I Was Just Thinking FINDING THE WORLD BEAUTIFUL
	NOVEMBER 2005

by Don Huntington, Editor In Chief

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. (Francis Bacon)

When I first read them, Bacon’s words stopped me in my tracks because I recognized in an instant how profoundly true they are.

I’m often strongly moved by the beauty and grace of things that seem flawed and imperfect. The poem, “I am a little church,” by EE Cummings, for example, seems to me to be one of the most compelling literary works I ever read. But imagine a traditional copy editor receiving the following:

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His
    presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly
    His darkness)

From a formal point of view, the poem is a grammatical mess. Punctuation is missing or mistaken. Words are in the incorrect order. Adjectives don’t really fit with the words they modify. The only capitalized words are wrongly capitalized. Everything about it is “wrong.” From a superficial point of view, the thing is obviously in serious need of a complete rewrite.

Nevertheless, no editor in America putting together an anthology of American poetry would touch one character of the passage. It would hardly be correct to say that Cummings poem works in spite of all the “errors.” In some strange way (at least for those of us who “get” Cummings) the poem works precisely because of the unconventional problems — the “strangeness in the proportion,” to use Bacon’s words.

I especially believe in the principle of finding beauty in imperfection when it comes to people. I have always pushed away as too dismissive Shakespeare’s simple comment that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” The matter of common beauty goes much further than mere internalization. My eye actually recognizes rather than merely creates the beauty I see in people around me.

I also see in many people the inward beauty that the Bible talks about: a beauty from the “inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit.” And then the Bible adds about this kind of beauty, that it “is of great worth in God’s sight.” Right! And in my sight too!

People sometimes express a standard that we should accept people as they are, but it is possible to live on a much higher plane where we cherish people as they are. We embrace people as they are. We don’t love them in spite of their differences, but because of those differences. “Viva la difference,” as the French put it, though usually in a somewhat different context.

Crooked teeth, skin blemishes, veins, wrinkles.... These all magically become part of the beauty of the people whom I love. The attractiveness of a beloved person somehow becomes enhanced by the lack of porcelain-perfect complexions or god-like bodies.

If I come to love someone who is overweight, skinny, aged, whatever…, I come to the place where I wouldn’t change their appearance if I had the power to do so. At least, they don’t need to change their looks in any way for my sake.

My wife complains about her wrinkles, but I tell her that I don’t want her to look like a 17 year old girl. I want her to look just like she looks. I think her wrinkles are beautiful! She thinks she’s overweight, I think she’s just right.

Some people I dearly love have lost 30 pounds who I thought looked just great before they started. People I cherish have paid thousands of dollars for teeth alignments when I thought they were beautiful before the operation.

Perhaps the quality of my feelings, prompted as they are by the grace of Heaven, are even more accurately reflected in the words of a chorus we used to sing:

I can see in you the glory of my King

And I love you with the love of the Lord.

I’m so thankful that Heaven puts in our hearts the capacity for seeing beauty in others and for acknowledging that the outward appearance of an inwardly beautiful person is only enhanced by whatever “strangeness” there might be “in the proportion.”

Hollywood creates a beautiful illusion; God creates a beautiful essence — that I can see and touch, and that calls my mind to joy, delight, and sometimes to worship.