Tag Archives: Beauty

Beauty for ashes

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Recently I was listening to something that made me ponder the question: if I could ask God for a “re-do” — if He could take me back in time and prevent every instance of sexual abuse, rape, and intense suffering at the hands of others — would I want that?

I was reminded of something I wrote a decade ago in a private online forum. We were a “tribe”, a group that were helping each other heal from sexual abuse and trauma. This is a slightly edited version of my response to an eloquent post from one of our members:

Yes, we’ve lost a lot. And the losses are overwhelmingly painful and deserve to be grieved, need to be grieved. But I’ve clung for hope to the second part of that journaling assignment, where we write about what wasn’t stolen from us. I’ve also clung to a phrase from the Old Testament about “God restoring what the locusts have eaten”.

When I felt like a hollow, decimated shell, barely alive, little more than a reservoir of pain and desperation, irreparably broken and crushed, my therapist and you, my tribe, saw in me what I couldn’t see. You helped me to believe in the truth of what you saw.

God doesn’t undo the past or replace everything that’s been lost. But I’m living proof that He restores, that He gives beauty for ashes, joy for mourning, and a beautiful garment for our tattered, heavy-laden spirits. My prayer is that He would continue to do that for you, my dear friend.

Back to now… would I wish that these debilitatingly painful, anguishing, despicable acts had not been done to me? I found myself wishing that certain people, for their own sakes, had not sinned so egregiously, but I could no longer say that I wished such things had not been done to me. (I wish that I had sinned far, far less, and that I had not responded so sinfully to the sins of others.)

What I am even more sure of now is that God is a redemptive God. He is the God Who heals. And I’m not just clinging to hope — I have tasted and seen the goodness of the Lord. And, although the past decade has had its own share of loss, difficulty, and grief, I’ve experienced depths of beauty, joy, and praise that I never dreamed possible.

Truth, beauty, and goodness

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To say I’m not a philosopher is an understatement. Back in my long ago schooldays, I managed to say something semi-meaningful and thoughtful, which promoted my wonderful teacher to loan me his copy of Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy. He thought I would enjoy it.

I was utterly and completely lost. I did somehow inadvertently fool him once with a coherent comment or two about Plato, but I probably gravely disappointed him after that. I never could finish the book.

Instead, I daydreamed my way through school, wrote angsty poetry in Algebra, got grades accordingly, and only became a serious student in Latin class. I’m still not sure why that subject commanded my attention.

By some weird quirk, I somehow got high SAT scores — maybe because I didn’t take the whole thing seriously enough to get nervous. Then I took some achievement tests, laughed my way through the absurdly easy German one, and was admitted to UCLA on the basis of my test scores alone, ignoring my scandalous grades.

My college career wasn’t any more successful than my junior high and high school careers had been. I finally dropped out after a couple years.

I never took a single philosophy class. But I did hang around Kerckhoff Coffee House with some grad students, discussing “deep things” , and somehow I must have uttered a semi-profundity or two, because they kept me around and even solicited my opinions.

But classically educated I definitely wasn’t.

Fast forward a bunch of years, when I was questioning why cultural relevance was more important than beauty, and why our church at the time should, according to the new pastor, abandon our usual worship space, meet in our fellowship hall instead, and make it look as un-churchy (and hence as devoid of beauty) as possible. Apparently, since I was already approaching 50 years of age, I was woefully out of touch.

Only it wasn’t just my age. In my 20’s I had voiced similar concerns in a different church, about the topic of music, and had jokingly dubbed myself a young fuddy-dud.

Years passed and stuff happened and, in a flash of insight, I told someone, “I’m starved for beauty. It’s as if I’ve been keeping myself on hunger rations.”

I attended a small conference about truth, beauty, and goodness — most of it way over my head because, again, I am no philosopher. I’m not really an artist either, and I haven’t written an angsty poem in years. But I was starved for beauty.

Then my dear daughter-in-law sought refuge with us during COVID, bringing beauty (and my son and granddaughter) with her. She didn’t just pile food haphazardly on a plate; she arranged it artfully. She didn’t just grab a snack and head outdoors; she created a lovely scene that belonged in a painting from long ago. She didn’t just toss on jeans and t-shirts; she dressed herself and her daughter as if clothes actually mattered. It was inspiring.

Gradually I began bringing little bits of beauty back in my life. I began opening my heart wide to even more beauty.

In the meantime — between my young fuddy-dud days and a couple years ago — I had been on quite the spiritual and theological journey, and I’ve got the books to prove it. (Well, not all the books… I’ve gone through three major cullings of my personal library in the past two decades.) In the past year or so, while visiting my daughter, I said something to her priest about truth, beauty, and goodness. He probably thought I was more profound and philosophical than I am, and said something in return about transcendentals… and I had to look it up later.

Turns out cultural relevance is not a transcendental.

You can’t just go where the beauty is, I had told myself sternly. But God kept drawing me with beauty. Also with truth and goodness, to be sure, and He was wooing and pursuing me with love all that time — and it was the beauty that, at least for me, illuminated all the rest.

After my first reading assignment from my priest, when I returned to my next meeting with him, I enthused, “It’s written so beautifully!”

I was discovering Byzantine Catholicism.

Since my priest is classically educated and didn’t daydream his way through most of his education, he tried to explain something about the role of beauty in revealing the nature of God, drawing us to Him, and glorifying Him in worship.

In a culture that assaults my sensitive nature with so much ugliness — not just the ugliness of its sin but its architecture, art, home decor, music, entertainment, and ideas — God has drawn me into beauty. Every Sunday I experience a beautiful, glorious foretaste of Heaven as we step outside of time, and worship God in spirit and in truth.

Every Divine Liturgy, I taste and see that God is good, that He is really and powerfully more than I could ever hope, and that He is all that is true, beautiful, and good.

Beholding Beauty | Fashionless Friday

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“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

For years those words haunted me: am I only beautiful if someone else considers me to be so? And, as someone who has never met our society’s conventional beauty standards, why couldn’t I just accept this fact — why was I so hung up about wanting someone to find me beautiful?

As a young teenager, I used to fantasize that there was a boy somewhere on this earth who would look at me — in all my skinny scrawny shapelessness, with my frizzy unruly hair, buck teeth, acne, freckles, and weird-looking bony knees and feet — and somehow find me beautiful. And, since I was fantasizing, I imagined him as a nice, sweet, wholesome, kind, sane boy rather than as a desperate, lunatic boy with low self-image and poor taste. Finally, that fantasy seemed too ridiculously improbable, even for me, so I began dreaming of a boy who would overlook my outward appearance and even my misfit personality, and would somehow manage to fall in love with a hidden inner beauty that hitherto no one — not even me — had ever managed to discern.

I was thinking about all that recently, as I had the enormous privilege to kneel — and I mean this as literally as possible — at someone’s beautiful feet. As I rubbed these dear, sweet, painful, elderly feet with soothing lotion, I thought of the verse, “How lovely are the feet of those who bring good news!” My mother has truly announced “good news of happiness” to many. Her feet are beyond beautiful.

All that has made me think, yet again, about my notions of beauty and my desire to be found beautiful. I’ve written about it before, about three and a half years ago.

That post was about, among other things, purposing to cling to “my other-worldly notions of beauty, and of what makes someone attractive to me”. I ended by stating:

After all, the thought of hearing the words “my good and faithful servant” means far more to me than even the most flattering words and opinions of mere mortals.

What does that have to do with beauty being in the eye of the beholder? I realized, as I knelt at my mother’s feet recently, that God has been changing my eyes — not my physical eyes, but the ways in which I see and appreciate beauty. There is so much more to loveliness than most of us can recognize, especially if our eyes and hearts have been trained by societal norms.

One of my favorite people to pray with has hands I find absolutely beautiful. She sees hands damaged by hard work and arthritis; I see hands that have served Jesus oh so very well, hands that have soothed the dying, hands that have brought me flowers she lovingly tended in her garden, hands that continue to bless everyone she touches. I see hands so beautiful that they have moved me to tears.

Back when I was that young teenager, facing constant mocking and bullying at school, desperately dreaming up fantasies of sweet boys who would find me beautiful rather than ugly, I began looking at myself through the wrong set of eyes. The people who truly loved me never considered me ugly — not even when my actions and attitudes were. It has taken me decades to be able to look at pictures of young teenage me and not feel embarrassment and humiliation… and self-loathing.

“Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’?” (‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭45:9‬ ‭ESV‬‬)

Ouch. That’s what I was doing. I was telling my Creator that He did a lousy job when He knit me together in my mother’s womb. I was accusing Him of shoddy workmanship… just because some people, including myself, were looking at me through the wrong eyes.

Love sees beauty even when others don’t.

That’s the kind of eyes I want, so that I might be a beholder of beauty, whether it’s mine or someone else’s. I want to have beauty in my eyes, so that I might see beauty wherever it is to be found.

Full circle | Fashionless Friday

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“There’s nothing wrong with work-worn hands,” I insisted. But what did I know? I was young, naive, idealistic, and inexperienced. I wasn’t thinking that someday a man might hold my hands, and might want them to feel soft and tenderly smooth, rather than roughly calloused, aged, and battered from hard work. “There’s nothing wrong with work-worn hands,” I kept on insisting, a few years later, when the harsh cleaning solution I used to clean a commercial kitchen made my hands bleed and crack. “There’s nothing wrong with work-worn hands,” I laughed when I was a newly-wed, and an older, wiser woman urged me to don white cotton gloves under kitchen gloves before plunging my hands in hot, soapy dishwater day after day after day.

I was no longer quite so young nor naive — but I was still oh so idealistic.

My idea of beauty was, I realize now, rather other-worldly, based far less on physical reality than on love, admiration, and relationship. A few years ago, a group of women told me that I described every single one of my female friends, and every other woman I liked, as “beautiful”. Really? I had no idea.

They mimicked me, with affection. “When I got here and said I wanted to meet Laura,” one of them told me, “you said, ‘Oh, Laura? You’ll love her! She’s encouraging and funny and smart — and she’s really beautiful! She has the most amazing eyes!'”

One of the other women imitated my voice, “‘And Carmen — she has this quiet strength. Nothing throws her. She’s like a super-hero. And she gives the best hugs in the world. She is so beautiful!'”

“‘Wait ’til you meet Amy!'” another woman pretended to be me. “‘She’s a math genius, but not at all intimidating. She can be so funny, and she has helped me so much. And she’s really beautiful!'”

The women laughed. “You think everyone is beautiful!”

“No, I don’t,” I insisted. “It’s just that all of you…you really are beautiful. You are some of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met! Go look in the mirror!”

Recently I was reading some articles online and I made the shocking discovery that the rest of the world doesn’t all think that way. Yes, for most of us, the objects of our affection do become more beautiful in our eyes. We even have the saying that “love makes blind,” and we’ve probably all encountered that odd-looking elderly couple that seems ridiculously smitten with each other, with the husband foolishly insisting that his wife grows more beautiful with each passing year.

But it’s more than that for me. I remember back in my college days, when a friend of mine showed me a picture from a magazine of some guy she proclaimed to be very sexy. She asked me my opinion. I scrutinized the picture carefully and had to admit that his body was aesthetically appealing, but how could I know whether or not he was sexy? In fact, I became convinced that he was the antithesis of sexy — any guy who would pose in a magazine like that was no doubt arrogant and narcissistic, and there was nothing remotely sexy about that! Ugh! Come to think of it, the guy was downright ugly!

Another friend confided in me around the same time that she had some major crush on a guy she only saw in passing and had never actually met. “What?” I was incredulous. “But you don’t even know him!”

I knew — because one cannot live for more than a day in our culture without being bombarded with this message — that most men are attracted primarily to a woman’s physical features, that men can be filled with a strong and overwhelming sexual desire for a woman who is a complete stranger to them, and that a woman’s “wonderful personality” will not make up for whatever off-putting physical flaws she might have in a man’s eyes. Men, I’ve been told over and over again, are primarily visual. You can’t see a woman’s inner beauty. You can only see her outward form.

But I’ve also realized that it’s not just men who are “shallow” in that way. Women too are guilty of looking mostly on the outside. After all, none of us can truly see inside the heart of another person.

I’ve had to live in the reality of that world, in a world in which I’ve never measured up to the culture’s standard of beauty, in a world where youthful flawlessness is idealized, in a world where whatever “cuteness” I may have possessed as a little girl has now long faded away in the experiences of living decades past my youth.

After my oldest son was born, my body was so radically changed that catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror was literally startling. It was the body of a stranger, and I was struggling to make peace with it. A dear family friend said to me, “What is our body but a tool to do God’s will? You are doing God’s will.”

I saw the beauty in that, and my eyes were opened to the new beauty in me…well, except when I would foolishly allow someone else’s opinion to matter more than God’s.

There’s more to this story, lots more, but I’ll save most of it for future blog posts. Fast forward to now. My body is aging. It’s been causing me some physical pain and discomfort lately. It’s in decline, functionally and aesthetically. That’s the way things are at my stage of life, and I can only expect this to accelerate in years to come. Eventually my body will fail, and I will die…unless death comes in a different, more sudden way. That’s our human condition.

I had a recent, mind-boggling epiphany as a result of some articles I’ve been reading. It seems I’m somewhat of an odd bird — what attracts me is relationship. I thought most people were like me, except for shallow, immature men. I honestly find it difficult to fathom that anyone — especially a woman — can be sexually attracted to someone without a strong emotional connection, without a friendship. I am mystified by the whole concept of the “friend zone”, because I’ve always elevated the idea of friendship and have seen it as a necessity for a truly rewarding romantic relationship, not the antithesis of it.

It’s like I said at the beginning of this rather rambling post that isn’t adequately expressing the entirety of what I’m trying to say: My idea of beauty is, I realize now, rather other-worldly, based far less on physical reality than on love, admiration, and relationship.

Friendship is attractive to me. True intimacy…a deep connection…mutual respect and understanding…a close bond…openness and vulnerability…without all that, I’m as lost as I was back in college, trying to explain to my friend why I didn’t find a supposedly hot hunk of a man in a magazine even remotely attractive. How could he be? He was a stranger.

Then, as I was mulling these things over, I read this:

As Paul writes, we are meant to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, beings that weaken and suffer and endlessly minister. Our bellies should swell with children and shared meals and laughter. Our eyes should smart with tears as we grieve with those who mourn. Our knees should ache as we kneel to serve, and our hands should twinge as they clasp the fingers of the dying. A preserved body is stagnant, atrophied; its value misunderstood, its substance misapplied. A sacrificed body is tired, rundown, redeemed, and truly beautiful. [from A Living Sacrifice: The Beauty of a Body Broken for Others]

That’s why Jesus’ resurrected body still bore His beautiful scars. It’s why pregnancy-ravaged bodies are beautiful and, yes, even holy. It’s why those who give of themselves in sacrificial and loving ways, who let me in to their hearts, become breathtakingly beautiful in my eyes.

It turns out that I was right after all. Yes, hopelessly idealistic — although I prefer to think of it as hopefully idealistic — and, as usual, marching to the beat of a drummer that is out of step with most of our culture, and even out of step with most people. But I will cling to my other-worldly notions of beauty, and of what makes someone attractive to me. It turns out that there is nothing wrong with work-worn hands. Maybe someday mine will become far more so than they are now…along with the rest of me…so that I can be “tired, rundown, redeemed, and truly beautiful” in the eyes of the Only One who truly matters.

After all, the thought of hearing the words “my good and faithful servant” means far more to me than even the most flattering words and opinions of mere mortals.