Expanding our sense of beauty

IT’S good that we revisit our idea of beauty from time to time. The Pope just made another reference to it recently. In effect, he once again wants us to expand our sense of beauty.

These were some of the things he said:

“The search for beauty without truth and goodness can drive young people to fly toward artificial paradises that simply hide interior emptiness.”

“There is currently a dramatic separation between the search for beauty, understood in a reductive way as an exterior form, as an appearance to be sought at all costs, and the search for truth and the goodness of actions.”

“It is needed to again link beauty with reason, since reason that would like to separate itself from beauty would be diminished, as also beauty deprived of reason would be reduced to an empty and illusory mask.”

“Beauty has always been considered a path to arrive to God…The man of today, though absorbed by a cultural climate that is not always adequate for welcoming beauty in full harmony with truth and goodness, still has a desire and nostalgia for an authentic beauty, not superficial and ephemeral.”

Our problem is that we are stuck with just the physical, material and external aspects of beauty. It’s as if beauty has no other dimension, a much deeper one, more proper to us as persons and children of God.

To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with beauty in those peripheral aspects. What’s wrong is when we fail to connect them vitally to their proper foundation and principle.

What’s wrong is when with the constant bombardment of these aspects in media and elsewhere, we are made to spin and firm up a deepening belief that beauty indeed has no other beginning and end. These are just all it has.

And we cannot deny that there’s a surge these days of more intemperate ways to luxuriate in this kind and level of beauty, dripping with its usual cabal of companions like vanity, pride, arrogance, sensuality, self-absorption, greed, etc.

In fact, we now have some kind of a body cult, an adoration to the body that exacts our full attention to its need for wellness and beauty. It’s a cult that competes and tends to replace the worship we owe to God.

It kills our impulses to pray and make sacrifices. It arouses our bodily instincts and powers while lulling our spiritual faculties to sleep.

We need to defang this trend. And the challenge is precisely how to make it more human, more Christian, more in keeping with our true dignity. It’s not to do away with it completely. It is to regulate it, to subject it to a higher guiding principle.

The main difficulty we have to contend with is the democratic and free market type of economy that actually needs to be infused with the proper spirit. Absent that, it becomes a cesspool of wild, raw and unprocessed tendencies.

This is what we sometimes see in the media. For example, it’s now not anymore a source of shame to strut one’s stuff. Modesty these days is a value violently mutilated by the new and notoriously flirty prophetesses and apostles of the body cult.

Of course, the mentalities of people are changing also. The other day, someone told me that a girl who was to turn 18 decided not to have a debut. Instead she asked her parents for a nose job, some nipping and tucking in parts of her body, and, sorry for this, a bloating of the boobs.

There are many other examples that cannot be mentioned here. Obviously, the whole affair breeds temptations and feeds sins, vices and other irregularities. Scandals have exploded. On second thought, it’s a good sign that we are still scandalized. Woe to us when we stop getting scandalized!

Again, we should not stop at lamenting. That will not take us anywhere. We have to offer the antidote to this sweet poison menacing our society. All of us should find ways of how to relate the attention and care we give to our bodies to our worship to God, to our duty to love God and all.

Those in the media, in the entertainment and body care industry—beauty parlors, spa and massage parlors, gyms, etc.—should be the primary experts on how to link their work to God.

We all have to expand our sense of beauty and body care.