"Pastor's Musings......"

February 2026

Beauty

 Lately the subject of beauty, and our need for it, has been looming large in my awareness. I received an email recently about an artist, Jim Dingilian, who fills old bottles with smoke and brushes it away to create beautiful art [show photos]. What intrigues me about this – besides his obvious talent – is how he came up with the idea in the first place – what inspired him to do it? Apparently he could see something in those old, worthless bottles, that most of us can’t.

And isn’t that true of all beauty? Beauty makes the soul soar and is as essential to the spirit as food and water are to the body, yet it is mocked as sentimentality and foolishness. It is often eliminated from many churches and untaught in school curricula today, because who is permitted to define what is beautiful, anymore?

On any given day I am too little exposed to beauty. I imagine this is typical of most people these days. We go through the day surrounded by the ugly and the mundane, and not realizing we miss beauty. In my home though, I surround myself with beauty. I have it hanging on the walls and pouring out of stereo speakers. I visit it in my mind through pages in a book. And I realize that my home has become a sanctuary of beauty, because modern schools and churches tend not to be.

We appreciate beauty because beauty is a gift from God; as the song goes: “All things bright and beautiful, the Lord God made them all.” Beautiful things and people are uplifting to the soul. That means that we need more beauty in our lives rather than less. But there is a problem. The problem is not beauty itself, but our perceptions of what is beautiful. The Bible has this to say: “The LORD sees not as people see; people look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” (1 Sam.16:7). And again: “What matters is not your outward appearance – the styling of your hair, the jewellery you wear, the cut of your clothes – but your inner disposition. Cultivate inner beauty, the gentle, gracious kind that God delights in.” (1 Pet.3:3-4).

While standards of beauty have certainly changed over the years, and across cultures, nevertheless there are certain elements that are universally recognised as constituting the essence of true beauty. One of those elements is what’s called radiance or splendour, meaning something that shines out from the object or person, not merely what is seen on the surface. True beauty, therefore, is not “skin deep”; it has depth, it shines from within, a radiance and splendour that goes beyond the outward image. 

That’s why most ancient languages have more than one meaning for the verb “to see”. The basic meaning of “seeing” is simply to look at something. But a deeper meaning is to look into something or someone, to see the beauty that radiates from within. That’s why people sometimes say that love is ‘blind’, not because it can’t see but because it sees more than just what the person looks like on the surface.

True beauty lies within, in the heart, and shows itself in expressions of true, unselfish love. Some of the most beautiful people I have ever known have been off-putting at first glance, but once I got to know them, I was captivated by their gentle, gracious beauty. Appearances are important, but they are not everything, and they are not enough. What we need is a new way of seeing. We need to learn to see one another and ourselves with the eyes of God. We need to learn to look at one another with eyes that are patient and perceptive enough to pick up the beauty of the soul. We need a new way of seeing ourselves, and we need a new way of growing ourselves.

God is love and an inner beauty shines forth from us as we pray, for prayer is relationship, communion, a dialogue of love which allows us to enter into contact with God, so that he might live in our hearts. For this reason, when we see a person pray, we get a glimpse of the transcendent beauty of God; we see as God sees. So if there is an art we Christians need to learn and practice once more it is the art of interior decorator, longing to nurture within the spirit that God gives to each of us, the spirit that is loving and joy, creative and giving, the spirit of Jesus that is the beauty of the soul no matter the shape of the body. This is the ultimate beauty we ought to admire and pray for and seek to grow toward in all we do.

Blessings, Pastor Mark