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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 kitch. But beauty, right
proportion in all things, harmony in the universe of our lives, truth in appearances, eludes us. We paint
over good wood. We prefer plastic flowers to wild flowers. We reproduce the Pieta in plastics. We
forego the natural and the real for the gaudy and the pretentious. We are, as a people, awash in the
banal. A loss of commitment to beauty may be the clearest sign we have that we have lost our way to
God. Without beauty we miss the glory of the face of God in the here and now.

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.

Beauty is not a matter of having enough money to buy anything in sight. It is a matter of having enough
taste to recognize quality, depth, truth, harmony when we see it. “Beauty is truth and truth beauty /
That’s all we know and all we need to know,” the poet John Keats wrote. A thing is beautiful, in other
words, when it really is what it purports to be. There are cures, of course, for deprivation of spirit. We
could take down the billboards that turn the landscape into a junkyard of old ideas. We could study
the order, the harmony, the proportion of a flower. We could strain our eyes to look for what is
beneath the obvious in the wrinkles of age, the misshapen knuckles of a worker’s hands, the meaning in
every moment, the ultimate in every possibility, the essence of every encounter. Or we could simply
own one soul-shattering piece of art ourselves, put it up in a solitary place over and against the
commonplace that normally surrounds us. We could let it seep into the center of the self until we find
that we can never be satisfied again, anesthetized again, by the visual platitudes of the world in which
we live.

What we do not nourish within ourselves cannot exist in the world around us because we are its
microcosm. We cannot moan the loss of quality in our world and not ourselves seed the beautiful in our
wake. We cannot decry the loss of the spiritual and continue ourselves to function only on the level of
the vulgar. We cannot hope for fullness of life without nurturing fullness of soul. We must seek beauty,
study beauty, surround ourselves with beauty.

To be contemplatives we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and
consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give it away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are
responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.

from Illuminated Life: Monastic Wisdom for Seekers of Light by Joan Chittister (Orbis)