Beauty

In the book Always a Guest by Barbara Brown Taylor, she shares a sermon called Errors about Beauty.  I wrote about it earlier. 

In this sermon, she shares three of Elainse Carry's ideas about beauty (from On Beauty and Being Just)

1. Beauty prompts a copy of itself.  We see a sunset, and we grab our iphone and snap its picture.  For me, I see a lovely handmade greeting card, and I want to replicate it.  What is so beautiful around you that you want there to be more of it?
2. Seeing beauty awakens in the seer what is not beautiful.  Wendell Berry said, "There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places." For example, you might see the beauty in the wonder of a child's face, laughing at a story someone has read to him. That beauty will help you to see when a child is hungry, crying, or hurting, and you are moved to do something about it.  What around you is desecrated and needs your work?
3. Beauty has the power to remove us from the center of the universe like nothing else can.  What in your life is so beautiful that it has removed you from the center of your world? What has made your less selfish, less self-center, less "me first?" Taylor says that Christians call this power of "redemption" or "salvation." We are called as Christians, aren't we, to remove ourselves from the center of our world.

I love this description of the effects of beauty. Have you ever been surprised by beauty? I wrote a few weeks ago about North Bend State Park in the rain.  I had the same experience in the West, when visiting our son in Nevada.  I live in West Virginia, where the mountains are green (or a patchwork of autumn colors), and I think it is beautiful. Out West, it looks so different!  And yet, if you open your eyes to what is around you, I think you can see - at least I did - that it is beautiful in its own way.  That kind of awareness of beauty can lead us to seeing what is not beautiful, too, and moving ourselves out of our selfish locations as the center of the world and acting to redeem it.