Some Thoughts on Beauty
“He has made everything beautiful in its time…” Ecclesiastes 3:11
My younger sister, Betty, is a regular reader of our blog. Earlier today she sent me a couple of quotes she thought I might find interesting. One is a Turkish proverb that says “A heart in love with beauty never grows old.” The other quotation comes from the pen of D. H. Lawrence: “The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.” The common denominator in these two sayings is, of course, beauty. My sister’s e-mail got me to thinking about what others have said about beauty.
In words similar to Lawrence’s, John Muir wrote “Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.” Elsewhere Muir said, “No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening—still all is Beauty!”
Apparently Muir and Ralph Waldo Emerson concurred on this connection between God and beauty for Emerson wrote, “Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”
No matter where we live there is much beauty to behold. If we will take time to notice it and contemplate it we truly will find food for our soul. And in ways I cannot fully explain, we will also find God.
–Chuck Summers