BAGUIA
To be beautiful is to be who one is in God’s order of creation. Only in this divine order, this fullness of beauty is the universe set aright.
What is beautiful?
What is beauty?
Millions of Filipinos have rejoiced over the triumph of Catriona Gray as this year’s Miss Universe that makes her in the eyes of many the most beautiful woman in existence.
A Hollywood actress once quipped: Of course, beauty can only be skin-deep.
What do you want?
An adorable pancreas?
A movie has been produced about a mathematical genius.
It was titled “A Beautiful Mind.”
Is beauty a combination of outward aesthetic attractiveness and inner refinement?
Beauty, according to Fyodor Dostoeevsky, will save the world.
Is this salvific beauty the kind that is promoted in beauty pageants?
Perhaps there is something of these competitions that give us an idea of what beauty is, but as long as they remain but potential momentary sources of national pride, we have to look elsewhere for the beauty that saves.
The Belen is always beautiful.
What gives beauty to this tableau of hay and ox, horse and sheep, magi and shepherds, a carpenter and angels, a Virgin with her newborn Child?
It is not the glittering lights, or the music, not the poinsettias, not the tinsel.
Gray captured something of this in her speech on the future and on children.
Childhood has been made beautiful by the Word that became the Holy Child, and who would one day say: Let the children come to me.
The kingdom of heaven belongs to them.
Unless you become as a child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.
If anyone causes of one of these little ones of mine to sin, better for him that a millstone be tied around his neck that he may be thrown into the sea.
The Belen is beautiful because it brings to mind the essence of beauty that is someone’s sheer resting in his deepest identity, the identity of being Son of God.
Beholding the Holy Child, restful in his being Son of the Father, everyone else in the Belen has known the true beauty reflected in the beauty of their circumstances.
The carpenter is dignified by the Child who would build his Church on a rock.
The Virgin handmaid of the Lord finds the meaning of her servanthood in the One who would say he came not to serve but to be served.
The shepherds found their dignity in the boy who is the Good Shepherd.
The magi found the source of their wisdom, the Wonderful Counselor.
The animals, symbols of foreign and false deities, found new dignity in the Master whose gentleness is symbolized by the ox, who was named Lamb of God, who entered into the glory of the Cross aboard a donkey.
The angels saw the heart-rending meaning of their song.
To be beautiful is to be who one is in God’s order of creation.
Only in this divine order, this fullness of beauty is the universe set aright: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace to men of good will.
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