The Three Sisters: Beauty
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We live in a disenchanted age.
A secular age
where meaning is reduced,
mystery explained away,
and the world becomes
what can be measured,
priced,
consumed.
We forsake the living water
and drink from
broken cisterns.
And wounded,
reduced humanity
forgets what it is.
Not image,
but animal.
Not creature,
but consumer.
Not soul,
but matter.
We stumble east of Eden,
exiled from a home
we can barely remember.
Lost.
And yet—
three sisters remain.
Triplets,
born together,
walking among us
like guides in the dark.
The first is Beauty.
She does not argue.
She interrupts.
A shaft of evening light
across a kitchen floor.
The sea at dawn.
The face of an old man
creased by laughter.
A friend who stays
when leaving would be easier.
The sudden green
of spring
breaking through concrete.
Beauty comes quietly
and catches us unprepared.
The birth of a child—
and you cannot cut the cord
because your eyes
are suddenly full of tears.
That first cry.
That impossibly small body.
And something older than language
rises in you.
Wonder.
Awe.
Recognition.
Music does it too.
Bach.
Miles Davis.
Led Zeppelin.
Kind of Blue.
The Lark Ascending.
Different songs,
different worlds,
yet sometimes music
builds a stairway to heaven.
Not because heaven
has been explained,
but because, for a moment,
earth becomes transparent.
Beauty.
An enchantment
words cannot quite contain.
A glimpse.
A tear in the veil.
The ordinary
becomes luminous.
And we remember—
or perhaps
we begin to remember—
that the world
is more than matter.
That we are more
than appetite.
That life is more
than survival.
Beauty wounds us
because it awakens
a homesickness
we did not know we carried.
We see something beautiful
and want it to last.
We hear a song
and wish it would never end.
We hold a child
and cannot comprehend
how something so fragile
can carry so much glory.
We stand beneath the stars
and feel, for a moment,
the smallness of ourselves
and the largeness of God.
Beauty whispers:
You were made for more.
And perhaps that is her gift.
Not to take us
out of the world,
but to teach us
to see it again.
To see the world
as gift.
To see creation
as more than resource.
To see a face
and glimpse an image.
To see the ordinary
and suspect glory.
These moments of wonder
are not heaven.
They are only foretastes.
Little fragments of Eden
in a world east of it.
Windows opened
for a moment
onto home.
But every glimpse
leaves us wanting more.
Every beautiful thing
carries within it
the ache of its passing.
The flower fades.
The song ends.
The child grows.
The evening light disappears.
And beauty,
having awakened desire,
leaves us longing.
Perhaps this is why
we cannot finally be satisfied
with beautiful things.
They point beyond themselves.
Beyond the music.
Beyond the sea.
Beyond the face.
Beyond the world
we can see.
Towards the beauty
from which all beauty comes.
For one day
the veil will be lifted.
One day
the tears will be wiped away.
One day
we will no longer see
through glass darkly.
We will see face to face.
And perhaps then
we will understand
what Beauty has been whispering
all along—
that every true glimpse
was a sign home
every moment of wonder
a foretaste,
every ache for beauty
a hunger for home.
Until at last
we behold Him.
The King
in His beauty.
And discover
that Beauty was never
the destination.
She was the sister
who took us by the hand
and led us home.
Rev'd Jon Swales
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