All things bright

Yesterday I was invited, along with about eight others, to the house of some friends for a slideshow of their trip to Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This was not your clunk-click holiday snaps ("this was right after an amazing thing happened"). This was a choreographed evening that involved all our senses. The presentation was split into four collections of beautiful images, accompanied by carefully-selected music and their occasional stories. Between these we were served courses of Croatian dishes to the point where we barely had room for a taste of grappa to finish off. It was a painstakingly-crafted, glowing experience.
What inspired me most was their observation and appreciation of beauty in everything from an ancient doorhandle to a story of life since the war, from freshly-caught tuna to a bullet-ridden wall, from the harmonies of the local music to a medieval danse macabre fresco.
It beggars belief how the people of the area turned on each other after years of friendship and blew holes in the natural and architectural heritage of their country nearly twenty years ago. They became temporarily blind to the beauty around them and in themselves. But beauty will always win out, as the evening illustrated.

All the weapons that the world can muster cannot push a single crocus through the frozen winter soil.
Margaret Silf

This tied in nicely with my ongoing reading of John O'Donohue's 'Beauty: rediscovering the true sources of compassion, serenity, and hope'. There is a causal connection between beauty and peace. We become victims when we lose faith in beauty, when we allow fear to push us back into a monochromatic, shallow-breathed shell of self-pity and resentment. 

If one has become stuck in a certain narrow or predictable way of seeing, the outside light cannot bring colour into one's life...When no fresh light can come into the mind, the colour and beauty fade from life...Each of us is responsible for how we see, and how we see determines what we see. Seeing is not merely a physical act: the heart of vision is shaped by the state of soul. When the soul is alive to beauty, we begin to see life in a fresh and vital way. The coating of dead dust falls from the windows. Freed from their dead forms the elements of one's life reveal new urgency and possibility.

John O'Donohue Beauty

To appreciate beauty and gain peace requires mindful effort and engagement with the offerings of the present moment. Peace, both personal and communal, is a hard-won stillness, an active calmness that is founded on a wide-eyed embrace of the whole holiness of Beauty. Peace is sought and found through eyes purposefully lifted towards Life and towards a deliberate faith in the saving safety of God's open hand and the beauty that God sees in us.

A small lifting of the heart suffices,

a small remembrance of God,

a movement of the heart's worship.

~ Brother Lawrence The Practice of the Presence of God

 Kontemplacija by Croatian sculptor Ivan Mestrovic.