You Are Beautiful
By Rev. Elizabeth Rowley,
Spiritual Director
April 12, 2019
Returning from a weekend getaway down South recently, my traveling companions and I chose to take a slight detour inland to the Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve in Lancaster, California. There were several hills blanketed with a beautiful orange super bloom of California Poppies. It was so stunningly beautiful that I could do nothing but stand in silence, observing and taking it all in for at least ten minutes. None of us had ever experienced anything quite like it before.
Nineteenth-Century American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We are made immortal by the contemplation of beauty.”
There is something immediate in beholding beauty. It has a way of pulling us into the present moment with fierce vitality. It’s a time when the veil between human and Divine fades to a gentle mist. There’s a realization that something created this beauty which leads one to contemplate the mystical nature of life.
Irish poet, author, priest, and Hegelian Philosopher John O’Donohue wrote, “We can slip into the Beautiful with the same ease as we slip into the seamless embrace of water; something ancient within us already trusts that this embrace will hold us.”
When beauty is observed, it is akin to a Divine show-and-tell, and we’re ready for it at the very depths of our being. Everything else seems to fall away as we are pulled into its embrace. Trials and tribulations, thoughts and questions, to-do lists and homework, shopping lists and what to make for dinner are all placed on pause as the certainty and definiteness of beauty rearranges us. The soul hungers for beauty and knows it when it sees it. It may leave you speechless as its radiant magnificence washes over, exalting your spirit.
In contemplating beauty, I wondered, what would it be like if we allowed ourselves more time to enjoy the beauty all around us? Better yet, what would it be like to look for the beauty in everything? Perhaps rather than traveling for hours to see blooming flowers, we might notice the beauty in the ordinary everyday goodness of our lives. The smile of a loved one, the ecstatic joy of a child with an ice cream cone on a hot summer day, people being kind to each other, or when the sunlight shines through a window in just the right position that it refracts the light, creating a rainbow on the ground or wall.
Beauty can be found in every moment if you’re looking for it. Today I invite you to remember that you are beautiful. This beauty radiates out from within the deepest parts of you. It is a self-effulgent light glowing luminous and bright. It’s the beauty of Life itself contracted into the single point of being on this planet that is living as you. A kaleidoscope of experience with the beauty of a stained-glass window as the sunlight shines through it. Move through your day remembering this Truth.
And so it is.
