Finding Beauty, Finding God
Facilitator Notes
“Beauty is not opposed to truth. It is simply truth in its most attractive form .”
-Andrew Greeley
“The aim of the artist is to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe (which mirrors God).
The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image ultimate
reality.”
-Flannery O’Conner
“What compels us to call something ‘beautiful’? When the harmony of a thing becomes luminous, when its
inner coherence and organization shine forth, the beautiful emerges. James Joyce calls our experience “epiphany,”
and “aesthetic arrest,” a state of enraptured wonder.
St. Thomas gazes at the loveliness of the world in an attitude of prayer. The world in its totality is a sort of
icon of the divine beauty, a mirror in which we see reflected some of the unbearable perfection of the divine being.
God engages in explosive and irrepressible creativity because he is determined to show, as fully as possible, some of
the intensity of his own beauty.
The basic energy of the created realm is a relationship of love. God continually pours out the gift of being,
and the world is at every moment a sheer receptivity, an openness toward that gift. Human beings are in a
privileged position because they are able to perceive and to celebrate this relationship that they are.”
Creation and Beauty -Fr. Robert Barron
Supplies/Preparation:
 The below poetry selections and scripture selection.
 A quaint and quiet place to reflect outside close to some type of natural beauty – Centennial trail, Manito
Park, Lake Arthur, etc. This reflection can be done at any of those places or can start indoors and move to
one of those places.
Opening Prayer
Morning Poem
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches --and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead --if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging --there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted --each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
Excerpted from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
Beauty As A Means to the Divine
Language can be a stumbling block. We speak different languages and dialects. We observe
different body language. Our culture reinforces different ways to say things and when to say them. Within
our religious traditions we fight over the significance of certain words whether theologically,
ritualistically, or spiritually. Yet, we pray to a universal God. Perhaps deep, centered prayer does not need
language. Beauty, whether manufactured or natural is, perhaps, a universal language. No matter what
language we speak we all see the same sunset. This reflection attempts to use poetry to get in touch with
a deeper sense of beauty that may indeed be universal to us and universal to God.
In our opening we are reminded, by Fr. Robert Baron, that “God continually pours out the gift of
being, and the world is at every moment a sheer receptivity, an openness toward that gift.” Art,
particularly poetry in this instance, provides a means by which to capture that beauty. In receiving and
creating art we allow ourselves to not only co-create by manufacturing something beautiful but to
dialogue with the divine. Amidst our natural setting it is present that God is around us. Words are fleeting
but by way of our imagination we will listen to poetry, reflect on it, and attempt to create some of our
own in this reflection.
Some Examples (Gerard Manley Hopkins):
The Grandeur of God
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil
crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and bears man’s smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black west went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost, over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings
Invite members to gather and reflect.
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What does it means to say the plowed earth “shines?”
What emotions do you get when you imagine the Holy Ghost bent over the world with “warm breast and
bright wings?”
Above Flannery O’Conner remarks: “the artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the
image of its source.” How does Hopkins attempt to do that here?
What does it mean, to you, to say the world is suffused with God?
If we were to say that the good gives of itself, what type of God (loving? forgiving? vengeful? wrathful?
does Hopkins present?
Why do generations continue to “trod, trod, trod?”
What images resonate with your image of God?
What is beautiful about the poem?
Some Examples (Joseph Mary Plunkett)
I see His Blood Upon the Rose
I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.
I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice—and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.
All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.
Invite members to gather and reflect:
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Do the images Plunkett uses work for you? What words or emotions match blood, snow, thunder, sea,
thorns, or tree (or any other symbol used)?
Blood is an often used symbol associated with Christ, can blood be beautiful? Why does blood make us
uncomfortable?
Plunkett is able to see Christ in a multitude of examples – what symbols might work for you?
Some Examples (Joyce Kilmer)
Trees
THINK that
I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
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Do you find trees lovely? What makes a tree lovely?
Trees can symbolize a number of things (see the previous poem). Take yourself back to a significant
memory in your life involving a tree – what was it, what emotions do you associate with that tree?
What does it mean to say “a tree that looks at God all day, and lifts her leafy arms to pray?” Does nature
pray? How could we learn something about prayer from nature
Listening Deeper (Examples from Scripture)
Ecclesiastes 3:1-11
1 There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. 2 A time to
give birth, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant. 3 A time to kill, and a time to
heal; a time to tear down, and a time to build. 4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and
a time to dance. 5 A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them; a time to embrace, and a time to be
far from embraces. 6 A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away. 7 A time to
rend, and a time to sew; a time to be silent, and a time to speak. 8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time
of war, and a time of peace. 9 What profit have workers from their toil? 10 I have seen the business that
God has given to mortals to be busied about 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also
set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Invite members to gather and reflect.
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What does the author of Ecclesiastes have to say about beauty?
What is poetic about these verses
Some things mentioned here - death, murder, mourning, war – are not typically associated with
beauty, can they be?
Activity
1) Allow participants to have some time on their own to create some type of prose poetry – it can be
religious in nature if they like but it does not have to be. The only requirement is that each poem
must touch on some aspect of beauty.
2) Share each poem, give time for pause and reflection.
3) Each person must share one thing they liked about the poem.
Closing Prayer
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver