Category: Beauty

The look on His face.

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During Advent, we meditate on the Second Coming of Christ as well as the first.  In the book of Revelation, it says: “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”  I could not help but think of what Christ’s face will look like when we are presented to Him as His bride when I looked at these photos.  May they be a meditation for you of the pure love of your Bridegroom: 24 grooms seeing their brides for the first time.  So great is His love for you.

The look on His face

Sr. Dorcee4 Comments

During Advent, we meditate on the Second Coming of Christ as well as the first.  In the book of Revelation, it says: “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”  I could not help but think of what Christ’s face will look like when we are presented to Him as His bride when I looked at these photos.  May they be a meditation for you of the pure love of your Bridegroom: 24 grooms seeing their brides for the first time.  So great is His love for you.

Taking in Your Loveliness

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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)

Bless the Lord, my soul!

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Bless the Lord, my soul!
Lord God, how great you are,
clothed in majesty and glory,
wrapped in light as in a robe!

You stretch out the heavens like a tent.
Above the rains you build your dwelling.
You make the clouds your chariot,
and walk on the wings of the wind;
you make the winds your messengers
and flashing fire your servants.

Psalm 104

The artist’s task

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Life can throw us many curve balls, as they say.  Some are big and some are small, but all are important in the formation of how we handle life.  Sydney Eddison recounts (in Gardening for a Lifetime) a story “of the violinist Itzhak Perlman, who as a boy was struck with polio and who as a man must walk with the aid of leg braces and crutches.

At a concert on the night of November 18, 1995, at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, one of the strings of his violin suddenly snapped during the performance.  Stunned, the audience held their collective breath, expecting Perlman to stop and leave the stage.  Instead, he paused, then continued playing–adjusting, creating, compensating as he went along, and when he put down his bow at the end of the concert, a mighty roar of applause filled the hall.  When it had died down, he spoke to the audience: “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”

Listen to him playing the theme from Schindler’s List.  Our lives can also sound as beautiful if we continue to respond as best we can in God’s grace to all that life brings us.