“Beauty will save the world” asserted Fyodor Dostoevsky and I am a firm believer in this.
I have often decorated spaces for friends who questioned the need for beauty, only to see them profoundly influenced after living in a newly decorated space. They find that beauty awakens something within, like wonder and delight. It induces peace and a sense of wellness. In the newly decorated space, they begin to feel at home.
There is something about noticing that which is beautiful, even if only in our eyes, which transforms us. The tendency in our culture is to spend time in production and acquisition, and beauty asks us to slow down and receive.
Instead of walking past without seeing, I stop and focus on the intricacy of the spider’s web, the way the delicate strands shimmer in the sunlight. I see the symmetry of the design created by this tiny creature. I notice how responsive the web is to each breeze and yet how firmly anchored it remains.
Small everyday beauty can halt our hurried passage through life. We learn to take off our shoes and declare the place “crammed with heaven”, as Elizabeth Barret Browning says. Stopping to notice grounds us in the present, making worry and regret take a back seat to appreciation and joy.
The beauty of the grand vistas nature provides reminds me of my relative smallness. Glancing up at the sky full of stars, diamonds flung upon black velvet, or the airbrushed canvas as the sun sinks below the horizon, I am filled with wonder.
Music and art can reach in and overwhelm with emotions which lie under the surface of our consciousness. We become more whole as beauty does its undercover work. Beauty bypasses the intellect and speaks on a soul level in a voice largely unknown to us. It speaks of an underlying goodness in the universe, hints at a grand design, and shifts our focus outward and upward.
Beauty leaves us in a state of gratitude and wonder, sometimes causing our very breath to stop for a moment. Then we inhale abundance, and exhale scarcity. We are drawn to the hand which scattered the stars and taught the spider how to spin.
According to Pope Benedict XVI, true beauty, “unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond. If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence.”[i]
Where are you finding beauty today?
If you would like to read more on the topic of beauty, check out my article at Red Letter Christians here.
[i] [i] As quoted by Pope Benedict in MEETING WITH ARTISTS, ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI, Sistine Chapel, Saturday, 21 November 2009