Sunday Reflection

PRELUDE

At the present time...the beauty of the world is almost the only way by which we can allow God to penetrate us.... A sense of beauty, although mutilated,...is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. The soul’s natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it.... The beauty of the world is the co-operation of divine wisdom in creation.The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through the matter. He is really present in the universal beauty.

The love we feel for the splendor of the heavens, the plains, the sea and the mountains, for the silence of nature which is borne in upon us its thousands of tiny sounds, for the breath of the wind or the warmth of the sun, this love of which every human being has at least an inkling, is an incomplete, painful love, because the beauty of the world makes us yearn for some universal beauty...that does not seem to respond to us.

— Simone Weil