There is an all-too-familiar adage—”Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”—that has allowed many to assume beauty is utterly subjective. In fact, beauty is no more subjective than goodness or truth which together allude to the triadic nature of God. God is truth. God is goodness. God is beauty. Perhaps rather than dismissing this well-known saying we can do a bit of reconstruction by stressing that it doesn’t mean beauty is merely or purely subjective but rather that it appears to us or is accessed by us when we employ a particular way of engaging reality, a particular way of seeing called beholding.

It is not that beauty is a matter of taste, a personal opinion. It is that beauty is all around us but only experienced by us if we know how to approach, encounter, receive, and participate in it. To behold is to hold in one’s heart the being or essence of something or someone. It is a reverent way of going out to meet and greet the world. It involves a conscious enactment of holy susceptibility. It entails a knowing vulnerability and openness to be acted upon, affected, or moved by some internally or externally experienced reality. Beholding is a way of contemplative engagement that dispels indifference, apathy, cynicism, and callousness. It is an antidote that counteracts ignorance and arrogance.

Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky—who was well acquainted with suffering—has one of his characters say, “The world will be saved by beauty.” But beauty is not something that rides into the world or into our lives on a white horse to make all personal, communal, and cosmic boo-boos all better. It is rather a dynamic, incarnated but eternal truth that requests our presence, requires our participation, and invites our cooperation in the sacred drama by which the Holy One is making all things new.

For me, the truth of Dostoevsky’s words is perhaps more apparent if we change our means of engagement from one that is optical to one that is aural. If we swap out the act of beholding something visibly beautiful—a work of art, a dolphin in flight, a moonbeam on a glassy lake—with the act of deep or generous listening to a piece of music that both moves us and gets us moving, it is less difficult for me to imagine or to be convicted by the truth of Dostoevsky’s words. While both acts enable me to partake in awe, I have been brought to tears far more by what I have heard than what I have seen. I do believe that music could indeed save the world. I have posted many songs and performances on THE ALMOND TREE over the years (just type music in the search bar above right) that are examples of music that move me.

Today, I offer below another piece of music—and especially a creative performance—that moves me deeply, one that lifts my spirit, offers me hope, brings me joy, and gives me a sense of holy communion with the chorale members and with those unseen like-minded and like-hearted people who like me have grown weary beyond the telling of it with flippancy and rudeness and indecency and divisiveness and selfishness and greed and power mongering and callousness and violence and cruelty and war and a boatload of toxic and death-dealing -isms. Let this song and performance rain down on you, shower you with love, wash over you with delight, hope, and joy, and encourage you to look for and find ways to participate in the beauty that will save the world and make all things new. ~ Dan

♣ GOODPEOPLE ♣

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