Seeing Beauty

The following is an excerpt from the CNA weekly column, “The Way of Beauty”by Sr. Joan L. Roccasaivo, CSJ. This was posted July 20, 2011 and can be found in its entirety at: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column.php?n=1686

How to see beauty

Seeing and hearing are the senses most often used to experience beauty; the others, less so.  How is beauty to be seen?  Receiving a thing of beauty involves an understanding and an attitude but it is also a matter of repetition. The following steps can serve as a guide for perceiving a thing of beauty:

1.The beholder should take a step back from the form. Putting up barriers by way of bias and curiosity should be relinquished in order to allow the being to be itself.

2.One steps back from self-centeredness and stops looking at the form solely from its relation to self. One must intentionally be a self-forgetting person, looking at it for its own value, that is, objectively. This is the love of benevolence.

3.One should avoid looking at the accidental things but go deeper into the interiority of the being by looking well.  To grasp the totality of the form, one must develop a set of eyes that see reality with a different vision.

4.One should try seeing the form as a subject and not as an object.

5.The beholder should repeat the practice, stopping to look at the beauty of a simple thing, allowing the beauty to shine through it, contemplating it, grasping it and being grasped by it.  One should see well.

6.Loving the good allows its beauty to shine forth.  The thing of beauty is designed to let its magic work in the beholder.

Saints and young children are open-minded people, the former, having trained themselves to see all things in the context of the divine, and the latter, who have not as yet learned bias.

Walking with Your Father

The Catholic Church defines grace as “the free and underserved gift that God gives us to respond to our vocation to become his adopted children” (CCC Glossary). The Church often identifies four different kinds of grace: sanctifying grace, sacramental grace, actual grace, and special graces. To better understand these kinds of grace, consider this:

Imagine grace is like walking with your father when you were a child. Grace in general involves activity with another, like walking alongside your father. Being with God causes us to be animated—that’s the gift of God’s presence being with us. The fact that you are consciously walking with your father means that you choose to be with him.

If you were in the habit of walking with your father because you knew you needed his presence with you to help you find your way, then that is like sanctifying grace. As a child you realized that you could not make your way through the path or to the destination unless you were with your father. He knew how to guide you because he knew the way. You trusted that he would lead you in the right direction and on the right path. You formed a particular disposition to be with your father while on this journey.

If while on this journey you and your father were holding hands, then this is like sacramental grace. Through that touch, you felt his walk. Maybe the holding hands lead to an arm over the shoulder or even a side embrace. The closer you walked together, the more body contact was made. Maybe you tripped and he had to bend down to pick you up. Maybe he was proud of you, so he gave you a pat on the shoulder and rubbed your hair. Maybe as you spent more time together, he wanted to give you a hug and you realized you needed his embrace.

And then at very particular moments during the walk while holding hands, he drew you closer to him by moving your hand toward him. He directed your body to mimic his body, so you could walk in the same place where he walked. This is like actual grace. And because you had already trusted to walk with him, and were comforted by his touch, you didn’t blindly follow him but rather conformed yourself to be like him, on this journey.

Perhaps while on this wonderful walk with your father, he started to whistle and you too started to whistle. Then your father started to ask you where you wanted to walk. You began to think about your own path, but you knew you didn’t want to walk alone. So you considered where you wanted to walk with him. You took in consideration what he taught you, how he showed you certain moves, and so you began to take your own step in imitation of him. This is like special graces. Yes you may be walking on your own, but you are definitely walking like him, hopefully never letting go of his touch.

Now imagine that your walking has turned into dancing! And in the dancing you and your father are moving to a whole new rhythm and you enter into a whole new way of moving your body. The touch means a lot more, and there is no final end to the walk because you’ve reached your destination—it’s to dance with your father. This is what Heaven is like. Just as walking prepares us to dance, so too grace prepares us for Heaven.