You Are Beautiful, Day 7

"Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te." You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. -St. Augustine, The Confessions


As I read that line in yesterday's post, I couldn't help but think how true it was. Especially as I've been searching for knowledge and experiences of beauty, I've noticed a restlessness in my heart, and it is only quieted even slightly by returning to the understanding of God as beauty. I brought up the struggles I'm having to a couple of friends, who have both told me I'm looking for answers I can't have, either because they were not meant for this world, or because they may not exist at all. Something tells me the answers do, in fact, exist, but that perhaps they are not meant to be understood in this world. Unfortunately, this hasn't stopped me from trying to find them.


Over the past several days, I've turned to all the things I find beautiful, hoping that something would be that magic lightning bolt of understanding, but no dice. Listening to music hasn't helped increase my understanding, because there is beauty in both the discord and the harmony. Observing nature hasn't helped, because there is beauty in both the simple and the complex. Art is similarly unhelpful, because there are so many different styles which are beautiful and have little in common. Forget about literature, since it's different from author to author, and even piece to piece. There doesn't seem to be one quality or characteristic running through all these things which makes them beautiful, they just feel right. They speak to my mind, heart, and soul in that inexplicable way that very few things do, and that is how I know they are beautiful. 


The only thing I can isolate that these things have in common is that when I experience them, there is some sort of release. When I hear beautiful music, or see beautiful art or nature, or when I read something beautiful, I can only be calm and serene, and it feels for a brief instant as if the present moment is all there is. As Marc Barnes so eloquently explains, the desire for beauty is infinite. There is no point at which a person says, "I've experienced enough beauty, and I'm done now." One experience of beauty leads only to a desire for another, and then another, and then another. Nobody ceases to desire to experience beauty, no matter how much he has seen or heard or read. It's like being an addict, except for one crucial difference; the addict has to experience the euphoric feeling of the first high from outside himself, which he will spend the rest of his life chasing, and will never attain again. The desire for beauty is innate. Something prompts a person from within to seek beauty, though he does not know quite what it is, and he will spend his life chasing it, only to truly experience it for the first time when he is face to face with his Creator.


Until that day, all we have are reflections of beauty. We see and hear and read things which mimic God's beauty and perfection, but are not it, and so we continue to seek that which we cannot define and will always desire. However, this is, I think, why people are moved to conversion by beauty. There is something in the beautiful which those people are able to recognize as God, and the painful longing for that beauty tells them that somehow God exists, and it causes them to chase after Him.


I haven't yet mentioned what this means for you, though. Forgive me, but I'm about to use a couple of very tired cliches. Marianne Williamson, a woman who is best known for her activism for peace, is also the author of a longer version of this quote, often incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be?" It is that same tactic of Satan's which I talked about in Day 2's post, convincing us that we are not as like God as we are. So if God is beauty, then our greatest fear is being like Him, because the devil has assured us we are not. 


The next cliche is much more recent, though no less overused, I think. In the book The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the main character (whose name I forget) was doing something outlandish (which I also forget) when he says this line to the reader: "And in that moment, I swear we were infinite." This has absolutely nothing to do with the book, but if the experience of beauty is infinite, then whether you are experiencing beauty or someone else is experiencing it through you, in that moment you are infinite, as well. Because of the fall, we have been convinced to be afraid of what we are as a reflection of God. We are frightened of being infinite as we will be in heaven, but we are still unceasingly drawn to the infinite experience of beauty because our souls were made for infinite union with beauty Itself. And so we are restless until then.


You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

You Are Beautiful, Day 6

Beauty.  

They say it's in the eye of the beholder.  I struggle with that saying because it puts the onus on another person's opinion.  These days, as I approach forty, I'm thankful for the wisdom that age often brings.  Because part of that wisdom is the realization that reliance on others' affirmation is time-consuming, pointless and makes me weary.

These days it is so easy to fall into the trap of believing we are not beautiful if we don't measure up to a societal construct.  There are salons on every corner promising that you'll be beautiful when you leave.  The billboards scream that you'll be beautiful if you call this or that doctor and schedule a consult for the latest augmentation surgery.  The radio blasts with commercials for the latest fad diets, "Eat Real Food!  No Exercise!  Lose Weight Fast!"  The magazines in the grocery store checkout aisle scream intimidation hosting airbrushed beauties with trussed up locks, 6 inch heels (often there is cleavage to match!) and a skirt with a view.

One thing I notice is that women (especially), often mold our opinions of ourselves into the opinions others have of us.  Instead of the acknowledgement that our worth and value comes straight from the One who made us, we look to other, flawed human beings to give opinions.  And we often assign a great worth to those opinions!  

Why do we do this?  Part of the reason is because we're wired that way.  Women thrive on relationships and emotional connections.  We need other women to affirm us and we expect our men to do so as well.   There's nothing wrong with that, to a point.  But what can happen, then, is that women place higher value on one negative opinion and disregard anything positives they might encounter. 

Of one thing I am reasonably sure:  If we stay focused on God in our lives, we will need less affirmation.  We will acknowledge our beauty as we know we are made in God's own image. 

If we bathe in the love of our Savior regularly in prayer, perhaps Adoration, and certainly frequenting the Sacraments, we will keep our hearts full of the Love of Christ.  And when we're full of the Love of Christ, we won't need as much affirmation from our peers or even our men. 

"Our hearts are restless until they rest in You." --Saint Augustine, Confessions

The endless pursuit of affection and affirmation from the world will never be enough to satisfy our hearts.  God's beauty poses a vast difference from the world's opinion.  God sees all of our being.  He is pleased with our physical attributes -- all of them, and He sees completely through to our soul. 

We are beautiful because He created us in His image. 


Michelle is a Catholic wife and mom to five children, who works full-time outside the home.  She enjoys reading, writing and running.  You can find her musings at Endless Strength.

You Are Beautiful, Day 5

I hope you all are enjoying the series so far! I've really loved seeing the takes of other women on beauty so far, and I can't wait to read the rest!

Since I've started this project, I've been doing a lot of research on beauty. I want to experience it and understand it as much as I can, partially so I can write better posts about it and gain more meaningful insights into it, but also because the very thought of beauty lights a fire in my heart that makes me yearn to know and understand it in its fullness. I suppose that this is because, going back to Day 2, God is pure beauty, and any beauty we experience on earth is a reflection of Him. I guess that on some level, this is me longing to be in communion with God. However, I don't just desire to experience beauty, I also want to know what makes it tick, so to speak. I want to know what makes beauty beautiful, what it is that makes it so attractive.

Recently, I was able to uncover some information about a mathematical standard of beauty called the Golden Ratio. The discovery of the ratio is attributed to the sculptor Phidias (hence the use of the Greek letter Phi in the formula) whose sculptures seemed to be the embodiment of the ratio. For anyone who's curious, the actual ratio is 1:1.6180... and tends to be expressed as a rectangle, though I do not know why, as I have never found rectangles to be a particularly pleasing shape. I suppose that explains why I'm a historian and not a mathematician. I was thankful to have found the ratio, though, and I think that's because some small part of me did want a quantifiable standard of beauty. Some part of me wanted to know that beauty can be reduced to a comprehensible formula, even if I'm not the one who comprehends it.

That said, the application of the ratio to people unsettles me somewhat. Dr. Stephen Marquardt has developed a mask which supposedly outlines the most beautiful face in the world. It fits all ethnicities, and supposedly all the famous attractive people we know of today (or most of them, at least) have faces that fit this mask almost perfectly. Statues from Ancient Greece and Rome fir the mask, as do many paintings from the Renaissance through more recent centuries, aiding the argument that this is simply the mold for the most universally attractive face.

Some sources even go so far as to deny the idea that standards of beauty have been different in different times and places. As a budding historian, I'm not terribly fond of this idea. I do not deny math its rightful place in the world and our understanding of it, and I certainly will not dispute the attractiveness of the faces that fit the Golden Ratio mask, but this argument is too narrow. It leaves no place for a realistic reading of history, ignoring the factors which have caused societal standards of beauty to change, and indeed, ignoring the fact that even now there is no uniform idea of what makes a person beautiful.

Another thing that bothers me about the idea that this mathematically based mask is the true standard of beauty is that it dehumanizes individuals. It makes people whose beauty can be measured into genetic accidents; their beauty has no purpose, and is based only upon our brains' recognition of specifically calculated numbers. The other side of the idea that bothers me is the preclusion of others from being beautiful because they don't fit the mask. It does not recognize the uniqueness of persons, or account for the whole. The mask identifies one person as beautiful because their face fits, and another as not beautiful because their face doesn't fit. It has an unpleasant, utilitarian flavor, and I don't like it.

I think what bothers me most about the use of the Golden Ratio in determining whether or not something or someone is beautiful is that it removes God from the equation. God created each person to be beautiful like He is beautiful, and He created nature to be beautiful as a reflection of Himself. It is good that He has also given us a way to understand beauty cerebrally, but we've fallen into the trap of measuring beauty by the aesthetic pleasure we receive from it, and applied that mistaken standard to people. I have no problem discounting the work of Jackson Pollack if it isn't aesthetically pleasing to me, but I have no desire to discount the dignity and value of a person because he or she is not aesthetically pleasing or useful. God did not design people to be used like that.

I know I don't fit the Golden Ratio mask, and that most of the people I know probably don't fit it either, and that doesn't bother me. It doesn't make me or them unattractive, and it has no bearing on our intrinsic worth as children of God. I want to see as God sees, and love as He loves, and though I often fail miserably at that, I know that it means fighting the temptation to dismiss people because they are not deemed useful or beautiful by human standards. You are beautiful because you were brought into being from the mind of God by His love. You are beautiful regardless of any label this world can place on you. You are beautiful by virtue of your very existence, because God wanted you here, and because He loves you.

"But the LORD said to Samuel: Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature, because I have rejected him. God does not see as a mortal, who sees the appearance. The LORD looks into the heart." -1 Samuel 16:7

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.

You Are Beautiful, Day 3

Beauty can be such a hot button topic in our society. There are so many facets to this one seemingly simple word. Beauty is often times defined by our looks and image. In America, that generally means being youthful, being slim but with a womanly figure, having symmetrical features, and either blonde hair, or being 'exotic' looking. The problem with a definition based on looks is that most of us don't measure up! Society, largely by way of media, makes us think that beauty is something we must constantly seek. We must always want to be thinner, tanner, prettier, have the most fashionable clothes... you know the drill. It's why we are bombarded with ads for plastic surgery, teeth whitening, and with airbrushed models on the covers of magazines. They want us to want that. And guess what? It works!

We also know that there's the smaller group of us who says beauty is defined by what's inside. Beauty is your personality and your character. It's the love you give, the friend that you are to others, and your (hopefully) positive self esteem. But you probably know as well as I do that, even though we know how true beauty should be defined, it's really easy to slip back into that societal way of thinking. Yes, I like who I am as a person (ok, most of the time!) and I do think I am a beautiful person when I think of what I have to offer others, but you better believe that I spend way more time wishing I looked better in a swimsuit, hoping I don't wrinkle too early in life, and wanting prettier features than I do focusing on my inner beauty. So I decided to take it a step further.

You my have seen my post about Catholic guilt that I wrote a few months back. I don't think it's the negative thing that people make it out to be, and actually wish it had a new term, because 'guilt' has a bad connotation. But I've noticed that when I want to make a change in life, if I can tie the change to something related to my faith, I am so much more likely to follow through and really buy into it. It's the reason why I can give up sweets for Lent and not cheat for all 40 days, but I can give up sweets to improve my health other times of the year and I generally cheat before lunch time. I'm usually more successful in doing something for God than for myself. So I thought, "how can I tie beauty into my faith?" My thought is that if I see beauty the way God sees beauty, I will be less likely to feel like I'm not beautiful!

So I turned to the bible, which has quite a lot to say about beauty, actually, and two things in particular really stood out to me. The first was from Song of Solomon 4:7, "You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you." Now I know this is a lover speaking, but there is no better lover than God, so the first thing that came to my mind is that this quote must be exactly how God sees you and I! And if he sees us that way, how can we dare to think differently? Well we do, because we are humans and we are flawed. But what I propose is thinking about this verse when you are being particularly hard on yourself, or wishing you had her legs or her waist or her fashion sense. If we can get ourselves out of that pity party and remember how God sees us, and really, how the people who love us see us, we'll remember that nothing else matters.

This led me into the next verse, from Genesis 1:26, "Then God said 'And let us make man in our image...." You know why God sees us as beautiful and without flaw? Because we are made in His image. Have you ever stopped to think what that means? I never really thought about it until someone brought it up at our engagement retreat. God made us in His image. If I point out all the things about my image that are 'wrong', am I not sort of saying that there is something wrong with God? And that there is something wrong with how He made me? Going to scripture, and leaving behind media and society, is one of the best ways I have found to embrace my beauty. I may not be 'typically beautiful', but I am beautiful because I was made by a God who loves me.

Stacy is a newlywed who blogs at http://catholicandcrunchy.blogspot.com 

about married life, PCOS, NFP, frugality, and being crunchy! 

You Are Beautiful, Day 2

So some of you may be wondering, why beauty? What made me latch onto this theme so much that I'd want to write about it for thirty days, or have other people write about it for me for thirty days? To this I would say, think about the highest praise you can give a thing. Oftentimes it's that that thing is beautiful, or if it is something like art or nature, which is supposed to be beautiful, you would say that a particular subject is more beautiful, or the most beautiful. Think about who we idolize in our society: people who are rich, powerful, or beautiful.

Going from that point- that we idolize people who are rich, powerful, or beautiful- let me pause. We do idolize these people, but we also recognize that there is something about money and power which can corrupt a person. There is something about them that, while attractive, is not quite pure. We are instinctively wary around people we perceive as being very wealthy or very powerful, but beauty puts us at ease. It is difficult to mistrust that which is beautiful, because it speaks to some subconscious part of us in a way that other things do not. Wealth and power cause us to fold in on ourselves, if you will, as if for protection, but beauty is evocative. Beauty exposes vulnerability.

To put it another way, and to borrow from one of my favorite bloggers, "There are three Transcendentals, three infinite goals that man naturally strives for. He strives for Goodness (that which he should obey), Truth (that which he should believe), and Beauty (that which he should admire). To the Christian worldview, these three Transcendentals, in their perfection, are God Himself. God is goodness, truth and beauty. In their imperfect form—that is, in all man's pitiful attempts to be Good, to know Truth, and to reach Beauty—God is pointed to. They are each images of God." Does that last sentence sound familiar? It should, because it sounds like Genesis 1:27, "God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." God is beauty itself. Earthly beauty is an image of God. Man and woman are in the image of God. Therefore, man and woman must also be beautiful.

However, this is knowledge which, even if we have it, we may lose from time to time. It is Satan's job to take us away from God, and part of how he does that is by convincing us that we are not as like God as we are. If we are beautiful because we are in the image of God, who is beauty, then it stands to reason that Satan would try to convince us that we are not, in fact, beautiful. Of course, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the help he receives from modern society. One impossible, non-existent standard of beauty is perpetuated, which causes us to look at ourselves and conclude that we are not beautiful.

You may wonder, perhaps, why it is that Satan does not simply try to convince us that there is no such thing as beauty, just as he has gradually eroded the idea of a concrete good and a concrete truth. If there were no beauty, then there would be no God, and if there were no God, then would we not be separated from Him by virtue of our ignorance of Him? We would indeed be separate from God if we believed He did not exist, but the problem for Satan is that, like all other creatures, he needs God. He needs God more than any of us do. If Satan were to try to convince humans that there is no beauty, and thus, no God, then he would be arguing for his own non-existence, as well. It is not to say that Satan is beautiful, but that if man did not believe God exists, then there would be no need for Satan. A non-existent God does not need an existent enemy. Satan needs beauty to exist so humans will keep believing in God, so he can draw them away from Him.

Especially in such a culture as ours, which places an imaginary beauty on a pedestal, Satan does not need to be that small voice in the back of our minds saying, "You're not as pretty as her," or "You'll never look like he does." No, with all the hypersexual, airbrushed and photoshopped ads we see every day, he can be that voice right in front of us saying "Buy [product name] now, and you could lose up to 25lbs!", or the feature article on a magazine, saying "Exclusive! 15 Secret Beauty Tips Straight from Milan!" Our beauty as creatures in the image and likeness of God, the very pinnacle of His creation, is under attack constantly, and I wanted to use this month to combat that. Because beauty speaks to my heart in the same way it speaks to the hearts of others, I wanted to take an opportunity to remind others that beauty, like dignity, comes from being a child of God. Because God uses beauty to move our hearts, I wanted to remind you of your inherent power to do the same. God made you beautiful, because He made you like Him.

You Are Beautiful, Day 1

This is the first post in my month-long extravaganza project called "You Are Beautiful". The idea for this project came from an organization called Made in His Image, which is a Catholic organization based in Nashville, TN, and helps women recovering from eating disorders and abuse discover that they are beautiful because God made them in His image. I would be fibbing a bit if I didn't admit that the idea came to me when I wasn't feeling my most beautiful, and I hoped that writing a post reminding every woman, and indeed, every person, that they are beautiful would make me feel better.

But then I stopped. I'm not the only one who feels ugly sometimes, and it never hurts to hear that you're beautiful, or that you're loved, or that you're worth something. So I took the idea of writing one post to make myself feel better, and turned it into a month-long, post-a-day, multi-blogger collaboration project. I've recruited almost twenty Catholic writers (most of them bloggers much more prolific than myself) to write posts on the theme "You Are Beautiful". Some of them I know personally, some only through Facebook. Most of them are women, though I do have one intrepid young man contributing. There are single, dating, and married women, though there are no nuns (that would have been awesome). Basically, I tried to get all different sorts of women to put their own spin on how you are beautiful, and relate that to God.

I am psyched to post these amazing reflections, and to share with you all the writing of great, faithful bloggers. I want this message ingrained on the hearts of everyone who reads this blog by the end of the month: you are beautiful. God made you in His image, and because God is beautiful, so are you. And I'm not limiting this to external beauty, because if that is all you focus on, you can make anything imperfect seem ugly. Outer beauty is wonderful, but a good heart, a strong mind, faithfulness, love, and hope can make anyone radiant, and those are what make up a person, not how he or she looks.

This project started as an idea in the head of a slightly dejected twenty-year-old woman, and I'm hoping that it will become so much more. I hope that my readers will read each day's posts, and my contributors, as well. I hope that everyone will be able to take something away from this project, and if even one person feels a change because of it, then no one's efforts will have been wasted. Stay tuned for thirty days of fun, insights, and positive reinforcement! And remember, you are beautiful.