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.
