Extended description

As Frederick Turner puts it, ‘Beauty . . . is the highest integrative level of under- standing and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.” In this sense, the Beautiful is the true priestess of individuation, inviting us to engage the infinite design that shapes our days and dreams. She does not force on us any manufactured coherence towards which we must falsely strain; this is the diametrical opposite of all forms of fundamentalism. She invites us to surrender so that we can participate in the forming of a new and vital coherence that is native to our desire. In such unsheltered and uncertain times we yearn for this order and coherence, which brings the emerging forms of our own growth into rhythm with the concealed order of creation. Hans-Georg Gadamer catches this need beautifully when he says ‘the experience of the beautiful . . . is the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things, wherever it may be’. Indeed, it is part of the disturbance of the Beautiful that her graceful force dissolves the old cages that confine us as prisoners in the unlived life. Beauty is not just a call to growth, it is a transforming presence wherein we unfold towards growth almost before we realize it. Our deepest self-knowledge unfolds as we are embraced by Beauty. [Cut and paste splice of the Introduction to John O’Donohue’s ‘Beauty: The Invisible Embrace.’] []