Weekly Reflection

What may be most missing in this highly technological world of ours is beauty. We value efficiency instead. We want functionalism over art. We create trash. We bask in kitsch. But beauty, right proportion in all things, harmony in the universe of our lives, truth in appearances, eludes us… Beauty is the most provocative promise we have of the Beautiful. It lures us and calls us and leads us on. Souls thirst for beauty and thrive on it and by it nourish hope. It is Beauty that magnetizes the contemplative, and it is the duty of the contemplative to give beauty away so that the rest of the world may, in the midst of squalor, ugliness, and pain, remember that beauty is possible.

--Illuminated Life: Monastic Wisdom for Seekers of Light Joan Chittister, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2000.

Reflection: Where am I nourished by Beauty and where do I offer Beauty?