Skoonheid

Ek was nog altyd behep met skoonheid, enige vorm daarvan. Trouens dink ek ek is verslaaf daaraan. Tog moes ek leer om nie verslaaf te wees aan die skoonheid as sulks nie, maar aan die Een wat binne die skoonheid staan. Ek moes leer om dieper te kyk as die perfekte en volmaakte en om skoonheid ook in die aardse, alledaagse, onperefekte, selfs lelike raak te sien, want dis nie net daardie skone dinge wat aan ons onnatuurlike menslike standaard van skoonheid voldoen wat skoonheid vergestalt nie, maar elke lewende ding wat God se wese diep adem.

Ann Voskamp (2012:110-112) verwoord dit aangrypend:

I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep. Isn't beauty what we yearn to burn with before we die? That is what I crave: I hunger for Beauty. Beauty is the voice endlessly calling and so we see, so we reach. Doubt the philosophies, doubt the prophecies, doubt the Pharisees, but who can doubt this, Beauty? Beauty requires no justification, no explanation; it simply is and transcends. See beauty and we know it in the marrow, even if we have no words for it. Someone is behind it, in it. Beauty Himself completes.

All beauty is only reflection. An whether I am conscious of it or not, any created thing of which I am amazed, it is the glimpse of His face to which I bow down. Do I have eyes to see it's Him and not the thing? True, authentic beauty requires of us, lays claim to us, and it is this, the knees bent, the body offered in obedience. A pantheist's god is a passive god, but omnipresent God is Beauty who demands worship, passion, and the sacrifice of a life, for He owns it.