Murroe Website
Richard Seymour makes the point that beauty is something we feel rather than something we think about – this is not surprising given that a large portion of the brain is set aside to deal with information from the senses rather than thinking
– also the wiring between our senses and our brain is shorter then the wiring that goes through to our thinking centres.
It is the feeling of beauty that lures us on – we thirst for it and it nourishes us. It calls us beyond the present and the past to that everlasting now where Beauty dwells. It lifts us out of the mundane and encourages us to become more than what we are.
And our vocation is to become beauty and where we are, must be more beautiful because we were there than it was before our coming.
In a previous letter Pope Francis wrote about teaching something beautiful capable of filling life with new splendour and profound joy in the midst of difficulties ..every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with God…
So this lent let us remove some of the clutter from our lives – surround ourselves with beauty and consciously, relentlessly, give it away until piece of the world for which we are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.
“We are made to be manifestations of God’s beauty,’ wrote John Chrysostom. Saint Basil the Great threw down a similar challenge, “we are creatures”, he wrote, “but we are creatures who have received the command to become divine”.
Creatures who are meant to become divine!
Now there is a challenge for lent and beyond!