On the afternoon of the day my friend died in a hospital bed in Iowa City, my daughter and I made cookies. In the Kansas kitchen overlooking the finch feeder, while seventeen finch gobbled two pounds of thistle seed (95 cents a pound at Allen Farm and Feed), we measured flour and brown sugar, butter and ginger, and mixed them in the yellow bowl. Patting out the dough on the cookie sheet, we stopped to taste. “Umm, very good!” she said.
There, while she stood on the orange chair with a brown apron hanging to her ankles, I saw for the first time how the smooth curve of her cheek presses against space with such exquisite beauty.
How is it that we linger for days and weeks over the latest atrocity and evidence that evil is afoot and keeping steady employment? As a nation, we dissect and examine sin and evil from every angle, as we are seduced into complicity through our own fascination with it. We ask the best minds of our day to analyze and respond to iniquity yet rarely consider intently the nature of beauty and how to create and sustain it in our lives and world.
Many seek beauty, but it is more often to possess it than to appreciate it. As I impose my will on beauty, as I shape and prune it, cage it in my heart, and bow down and worship it with my reason and my money, it becomes a god, something I look to for my well being and satisfaction. Then beauty turns on me with its shrewish demands and shrivels into something harsh and burdensome which sends me off scurrying to polish it, insure it, buy more of it. No more is beauty a source of delight and joy. I have diminished it and myself by my lust, greed, and envy.
A young nurse stammered to tell me of the beauty she had seen last week. “I went for a walk with the dog down by the pond and I have never seen anything like it. After all the rain, the pond was brimming, spilling over the sides. I heard the water roaring through the drainage ditch. I saw God’s power, and everything was so green.” Tears glistened in her eyes.
True beauty is free. Our spendthrift God scatters it with lavish prodigality over the universe. The Trinity ceaselessly dusts us with beauty like pear blossoms sifting in white drifts on the lawn.
Would that we could approach our lives like kids on an Easter egg hunt at dawn – our world drenched with wonder and surprises nestled under every bush. When Moses was on the far side of the wilderness keeping his father-in-law’s flock, he turned aside to see the great sight of a burning bush. What amazes me about Moses is that he turned aside. He stopped doing what he was doing, turned his attention away from his work, and risked letting a sheep wander from his protective gaze, to see why the bush was not burned up. (Exodus 3)
Think of it. The liberation of the Hebrews and the rest of salvation history rested on this man’s freedom to wonder. The capacity for wonder and curiosity are essential to spiritual growth as well as to justice. A lot of prophets and saints knew how to dilly dally, how to daydream, how to poke along and stop and sniff the odd, the curious and find the hidden treasure under the lilac bush. The expectation and consent to be dazzled and amazed set the stage for God’s entrance into our lives.
May you discover the courage and grace this day to dilly dally,
to wonder, and to be astonished.
This post is excerpted from a book I wrote, Letters from the Holy Ground – Seeing God Where You Are, Sheed & Ward, 2000. pp 192-194. https://theprayinglife.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php You might like it.
A thousand shades of green hold me enthralled. The south wind teases up the glossy leaves, revealing their pale undersides. I find enough of God in a maple leaf to keep me occupied with wonder for a couple of centuries.
Simone Weil continues, “Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. . . . The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.”
I held out the tray of tiny plastic cups filled with juice, freshly poured, bubbles still floating on top. He delicately placed finger and thumb around his choice, and went to draw it out, but it was stuck and would not budge. He tightened his grip, pulled, and the thin plastic cup shattered in his fingers. Juice flew onto the suit jacket of the fellow next to him, the carpet before the altar, and my white robe and scapular with the appliquéd wheat and golden sun. How can such a tiny cup hold so much? we wondered.
ith her here, and, in her contact with God, find healing for her soul. Inside the hermitage my two daughters, ages four and six, are playing quietly. My guest and I sit still, leaning into the grace of the moment-listening to meadowlarks and watching willows bend in the breeze. After a while my children’s play grows noisier. Thumping, giggles, and something crashing to the floor intrude on the serenity. They are jumping on the bed. The more I try to focus on the silence and my guest, the louder the girls get. Finally I rise from my prayer stool and go inside. “Please be quiet,” I whisper. As I take Diana’s arm to lead her over to some books, she shouts in a screechy, ear-splitting whine, “Mom, stop! You are hurting my arm.”
The Praying Life 