Beauty.

We look around us at things - flowers, trees with their cloak of autumn leaves, sunlight on rippled water, a bird soaring above - and see them as beautiful.  They are not.  They are just things we see.  Other things we may find ugly - litter blowing across the footpath, the churned-up mud at a field entrance, the smashed windows, graffiti'd walls and leaning doorframe of an abandoned building.  Again, these are just things;  it's our perception that establishes their beauty or ugliness.

It does not seem to be something we need.  Some ugly things are also dangerous, to health or wellbeing or our personal safety, so perhaps it's as well that their appearance repels us.  Some beautiful things may also be quite good to eat, or may offer a promise of safety and security, so perhaps, again, there is some benefit in their being attractive to us.  But on the whole this beauty versus ugliness thing is just something that is, a fact of our human lives.

But I do find it very interesting and quite instructive that we are moved by the perceived beauty of some things, repelled or nauseated by the perceived ugliness of others.  Of course it's not an exact science.  Some ugly things may be quite beautiful inside, a lesson the fairy tale 'Beauty and the Beast' seeks, I suppose, to teach us.  I remember also the Flanders & Swann song about the warthog.  Some things can be beautiful but also deadly - delphiniums and monkshoods are lovely flowers to look at, but fatal if their beauty were to tempt us to eat them.  And our perceptions of what is or isn't beautiful don't always coincide;  beauty, as we're told, is in the eye of the beholder.  It is also to some extent culturally conditioned.

But for the most part there is a remarkable degree of agreement, as to what is beautiful and what is not.  This is true not only of what we see but also of what we hear.  What is the origin of this sense of beauty?  Why do we have it?  What is it for?  There are those who would describe it as nothing more than an anomaly, a happy accident.  It isn't necessary but it's nice that we have it.  Nevertheless this is what motivates many of our attempts at artistic expression, and encourages us in our search for knowledge and meaning.

It particularly encourages us, I think, in our search for self-understanding.  And perhaps it may also encourage us in our search for something beyond ourselves that may help to explain ourselves, which for some of us at least is the search for God.  Which leaves me with the almost despairing realisation that, if it is the perception of beauty that motivates our search for God, how sad that belief in God has led to so many ugly events and activities, as we trace the history of the world.

In my mind beauty and peace are inextricably linked.  I find it so very sad, therefore, that they seem so often, and so fatally, broken apart in reality, and that, having been tempted by beauty to search for God, we allow him to become small and ugly and crude in the support of our human controversies and lusts after power - or it would perhaps be better to say, we replace the great and true God who must be the source both of peace and of beauty, with a small and mean-minded substitute of our own devising.