Beauty

For many centuries the quote “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” has been used to express the view that beauty is a subjective matter. The human race has spent millions of pounds and untold hours in the search of this subjective concept. We all have an opinion of what we find beautiful from the acts of kindness that we describe as ‘doing a beautiful thing’ to jewellery and motorbikes to the natural world. Some of us will search to find beauty in the mirror and some take this to the extreme and go under the knife in order to reshape what they see until it matches their view of beauty.

I wonder however how subjective beauty is and if there is something that we would all consider beautiful. A new born baby perhaps, a sunset, a cobweb caught with frost, a forest glade. Even here though we would disagree, there may be more of a consensus but there would still be some who didn’t like the look of the baby, some who don’t like sunsets, cobwebs speak of spiders and forests difficult to find.... what about a manger or a cross?

I believe we have been given a desire in our very being to search for beauty, to appreciate beauty, to experience true beauty. Our search may have been corrupted over the years but our longing to fix our eyes on something of beauty is a desire to be explored and the finding of it perfected by the knowledge that it is part of our created purpose. To find this true beauty I believe we must go to the one who put the desire in our hearts, to the one who created a world full of beauty and culminated his work with man and woman. Maybe it is as simple as looking in the mirror, to look not with subjective eyes but with eyes that speak of truth and say that we have been created and considered very good. Our journey to find true beauty can and must go deeper. To turn our gaze from what we see with our natural eyes to look upon the one who created us, created this magnificent earth, this overwhelming universe. The one from whom all things have been created, all things! It is there I believe our journey to find true beauty really begins.