Theology of the Body and Quarantine: The Invitation of Beauty
We currently find ourselves on a beautiful planet full of incredible eternal souls… trapped inside of our houses and yards. If you are anything like me, these past weeks have been hard. With a deeper ache for communion rushing to the surface of my heart, I often found myself turning on my phone as if it would be my savior. The cure to boredom, silence, discontentment, or disconnection, I subconsciously felt, was right there in my hand! But these feelings weren’t cured. I was just distracted from them.
While the way I used screens sometimes left me filled, more often than not I would feel numbed, rather than fully alive and connected at the end of the day. I put down my phone and looked around my room. “So this is what my room looks like,” I thought, taking off my blue light glasses and rubbing my still strained eyes. I guess I hadn’t really looked up enough that day to notice. A few iterations of this cycle in, I knew something had to change. It didn’t take long for me to find that the path to a deep sense of communion was so much closer to me than I would have thought. It all started with a simple challenge to myself: soak in one beautiful (non-virtual) thing a day for one week.
My desire was to truly contemplate, to profoundly open up my heart and senses to the world around me… or at least to be aware of what my room looked like. Half way through the week, I found myself bent over some bright green blades of overgrown grass. I watched as they seemed to twitch with aliveness. I smiled at how small they were and yet how they added so much fullness to the yard. I delighted in their fresh presence as if God had created them just so that I could encounter them in that moment. Suddenly, I was flooded with a sense of my Creator’s presence. And I felt it… I felt communion!
The beauty of nature, the present moment, my loving God, and my little self, all seemed to converge in one perfect moment of connection. The moment felt more real than so many others, but it wasn’t more real… I was just embracing reality more wholeheartedly. Moments like these are not rare occurrences… what is rare is our mindfulness of them. For in fact, these moments are ever-present. The reality in which we live in is so much deeper than we often allow ourselves to engage in, and yet God created it just for us!
This is the knowledge that underpins St. John Paul the Great’s teachings on the Theology of the Body. Bill Donaghy from the Theology of the Body Institute summarizes these beautiful teachings as “a sacramental way of looking at life… human life, and all of creation as God has formed it.” What does it mean to see life as sacramental? It means recognizing that all of creation, and in a special way the human person, are visible signs of invisible realities… they point beyond themselves to something so much deeper. God’s eternal will and design penetrates EVERYTHING… leaving innumerable traces of his glory and his attributes of truth, beauty, and goodness for us to delight in and find. This offers an incredible mystery in which we are all invited to unpack.
How can this knowledge practically transform our time in quarantine? We can allow our eyes to be opened to how the Lord uses matter to speak to our hearts! As Donaghy puts it, “He uses it as a channel or viaduct in which to really intoxicate us, pull us up out of ourselves… draw us into beauty!” Through beauty, the Lord can intimately speak. He can reveal truths about who He is or even who we are. Through beauty, we connect to something greater than ourselves, like I did in that simple moment of appreciating the grass. What an incredible invitation the world around us poses when you think of it like that.
I challenge you to seize that invitation to let beauty speak during this time. Letting beauty speak to us does not have to be complicated or forced… we were made for it! Simply walk (tech-free) into your yard or another beautiful environment and move through the three steps below.
- Notice. Sometimes the biggest step for us in our distracted world is allowing ourselves to be moved outside of our tunnel vision to simply notice. What catches your eye or heart?
- Encounter. Fully experience what you find beautiful. Rest in it. Start at your five senses. Enter into the moment in a deeper way. Reality is a sacred place of communion.
- Wonder! Wonder is the disposition of the heart and mind that moves us beyond our immediate experience and into our spiritual senses. Revel. Awe. Be curious. Here is where beauty speaks, whether through ushering us to a profound place of prayer, or through simply reminding us of the gift it is to be alive and experience anything at all. As St. John Paul the Great expressed, “We must wonder! We must create a climate of wonder! Wonder is needed so that beauty might enter into human life, society and the nation.” He even noted that this wonder is not just reserved for outside beauty, but for the beauty of the human person. “We need to marvel at everything that is found in man.” Simply let your heart be moved.
Discovering the beauty around us doesn’t entail a frantic scavenger hunt, but a gentle return to the reality that has always been. When we put down our phones and our defenses, we can learn how to savor and not just consume. We can delight in the beauty that we have been missing. We can learn how slowing down makes our experiences richer. We can recognize that the reality of the present moment is a glorious place of deep connection with the whole of creation and the Creator of it all.
It is especially important for us to let beauty speak when we start to feel overstimulated or numbed to the present moment. Overusing technology often puts our minds into this space. I can’t be the only one who has started thinking in meme format or has regrettably shrugged off precious human interaction with those in front of me in a haze of tech-fueled delirium. This is when beauty can wake us up.Ask yourself: What types of beauty are my return to reality? What moves my heart? What has excited me since I was a child? Bonfires, walks, music, art, conversations with loved ones? Now is the time to drink deeply of beauty, and to learn how to embrace the invitation for encounter that reality is constantly extending our way. In this way, when quarantine is over, we may no longer take for granted the beauty that unfolds, but know how to savor its gifts. Notice. Encounter. Wonder! Let beauty speak.
