Everyday Spirituality: Beauty.

{ this is my normal caution for readers coming here to read about anomalies. This isn't one of those days. On rare occasions I post something about the felt presence of the spiritual in ordinary circumstances that any of us experience. Some folks are uncomfortable with "too much poetic spirituality" so I'm putting out the warning. Just wait until next time and I'll be back to "abnormal". I'm reading something from Ivan about a UFO case and may try to make sense of it then.}


But for me this is at least as important.


There are those who find it difficult to feel the Spiritual on a day like this, but for me it permeates everything. Like the Minnesota folksinger, Peter Mayer, sings: " Now, the challenging thing becomes, not to look for Miracles, but finding where there ISN'T one". The whole Creation is one Great Miracle Act, and you can feel the presence and hear the Voice that brought it all about if you just open eyes, ears, soul and listen.

That chilly scene is dense with beauty. What "beauty" is I don't know, and will never know. But it's there.

Philosophers across the centuries have failed to understand beauty, and science's efforts are even more off the mark. I'll not try. There just seems to be a certain "rightness" about the beautiful, something more than the subject of the beautiful display itself. That "beyond" touches us with its rightness, and "communes" somehow. One feels that the beauty "comes into you" if you let it, and makes you feel more whole.

Despite the gorgeous glory of Ms Gene Tierney above, beauty isn't at all about gender attraction of the animal kind. In fact, that is almost precisely NOT what beauty is about. Beauty CAN be in the gorgeous, but it can be in the decidedly NON-gorgeous. I was sitting outside enjoying this "beautiful" wintry day and along came "an old friend". For years I have watched this old black man shuffle along walking his old black dog. I hadn't seen him for quite some time, and hoped he was doing well. There he was: a big hello, a smile, a how're you doing?, a that's great!. It was right. It was fine. It was beautiful.

The Lord was giving me great privileges today. His wonderful Creation, the Old Man and the Old Dog, the snowflakes and the exercise of shoveling them. There were marvels everywhere. Just beside my outdoor chair stands a table. Just a couple of days ago it was perfectly snow-layered, and, yes, beautiful. Yesterday the slight warming created the phenomenon that you see: the snow had crept back "just so" all around the edge.

The scientist in me knows that this [really amazing when you meditate upon it] regularity is caused by fundamental physical laws. The frontier scientist in me knows that these laws are expressions of physical law laid down far back at the very beginning of the Universe. The spiritual person, who IS me, knows that I am in the presence of the still-operating Creative Word of God.

There It is, in the most ordinary of things: God's Voice still speaking.

"The challenging thing becomes, not to look for Miracles, but finding where there isn't one".

The continuing sounds of those Words can be heard and seen everywhere if we just let ourselves open to them.

Marvels. Marvels uncountable. Even in the Old Man and the shoveling of the snow.

Blessings folks. As the Pieman says: God makes The Apples; I just make the Pies.