A beautiful poem on beauty by one of our sisters, Sr. Stacy Whitfield:
Beauty
I love your wild extravagance,
mountain flower and autumn leaves
Endowed with lovely lavishness,
making much of what none sees.
Yet surely you would not adorn
with greater glory grassy hills
Than sons and daughters made for joy
and destined for more beauty still.
Oh give me hope to lift my soul
to beauties that yet lie unseen,
That wait beyond the shimm’ring veil,
awaiting Dawn’s eternity.
The wondrous views of heaven’s scope
from which earth’s grand reflection springs,
The beauty that is fairer still
than all your earthly artistry.
Oh give me faith and love to long
to see all beauty’s heavenly source,
From which all loveliness is flowing,
river-like upon its course.
The fullness of all beauty there
on which to gaze to soul’s delight,
A heart all pure, a form all fair,
the fountainhead of love, of light.
I shall abide in blissful rest,
loving Love and Beauty seeing,
Taking in your loveliness
with opened eyes, with transformed being.
©Sr. Stacy Whitfield (revised February 3, 1991)
Witnesses to Hope 