When Life Unveils Her Holy Face: Reflections on Beauty

 “At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”

This quote from writer Toni Morrison brought to mind a recent experience I had one morning. I have become quite forgetful, and that morning I forgot to take my phone when I set off for a walk with the dog. This meant two things – I wasn't able to take any photographs and I didn't know what time it was, since I don't wear a watch. When I first realised I had left my phone at home I cursed myself – what if I fell over and broke my leg? How would I call an ambulance? (Always expect the worst – anything more is a bonus, my Nan used to say!)

My next thought was to bemoan the fact that I would be unable to take any photos. I love taking photos when I am out walking the dog – I love trying to capture the way the light hits the trees and the water of the river. And perhaps this means I am more observant, as I am looking for things that catch my eye. But it also means that I probably don't use my other senses to their full potential, since I am so focused on sight. And it also means that, while I am noticing things, I am not fully present to them. Not in the way that David Whyte wrote of is his poem Beauty, “Beauty is the harvest of presence... an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting that erases our separation.” 

After I had stopped berating myself for being forgetful and wishing that things were different, I was able to accept things as they were, and enjoy walking without checking the time and without taking multiple photographs. As a result, I felt quite liberated, and able to be present to my surroundings in a much deeper way than usual, to experience the beauty of the trees and the river, and respond with awe and wonder, in the present moment, without the need to try to preserve it for posterity.

We have all heard the expression, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Two people can be in the same place at the same time, one experiencing beauty, one not. It is all about our perception. How we perceive beauty is a reflection of what is inside us.

“Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror,” as Khalil Gibran wrote. 

For me, beauty is often strongly connected to a sense of the sacred as well as the sublime.   I experience beauty when something touches my heart – when listening to a piece of music or viewing a painting, yes, but it is the emotional response, how I connect with the story that the music or the painting conveys, the fragile, vulnerable humanity behind it, that reveals its beauty to me. 

I recently watched an episode of Mary Beard's Forbidden Art, described on the BBC website as an exploration of “Art that challenges, questions and appals. Professor Mary Beard confronts controversial works tackling such unsettling subjects that they’ve been fought over, removed or 'forbidden'.”

One of the stories in this episode was about a woman who painted a picture of her 100 year old mother. Nothing controversial in that, except that her mother was dead when her daughter painted her. Her daughter said that when her mother died, peacefully in hospital, she cried and then blurted out to the nurse, “I want to paint her.” The nurse found an understanding undertaker, who allowed the daughter to spend three days in the chapel of rest painting her mother. Gazing upon the finished portrait, her daughter said, “she would have hated this painting, but she did say to me that I could do what I wanted with her when she had gone.” 

This story touched me profoundly. Without her having said as much, it seemed to me that those three days with her newly dead mother had been a sacred experience for her daughter. She had been able to start processing her grief at the loss of her mother by painting an intimate, tender, honest, portrait of what is a taboo subject for most of us. I felt it was a beautiful painting and a beautiful story. It reminded me that there is beauty to be found in the most unexpected places, even in death. It reminded me that beauty is not about perfection, but imperfection. It reminded me of the beauty of our fragile, broken humanity, in all its glory and splendour. 

The daughter implied that her mother would have hated her painting because it exposed her vulnerability. I can understand this. Like many of us, I try to hide my vulnerability, my imperfections, my flaws, my pain, my brokenness. I don't want to suggest that painful experiences are good, but there are part of all the experiences that have made me who I am today.

Like the sun shining through broken clouds, our inner light shines through our brokenness, not in spite of it, but because of it. My brokenness is part of what makes me beautiful. Your brokenness is part of what makes you beautiful. The Japanese art of repair, Kintsugi (golden joinery), uses lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, to mend broken pottery. The damage, rather than being hidden, is illuminated and celebrated as part of the history of the object. 

In his book, Perennial Wisdom, Rabbi Rami Shapiro comments on Pelagius' Letter to an Elderly Friend, which ends with the words, “The presence of God's spirit in all living beings is what makes them beautiful; and if we look with God's eyes, nothing on the earth is ugly.” Shapiro makes the point that, in this understanding, beauty is not something relative, but absolute. He writes, “What is it like to see the world as God sees it? It is to see absolute beauty. But do not imagine this absolute beauty to be the same as relative beauty, the beauty that is in opposition to ugliness. It is something else entirely. To see the world as God sees it, to see the absolute beauty of a sunset and a sinkhole, to see the absolute beauty of a newborn infant and a charred corpse is to stand in awe, as awe. You stand in awe when you stand free from the conditioning of the relative self, the judging self, the labelling self. Free from conditioning you can see what is as it is: God. You see the awesome and the awful, and you experience them both as absolute beauty, as equal manifestations of the One who is without second.”

It is in human encounters, face to face, that we reveal to each other our divine beauty. Perhaps we may remember particular occasions when someone in our life has held up this divine mirror to us, so that we can experience our own beauty. The writer, theologian and Lutheran pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, writes about such an occasion in a blog post about the film The Painter, which is about the relationship between and artist and the thief who stole one of her paintings. She writes, 

“There is a scene about 30 minutes into the movie in which The Painter shows The Thief the portrait she has painted of him and he - a touch guy, a criminal, a drug addict, breaks down crying. Why? Because she saw him. And not just the tough-guy-criminal-drug-addict him. That is easy. What she saw was the him who is worthy of love. The him who entered this world as a baby like the rest of us. The him whose mother abandoned him. The him who is smart and funny and tender. The him whom God loves. The him he dare not let anyone see, and yet somehow she did. And he, having experienced being seen in this way, changed more and more into the person she saw him to be."

The late Roman Catholic priest Father Daniel O'Leary, who was a parish priest in Leeds, wrote, “The vocation of the priest is to be a prophet of beauty, to remind people of the light within them; to reassure them that they are, as Thomas Merton realized in his moment of intense disclosure in a city street, ‘shining like the sun’.” Interestingly, in the story he wrote about in the same piece, Beauty and the Priest, to illustrate this, it is the wife of a priest and not the priest himself, who reminds people of their light. O'Leary wrote,

“I recently read Years of Wonder by Geraldine Brooks. It was the time of the 17th century Great Plague in Eyam, Derbyshire. The small community heroically decided to close off all contact with the outside world so as to contain the deadly disease within their village. Most of them died horrible deaths. Towards the end of these fateful months, Mrs Mompellion, the vicar’s wife, despite her illness, whispers these words of hope to her distraught, despairing and hopeless helper, Anna: “I wonder if you know how you have changed. It is the one good to have come out of this terrible year. Oh yes, Anna, the spark was clear in you when you first came to me – but you covered your light, afraid of what would happen if anyone saw it. You were like a flame blown by the wind until it is almost gone. All I had to do was to put the glass round you. And now, oh how you shine!””

In the Unitarian tradition, ministry is not just something offered by an official minister, but is what we offer each other in community. We are all helping each other to shine our light, to reveal to each other that we are all beautiful, flawed, broken and whole human beings, who shine like the sun. May it be so.