxurious. Call a pair of chandelier earrings exquisite. Call particularly well-applied eye make-up alluring. Call cascading, waist-length hair lustrous. Call a light and toned frame petite. Call a straight, pearlescent smile inviting. Call slender, well-manicured fingers delicate.

But do not call them beautiful.

It is time to reclaim this word. It is time to make it sacred again. It is time to restore its deep meaning. It is time to re-capitalize it. She must be personified again: Beauty. She dwells within each one of us. But her Phantom runs rampant through the beauty isles of every Walgreens and Sephora we enter. Her Façade looms over us from every billboard. Do not be fooled by her.

True Beauty is like the moon. At times, she cannot be seen. She dwells within a secret. She reveals herself slowly. Her radiance bathes a dark world in calm light.

Light cannot be bottled and sold on the shelf of some store.

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"Hence, the importance of PATIENCE. . . Which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity, more even than humility: the power to wait, to PERSPERVERE, to hold out, to ENDURE to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies BEYOND heroism, the meekness of the Lamb which is led." -Fr. von Balthasar
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"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." - Margaret Williamson
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“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know." - Rene Daumal
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"But what is my God? I put my question to the earth. It answered, ‘I am not God,’ and all things on earth declared the same. I asked the sea and the chasms of the deep and the living things that creep in them, but they answered, ‘We are not your God. Seek what is above us.’ I spoke to the winds that blow, and the whole air and all that lives in it replied, ‘Anaximenes is wrong. I am not God.’ I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but they told me, ‘Neither are we the God who you seek.’ I spoke to all the things that are about me and that can be admitted by the door of the senses, and I said, ‘Since you are not my God, tell me about him. Tell me something of my God.’ Clear and loud they answered, ‘God is he who made us.’ I asked these questions simply by gazing at these things, and their beauty was all the answer that they gave." - St. Augustine, Confessions
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And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. - Seamus Heaney
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"Would you be the wind to blow me HOME?
Would you be a DREAM,
On the WINGS of a poem?
And if WE were walking through a CROWD;
Well, you know I'd be PROUD:

If you CALL my NAME out loud.
Do you suppose that I would come RUNNING?
Do you suppose I'd come at all?
I suppose I would...
You KNOW I would." -Dispatch
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"Thus says the LORD:
Just as from the heavens
the rain and snow come down
And do not return there
till they have watered the earth,
making it fertile and fruitful,
Giving seed to the one who sows
and bread to the one who eats,
So shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth;
It shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it." - Isaiah 55:10-11
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The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. - Gerard Manley Hopkins
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