You Are Beautiful, Day 4

You Are Beautiful - Beauty Inside and Out

The New Oxford Dictionary defines the word beautiful as an adjective, meaning “pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically” or “of a very high standard; excellent.” Yet it’s not an adjective many women would use to describe themselves. When we go shopping for clothes, adjectives like “cute”,“hot”, or “sexy” pop up; less often, “pretty” or “glamorous.” While all ofthese words have their place, I would argue that we as women should aspire to something greater: true beauty.  Cute, sexy, and glamorous are not synonyms for beautiful.  At worst, they channel outside perception of a woman into objectification. At best, they offer a superficial description of her outward appearance. Either way, is that how God wants us to show ourselves to the world?

You might argue that it is not our place to call ourselves beautiful. After all, as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to make that impression. I’ve heard more than a few women describe themselves as feeling beautiful when they are pregnant. This makes perfect sense to me; what could be more beautiful than the act of nourishing another life (or lives) over 9 months? If it weren’t for our current Western view of the ideal woman, it wouldn’t be odd at all. Historically, many cultures saw the rounded feminine shape as the most appealing. It’s a recent development that a long, lean physique is considered more desirable. The current definition of attractiveness aside, however, the question still remains as to how we women today can be our most beautiful.

Perhaps there is something more to beauty than one’s outer appearance. Let’s consider the Church’s most important woman, the Virgin Mary. Certainly all would see her as beautiful. Yet her beauty is tied to her humble willingness to do as God willed, her virginal purity, her maternal love for Christ, and her absolute faith. There is no mention of her physical beauty, although artists routinely depict her face with even features and a calm, serene, radiant appearance. Furthermore, Mary’s beauty has nothing to do with any of the adjectives women commonly use to describe themselves (as listed at the beginning), since we know she remained eternally a virgin and her marriage to Joseph was absolutely chaste.

So how can we as modern women apply this to our lives? How can we strive to be more completely beautiful? Our outward appearance serves a definite purpose in our daily life, so forgetting about it isn’t really the answer in my opinion. Rather, I think the answer is a more intense focus on the other aspects of Mary’s beauty – faith, openness to letting God’s will be done, humility, and chastity. Instead of trying to make an impression on others using only our clothing, hairstyle, and makeup, we can let our true beauty shine through from the inside. God made us beautiful. You are beautiful. Let’s step away from the mirror and live our lives so that beauty radiates from within us, just as Mary did. 

Sarah blogs about family, faith, and food at . . . and twins make four! (http://andtwinsmakefour.blogspot.com) She and her husband are expecting twin daughters this month.