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Bearded Iris from http://www.flickr.com/photos/exequiel_mapa/6782993493/in/photostream/
BEAUTY |
"True Beauty is from elsewhere, a pure gift. It cannot be programmed nor its arrival foreseen. It never falls simply into the old patterns of what is already there nor is it frivolous or burdened with leaden solemnity.
Frequently, beauty is playful like dancing sunlight, it cannot be predicted, and in the most unlikely scene or situation can suddenly emerge. This spontaneity and playfulness often subverts our self-importance and throws our plans and intentions into disarray. Without intending it, we find ourselves coming alive in a sense of celebration and delight. The pedestrian sequence of a working day breaks, a new door opens and the heart recognizes the silent majesty of the ordinary. The things we never notice, like health, friends and love, emerge from their subdued presence and stand out in their true radiance as gifts we could never have earned or achieved.''
- Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O'Donohue -
May we never lose our sense of awe and wonder in whatever we do in all of our life endeavors! May our God of Wonder continue to surprise our lives with this sense of celebration and delight in whatever circumstances we may found ourselves in our life situations and ministries!
WONDER
"Among the many things that the religious tradition hold in store for us
is the LEGACY OF WONDER. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is TO TAKE THINGS FOR GRANTED. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.
AWARENESS OF THE DIVINE start with WONDER. It is the result of what humanity does with its higher comprehension. The greatest hindrance to such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.
RADICAL AMAZEMENT has a wider scope than any other act of humanity. While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.
The grandeur or mystery of being is not a particular puzzle to the mind, as for example, the cause for volcanic eruptions. We do not have to go to the end of reasoning to encounter it. Grandeur or mystery is something with which we confronted everywhere and at all times. Even the very act of thinking baffles our thinking, just as every intelligible fact is, by virtue of its being a face, drunk with baffling aloofness. Does not mystery reign within the reasoning, within perception, without explanation? Where is is the self-understanding that could unfurl the marvel of our own thinking, that could explain the grace of our emptying the concrete with charms of abstraction? What formula could explain and solve the enigma of the very fact of thinking? Out is neither thing nor thought but only the subtle magic of blending the two.
What fills us with radical amazement is the relations in which everything is embedded bu the fact that even the minimum of perception is a maximum of enigma. The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that comprehend at all.
The way to faith leads thought acts of wonder and radical amazement.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, "GOD IN SEARCH OF MAN"
