Sunday, August 8, 2010

A Few Thoughts on Beauty (Eat, Pray, Love Reaction Post #2)

“Beauty is simply Reality seen with the eyes of love.” – Evelyn Underhill

“Love beauty; it is the shadow of God on the universe.” -- Gabriela Mistral

Over the last couple of years, I have found myself drawn to idea of Beauty. I want to find simple beauty in the world around us. After all, we live in a wondrous world, so complex and finely detailed that despite our best efforts to pollute it, it remains beautiful.

The fact that I ended up as a lawyer has always been a bit bewildering to me. By nature I am an intuitive, artistic sort of person. The one thing I was always best at was music, much more so than science or logic, yet God led me to and through law school, retraining my brain in the process.

In the last 15 years of practicing law, all my illusions about concepts such as “fair play” and “justice” have been eroded away. I never meet my clients at a good point in their lives, especially now that I’ve begun to focus on bankruptcy. My job brings me face to face with pain, guilt, anger, heartache, betrayal, confusion, despair, indignation, and injustice. Every day. Every day I must reach into myself and pull out compassion, sympathy, and wisdom, and by the end of the day I am drained.

So I guess it’s no wonder that the long-suppressed artist in me craves beauty. Beauty is restorative. Nothing fills me with peace and contentment any more than sitting quietly in a beautiful place, preferably outside. Beauty combats unrest, and at least for me, always wins.

In the first section of Eat, Pray, Love, Liz Gilbert ponders why Italy has “produced the greatest artistic, political and scientific minds of the ages, but have still never become a major world power.”* Her conclusion is that Italy’s history is riddled with corruption of power, so that the people trust only what they can perceive with their senses. She says, “[i]n a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted.”

From a strictly human perspective (i.e., without any theological concerns), this makes a certain amount of sense. I would probably rephrase and expand that conclusion as follows: In a world full of the worst parts of human nature, sometimes only beauty reflects goodness.

The quote that I highlighted in my copy of Eat, Pray, Love, though is this one:

To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then can be a serious business – not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into . . . rhetoric and plot.


Therefore, my desire to find or create beauty is a reaction to the ugliness of human nature. Not to escape from reality, because the reality is that we live on a cursed world, polluted by sin and evil, but to remind myself that what God created, He meant to be good.**

How do you cope with the erosion of confidence and hope caused by the stress of your daily life? How do you deal with the fact that people, as they say, are just no damn good? And where do you find beauty? How do you seek the hidden beauty in your own part of the world? I’d love to know.




* p. 114.

** The underlying assumption of that previous statement, that beauty equals goodness, must be the subject of a different dissertation. We all know that beauty does not equal goodness, that in fact beauty can mask great evil, but for purposes of this discussion, finding beauty reminds me of God’s goodness.

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