A Glimmer of Beauty
The blooming trees outside the St. Thomas More Chapel in Winona
Over the past several years, I watched them with eager anticipation each year when spring rolled around, and I will admit that I miss them a bit this May. In case you were wondering, “they” are a pair of crabapple trees that stand outside the St. Thomas More Chapel on the Winona campus of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota. As nature started to reawaken from her winter-induced dormancy each year, these two trees would explode in a flourish of color that I found absolutely breathtaking. While there were plenty of other crabapple trees on the campus (and throughout the city of Winona, in fact), these two had an especially vibrant shade, and thus they always caught my eye. The initial blossoming of leaves into a rich red-pink hue would last only a few weeks before maturing into a summer green, so I tried to savor that span when I could enjoy this particular manifestation of nature’s beauty.
I suspect many of us would agree that the encounter with beauty is an elevating experience. I certainly know that gazing upon those trees would always boost my spirits and lift my heart. Meeting beauty can be a bit of a paradoxical experience: it takes us out of ourselves in that we are drawn to whatever manifestation of beauty presents itself to us, but it also makes us more aware of ourselves as we experience this beautiful phenomenon before us. The meeting with beauty is a moment of both self-transcendence and self-realization. Trying to define exactly what constitutes beauty is a notoriously tricky business, of course, but perhaps this combination of self-transcendence and self-realization can serve as a bit of a gauge for recognizing the authentically beautiful.
In that light, then, one could reasonably argue that nothing is more beautiful than the revelation of God’s love that comes to us in Christ, especially in his Paschal Mystery. In contemplating Christ’s dying and rising, we are drawn toward the manifestation of a love that is so rich it is willing to embrace death but so powerful that death cannot contain it. And even as we are drawn into that love that dwarfs our every prior understanding of love, thereby drawing us out of ourselves, we recognize that this very love is poured out for each and every one of us, and thus we become rooted in our truest identity as God’s beloved ones.
Of course, we meet beauty in many ways—in nature, in the fine arts, in one another, to name but a few. And while not every encounter with beauty may be as profound as our meeting with the beauty that is manifest in Christ, every encounter can be seen as a “glimmer”, so to speak, of the supreme beauty to be found in the Lord’s love for us. And thus every such encounter becomes an opportunity to open ourselves at least a little bit more to that dynamic of self-transcendence and self-realization that can bring immense richness to our lives.
