Loving Love and Beauty seeing

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

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)

Praying for our government

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I’ve been waiting for an article I read last month in the print version of Restoration to go online.  (Restoration is a Madonna House publication.)  It’s entitled “Praying for the American Government” and was written by Cynthia Donnelly, a Madonna House staffer, who lives in a house in Washington, D.C.. The house was set up by Cardinal James Hickey specifically for the purpose of praying for the American government.  I share the story here because sometimes I feel overwhelmed thinking about the best way to pray for our government. I suspect there are others of you out there who think the same.  After I read this article, I had hope. I thought, “I can do this–and actually I do do this.”  You can read it here.

God’s look of love

Fr. Conrad de Meester says God has no needs, but if He did, it would be to love . . .

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Continuing from yesterday.  

St. John of the Cross has three chapters in his Spiritual Canticle in which he writes about God’s look of love.  It is God looking at us in love that makes us lovable and beautiful.  “With God, to gaze at is to love.” (SC 31.5)  And it is in His looking at us, loving us unconditionally, that we, in turn, become beautiful. 

By infusing his grace in the soul, God makes it worthy and capable of his love.  (SC 32.5)

He does not love things because of what they are in themselves.  With God, to love the soul is to put her somehow in himself and to make her his equal. (SC 32.6)

St. John says that God’s gaze of love produces four things in our souls: “it cleanses, endows with grace, enriches, and illumines.” (SC 33.1)   And as God gazes on us–as we let ourselves be gazed upon–we become beautiful, and then that beauty draws His gaze even more towards us, and the more He gazes upon us, the more beautiful we become, and so on and so on.  “When God beholds the soul made attractive through grace, he is impelled to grant her more grace.” (SC 33.7)

Who can express how much God exalts the soul that pleases him? [And remember we please Him best when we let Him look at us with His love.]  Who can express how much God exalts the soul that pleases him?  It is impossible to do so, nor can this even be imagined, for after all, he does this as God, to show who he is. (SC 33.8) [emphasis added]

God is Love.  For Him to be is to love.  So the more we let Him, give Him permission, turn our souls toward Him, the more we are letting Him be God, so to speak.

Fr. Conrad de Meester says God has no needs, but if He did, it would be to love . . .    So let Him love you . . .

The Christian life is not a beauty pageant

God “did not love us to leave us to our ugliness but to change us and, disfigured as we were, to make us beautiful.” (Augustine)

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Sr. Dorcee, beloved3 Comments

I don’t know about you, but most of my life growing up I never considered myself as beautiful.  None of my girl friends really were either.  We weren’t part of the homecoming court or a cheerleader.  So what to do with all that I’ve been sharing about beauty?  Hopefully, most of us have made the important transition in our thinking to the realization that beauty is more than skin deep, as they say.  It’s the beauty of the soul, of the spirit that is most important.
      Unfortunately, too many of us who “know that in our heads” still feel like we fall short.  We don’t feel all that beautiful in our souls.  But the Christian life is not a beauty pageant.  Our beauty comes from within, from God who dwells within us.  St. Augustine says in one of his commentaries:

What then is this love that makes the loving soul beautiful?  God, who is always beautiful, who never loses his beauty, who never changes: he loved us first, he who is always beautiful.  And what were we when he loved us if not ugly and disfigured?  But he did not love us to leave us to our ugliness but to change us and, disfigured as we were, to make us beautiful.

It’s almost like sunbathing. We turn ourselves toward Him, and it is He who makes us beautiful.  We just need to be there in His presence.  It’s the sun that makes us tan; it’s the Son who makes us beautiful.  It’s not what we do, but what He does.  Fr. Blaise Arminjon in his Cantata of Love addresses this very point in his commentary on Song of Songs 4.1 “How beautiful you are, my love, how beautiful you are”:

This is why the Bride [and we are each His bride] would be quite wrong in worrying whether she is truly lovable or not or worthy or not of love since all her beauty is made of her resemblance to her Bridegroom, whole holy face was engraved in her since the very first day and wants to be more and more deeply engraved in her.  Thérèse of Lisieux understands this very well when she reads this verse of the Song: ‘Adorable face of Jesus, only beauty ravishing my heart, deign to imprint on me your divine resemblance so that you may not be able to look into my soul without seeing yourself.’

To be continued tomorrow . . .

Jacques Fesch

The power of music.

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Sr. Dorcee, beloved5 Comments

I am currently reading the prison letters of Jacques Fesch (book details above under “Books to read – biographies”), a self-described juvenile delinquent, found guilty of robbery and murder, but subsequently gave his life fully to Christ.  A very inspiring read.  His cause for canonization is now open.  The thing I wanted to share here is a paragraph from a letter in which he described a bit of what his life was life before conversion.  (Read it, and then I’ll comment on what struck me.)

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Jacques Fesch

During the six or seven years when I lived without faith, I did evil, much evil, less through deliberate malice than through heedlessness, egoism and hardness of heart.  I was incapable of loving anyone.  Father, mother, wife, child–I was indifferent to them all.  I felt no warmth of emotion for anyone or anything, unless perhaps it was music. (p.32)

It was that last phrase that struck me–and reminded me of the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s reflections in my previous post about the power of music.  It wasn’t music that brought about Fesch’s conversion, but it is striking to me that that was the only thing he mentioned as evoking any emotion in him at that time in his life.  Music, reflecting the true beauty of God, is extremely powerful.  I think of pieces like Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending” which I had the privilege of hearing performed in a Scottish cathedral years ago, or Rachmaninov’s liturgical pieces that move one’s heart to worship. 

What music moves you to greater love of God?

As for God, His way is perfect

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

Some thoughts from Amy Carmichael that have inspired me time and again:

Ps 18.30: As for God, His way is perfect.

God is love, so we may change the word and say, As for Love, His way is perfect.  This has been helping me.
     One of the ways of Love is to prepare us beforehand for any hard thing that He knows is near.  Perhaps this word will be His loving preparation to some heart for a disappointment, or for some trial of faith, or some secret sorrow between the Father and His child.  As for Love, His way is perfect.  (Edges of His Ways, p. 131)

If we take this word seriously, it will be life-changing.

“A clean and shining beauty of soul”

Mary has “a clean and shining beauty of soul.”

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I can’t write about beauty without, of course, saying something about Mary, the Mother of God, who as John Saward says: “In face and grace, Mary is like Jesus.”

umilen3St. Cyril of Alexandria calls our Lady kallitokos as well as theotokos, “bearer of Him who is true beauty” as well as “bearer of Him who is true God.”

Grace, as the poet [Hopkins] says, is “God’s better beauty,” the splendor of the soul . . . “O pure Theotokos”, sings the Byzantine Church on the feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple, “thou hast a clean and shining beauty of soul, and art filled from Heaven with the grace of God” (the Festal Menaion).  Grace conforms the soul into the likeness of Christ.  So it is with Mary.

       (John Saward, The Holiness of Beauty and the Beauty of Holiness, p. 122)

We praise Thee, O God

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This Sunday’s poem is by T.S. Eliot:

We praise Thee, O God, for Thy glory displayed in all the creatures of the earth,
In the snow, in the rain, in the wind, in the storm; in all of Thy creatures, both the hunters and the hunted.
For all things exist only as seen by Thee, only as known by Thee, all things exist
Only in Thy light, and Thy glory is declared even in that which denies Thee; the darkness declares the glory of light.
Those who deny Thee could not deny, if Thou didst not exist; and their denial is never complete, for if it were so, they would not exist.
They affirm Thee in living; all things affirm Thee in living; the bird in the air, both the hawk and the finch: the beast on the earth, both the wolf and the lamb; the worm in the soil and the worm in the belly.
Therefore, man, whom THou hast made to be conscious of Thee, must consciously praise Thee, in thought and in word, and in deed.
Even with the hand to the broom, the back bent in laying the fire, the knee bent in cleaning the hearth, we, the scrubbers and sweepers of Canterbury,
The back bent under toil, the knee bent under sin, the hands to the face under fear, the head bent under grief,
Even in us the voices of seasons, the snuffle of winter, the song of spring, the drone of summer, the voices of beasts and of birds, praise Thee.
We thank Thee for the mercies of blood, for Thy redemption by blood.  For the blood of Thy martyrs and saings
Shall enrich the earth, shall create holy places.
For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ,
There is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it
Though armies trample over it, though sightseers come with guidebooks looking over it;
From where the western seas gnaw at the coast of Iona,
To the death in the desert, the prayer in forgotten places, by the broken imperial column,
From such ground springs that which forever renews the earth
Though it is forever denied.  Therefore, O God, we thank Thee
Who has given such blessing in Canterbury.

                                                      – T.S. Eliot

O Beauty Ancient, O Beauty So New

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If any of you are interested in listening to a talk I gave several years ago on beauty, O Beauty Ancient, O Beauty So New, you can click here.  (Then click on “Click here to start download.”  You can then choose to either 1) open it–which takes about five minutes and will then start playing on your media player–or 2) save it to your IPod or some other file.)

“. . . where all the beauty came from”

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Last night as I walked out of the chapel at the end of our time of adoration, this phrase from C.S. Lewis was running through my head: “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing . . . to find the place where all the beauty came from.”  Those of us who know Him know that place–the where that is a Who.

There is not and cannot be anything more beautiful and more perfect than Christ.  (Dostoevsky)

He alone is ravishing in the full strength of the term . . . beauty itself.  (St. Therese, Letter 76)

Yes, the Face of Jesus is luminous, but if in the midst of wounds and tears it is already so beautiful, what will it be, then, when we shall see it in heaven?  Oh heaven . . . heaven.  Yes, to contemplate the marvelous beauty of Jesus [. . . ] (St. Therese, Letter 195)

The face of Christ is the human face of God.  The Holy Spirit rests upon him and reveals to us absolute Beauty, a divine-human Beauty that no art can ever properly and fully make visible.  Only the icon can suggest such Beauty by means fo the Taboric light.  (Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon, p. 13.)

Christ is beautiful, and He comes to restore us to beauty.  (John Saward, The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty, p. 56)

Make time today to turn your face towards this place–Him from Whom all the beauty comes from.