BEHOLDING BEAUTY
Recently, I was guiding a young teenager through a drawing lesson at a community center. I told her that she must learn the art of seeing; making keen observations of color, texture, and shape, and how light plays the ultimate role in revealing the object we are drawing.
Lessons from the Rainbow Garden
When I was a child my mother taught me the art of seeing while helping her in a garden she cultivated. She worked hard to make this garden. She first had to convince the housing authority to allow for a garden in the neighborhood. Then after it was approved, with only some help from others she had to care and maintain it. She called it Rainbow Garden. It brought color and beauty amid the rough, low-income, drug-infested neighborhood we lived in. Then the lesson came – as we entered the Rainbow Garden she would say, “Look at those colors, how the orange plays with the purple and the red with the green.” And with emphasis, nearly demanding that I look much closer into the flowers, not moving until I did. And at my closer and more careful observation, a whole new world opened up to me. Leaves had fur and flower petals now had texture. Pollen glittered on anthers like powder pads for bees.
For me, this was just the beginning of seeing beyond seeing. We all know the famous phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Subjectively, this is true. I have witnessed many who would call bizarre, and even morbid things beautiful. However, beauty from a divine perspective is way beyond what we see with our eyes.
A rare kind of seeing
“The awareness of grandeur and the sublime is all but gone from the modern mind. Our systems of education stress the importance of enabling the student to exploit the power aspect of reality. To some degree, they try to develop his ability to appreciate beauty. But there is no education for the sublime. We teach children how to measure, to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.” ~Abraham Joshua Heschel
So, how do we learn to see beyond if there is no education for the sublime? How do we begin to behold a deeper, transformative beauty? A beauty that is not bound by our opinions and solely dependent on proof? And once we experience this undeniable beauty, what does that transformation look like?
These are questions that I’m not attempting to answer in just an email. However, it continues to become a lifelong pursuit of mine.
My finite efforts to behold beauty
True beauty has its origin in God‘s creative and relational work. Its power and ability to capture our hearts are not affected by our passivity, ignorance, indifference, or familiarity. True beauty is also not subject to or dependent on our opinion of it. Beauty originating from the divine source is for divine purposes albeit misused and abused due to our selfish objectives.
Our efforts to beautify or make beautiful things are essentially good yet only a fading shadow, and a short-lived reflection of an eternal work. We should not be discouraged by this truth, but should ultimately continue seeking and asking for genuine ways to reflect and infuse God‘s beauty into our work and lives.
Seeing beyond what is seen is when we experience true beauty. This may take only a short while longer than normal looking so that we begin to carefully observe. For me, it happens the moment after I blink and reconsider what is before me – a mind transition to behold.
Seeing beyond what is seen will take much more than having our eyes open. It is surrendering our passive business to behold the powerful creative life force beyond us. It’s beholding with our hearts what we cannot grasp and reaching for what holds and sustains us for all eternity.
Our greatest privilege is the invitation by God to engage with His beauty, goodness, and truth. We are invited by a deep calling to walk alongside him in the cool of the morning once again and to see beyond seeing, as we tend to the garden of his creation—even in the current world we live in.
The delicacies of your presence inundated me with the intricacies of nature. ~Carmen Rodriguez, a loving mother and founder of the Rainbow Garden.
