I’ve begun to prepare for a retreat in April that, God willing, I will lead in Montreat, NC for the World Community of Christian Meditation (WCCM-USA). This week-long event has a subject/title which has been brewing in me, percolating actually, for more than a few years. I’m aware that my history with noticing Beauty goes back to childhood while my more recent practice of Silence has only enhanced my ability to see it. But with just a little intentional reflection, I find that both themes have woven themselves in and out of my life since before I had the words for them.
As a child our house almost directly backed up to a clay pot factory. Some days a large garage door in the factory would be open onto a hill of broken, discarded pots just inside. It was often my aim on those days to go ‘rescue’ one or several of the pots which I deemed, well, redeemable. The tricky part was that the men whose job it was to discard the damaged goods, weren’t any too happy to have a little girl scavaging in their pile of debris!
As I’m remembering it, I’d hang out in the alley and listen carefully for the way to be clear. If it seemed that no one was bringing out a new load, I’d start hunting-first close to the ground-but also for those pots for which I might need to climb up the pile a little. 😉 If I was lucky, I’d make a small stack of 4 or 5 pots and skeedaddle out of the factory, across the alley and back through our back gate. If I wasn’t so lucky, a sweaty, grimey man would come towards me, shouting and flayling his arms, and then lower the big door so that I couldn’t return.
My task was often a solitary one. Stealth is easier when alone. And not everybody thought that rescuing and then painting damaged clay flowerpots, using only a tin box of 5 watercolors was worthwhile. But I thought it was, and I thought they were Beautiful.
That little girl quietly creeping into the pottery factory had no idea that the abililty to see cracked, broken, blemished discards as beautiful, was a virtue. Nor did she realize that seeing and valuing what other people saw as broken, or would throw onto a heap, or simply walk by without noticing, was a gift she’d been given. Those deeper learnings about myself came only slowly over the past 60 plus years since my pottery adventures. I know only now that what drove me back then was beyond any conscious thought or explanation. Compelled is likely too strong a word, so I’ll just say it was a gentle nudge or leading. A leading that imprinted itself in my consciousness–to look for the beautiful–that would play out in myriad ways my whole life.
One of the authors I ran across in my research for the retreat suggests, as the catechism does, that “the chief end of humankind is to love God and glorify God forever. He seconds that with “most of us have no idea what it means to glorify.” And his conclusion is that to glorify God “is to see and appreciate Gods Beauty” in Godself, all creation, Christ and one another. In some ways I’ve known that in an ‘unknowing way’, my whole life.
There are many other beginnings into Silence and Beauty along my path–too many incidences of Silence and Beauty to which I felt called in my lifetime to count. And then many, many more that, once I recognized those themes, I have sought out and nurtured.
So dear friend, I’m wondering where you find beauty. I’m wondering if you have a sense of the connection of Beauty to God and vice versa… Do times of silence, reflection, contemplation lead you to Beauty? Do you recognize God in the beauty in your life? What do you think is our task as Beauty finders? Where does that thought lead you?
As this New Year begins, I welcome you to join me on this journey. And my hope is that both Silence and Beauty will lead you.
With love,
Kathleen–thecelticmonk
The Celtic Monk Musings 