Beauty, Poetically

The Lord of the Rings revealed to me the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Before that I thought that wanting things to be beautiful (which to me includes goodness and truth) was asking for perfection and too much. But also too much to ask for, without it being the true and the good as well. Asking for life to be too good. I must expect the worst.

Beauty awakens desire for goodness and truth and even beauty itself, in a circular way it calls up more desire for itself. Beauty strikes you and makes you notice something good, and somehow there is an expanding, and you find you see after that more things that are beautiful- you grow bigger and bigger, with more room to appreciate. You see more things around you that once you hardly noticed, or didn’t notice at all- you see how beautiful they are. Your eyes are opened. And you see how small you are, how little you do see, and are awed by how much more there is to see, and very glad, too. It is exciting when there is always more to find out. You are not ashamed of being small and mean, but simply glad that there is so much to gather, to collect, to appreciate.

The feelings of encountering beauty awaken a desire to get inside beauty; a desire to manifest beauty. To become beautiful so as to continue the communication of beauty to other people and the world. To praise God.

But no- perhaps it is not to communicate that one desires to manifest beauty. It is desired in itself, somehow. If you desired only to communicate it, perhaps you wouldn’t be wanting it at all. But then, in desiring it, you desire to communicate it; the love of it overflows in a loving desire for others to have it, too. You want others to feel as you do, because it is so good. So then you hope that you will become exactly and rightly like it just for that purpose: because it must be shared, it cannot be kept for one’s lonesome.

I don’t believe the encounter with true beauty can result in a selfishness… we cannot hoard it. Perhaps it is that it cannot be hoarded; one loses it as soon as one tries to hoard it. It cannot fit through the door into our hoard, and so must always be shut out when we go inside our hoard, even if we don’t realise we’re leaving it behind. So therefore when we love beauty, we never can hoard it, or else we immediately lose it. We then begin to love the things that shone with beauty rather than the beauty itself… we lust after the thing we thought contained the beauty- the beautiful picture, or piece of music. But those things are only the offspring of true Beauty, but are not Beauty itself. When we seek them, to hoard the beauty, we idolise the thing that glittered, but not the light that made it glitter. It is somehow easy for us to forget the beauty in our lust for the thing that evoked it, our desire to control and keep that beauty for ourselves. We are incredibly forgetful of our visions of God’s paradise.

This is why when we are wrapped up in God, we desire to share, but left in our own devices, in our sin, we cower and hide from sharing anything and lose our bounty. We diminish and fade, even to ourselves. But when we let beauty come inside of us and overflow out of us, we become fountains of richness, wholeness, light. We overflow with God’s glory as He fills us. For if we desire to be filled with beauty, we will be filled with it. I ought to know this by now, but I forget, and I doubt, even after such glimpses as I’ve had.

For some reason to me manifesting the beautiful is the only way to communicate truth, goodness and beauty perfectly. One must become beautiful to be whole with God. Not in one's own power, but from an invitation by God to be beautiful… to be our true selves. We must not feel we must do it; we are allowed to do it.