Today’s Word: Beauty

Last evening’s walk around Mallard Lake in Creve Coeur Park in suburban St. Louis was a walk through beauty. No less than a dozen deer crossed my path as I walked along, a few so close we could look each other in the eye. The slant of light from the setting sun caught the water on the lake, the tips of trees and the wings of a soaring red-tail hawk at just an angle so as to take my breath away. I had to stop for a second on my trek and whisper a silent “thank you,” knowing that was enough of a prayer for the moment. I can only imagine that beauty magnified a thousand times in a few months when full-on autumn hits us with the gentle ferocity of Jackson Pollock-like splatters of color and light. There’s so much to be seen on such a walk, so much beauty to take in if we place ourselves in the position to see it. I walk for exercise, but I walk in such settings for the beauty. I need them both to be healthy.

And even as I write this, I realize that this word — beauty — is so overused in our world and culture that we barely pay any attention to it at all. Or if we do, we may be speaking of some artificial kind of beauty. Indeed, if you google “beauty” the very first entry will be a link to products and merchandise that will MAKE you beautiful, a social ploy created God knows how long ago to make people, especially women, think they are just not good enough as they are. Shame on us for buying into that at the expense of the inner and outer beauty that already exists in us.

Beauty may indeed be in the eye of the beholder, but aren’t some things innately beautiful? Thoughtful people have been asking that question for millennia, of course. I’m no expert on aesthetics, but I do know that my concepts of beauty are formed (or should be) by my faith and belief in the creator of all that is beautiful — in something that transcends both me and the created world.

This past week I listened to a podcast (something else I sometimes do on my walks) of an interview by Krista Tippett with renowned cellist and composer Yo-Yo Ma on her public radio show “On Being.” Near the end of the interview, Tippett asks Ma for his definition of beauty and, after a bit of creative and interesting rambling, he settles on this: “I can’t say the word beautiful without also equating it with the word transcendence…a moment of reception and cognition of the thing that is, in some ways, startling. There’s that moment where there is, essentially, a transfer of life…human cognition of that vastness, awe and wonder.” (To hear the whole glorious interview, click here: http://bit.ly/WAkzFB.)

For me, this comes close to the mark. This “transfer of life” that takes place in the presence of real beauty is perhaps why we gasp, as if we’re being re-born and sucking in air for the first time. It’s why so many of us find God in nature, in wind-blown places where the spirit wanders as it pleases and finally comes to rest on our lips and helps us pray, helps us whisper that “thank you.”  For whether we find God in the natural beauty of a lush forest or a stark desert, whether in a museum or a concert hall, it’s the same God showing us beauty in the bounty and diversity of the earth and in the people who walk it.

Ask yourself in silence: Where do I most easily see beauty? What is my response to it? Do I often enough put myself in a place where I can experience it?