Being human means we search for beauty everyday, everywhere. But what are we searching for? I have heard, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Is it really?
We can find beauty in our day but at the end of the day, consumer culture has been heavily defining beauty for us. It is sort of their job. They feed us expressions of what is beautiful by the mouth full from every new advertisement to the next big movie star. We cannot escape from being measured against someone else’s definition of beauty or from finding ourselves trying to conform to their understanding of beauty.
So this begs the question: Have we simply adopted someone else’s view of beauty and are we losing touch with what is truly beautiful?
Beauty is a very complicated thing. I mean, what exactly are we looking for when we look for beauty? When we see a photo or piece of art that is beautiful, what do we find?
In responding to the issue of culture’s definition of beauty, the Irish Poet John O’ Donohue eloquently stated,
“One of the greatest confusions of our time is that we confuse glamour for beauty. You see the airbrushed pictures but when we look into the eyes we see that they look like holes to nowhere. There is so much desperation in them.”
In the book Beauty, O’ Donohue clarifies beauty for us by relating the concept to its root of the word: calling. O’ Donohue understands beauty as the calling to be yourself and beauty is not only an expression of true humanity but also of the divine. He explains how beauty captured through the arts is supposed to awaken the beauty inside us. Beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder; beauty is in the beholder.
Beauty may be radically different than we have been trained to understand it. Whether it is a beautiful landscape, a work of art, or a beautiful person, I think we look for beauty around us so it will confirm the possibility of beauty within. If beauty can exist in a landscape, or in a piece of art, or in another person then maybe we too can be beautiful.
The reality is we cannot appreciate beauty or create beauty if we are disconnected to self. Just as beauty is found in self, beauty is just as much expression of self. The artist who is able to capture this creates something that extends beyond themselves to something eternal.
This craft is something we are culturally losing. I came across an article on beauty this week in the New York Times. It finishes by saying,
“The shift to post-humanism has left the world beauty-poor and meaning-deprived. It’s not so much that we need more artists and bigger audiences, though that would be nice. It’s that we accidentally abandoned a worldview that showed how art can be used to cultivate the fullest inner life. We left behind an ethos that reminded people of the links between the beautiful, the true and the good — the way pleasure and love can lead to nobility.”
The search for beauty is a challenging venture. We cannot behold beauty without confronting the fact that we are also beautiful. We cannot accept that we are beautiful without confronting the notion that we have been created by One who is beautiful. And we cannot create beauty without acknowledging that it points to something that is far beyond us.
Great insight!!