A few days ago at the beach I was reading Nouwen’s wisdom on hospitality and prayer and then Khalil Gibran. With all the beauty of nature surrounding me, this passage from Gibran jumped out at me:
Beauty is that which attracts your soul, and that which loves to give and not to receive. When you meet Beauty, you feel that the hands deep within your inner self are stretched forth to bring her into the domain of your heart. It is a magnificence combined of sorrow and joy; it is the Unseen which you see, and the Vague which you understand, and the Mute which you hear – it is the Holy of Holies that begins in yourself and ends vastly beyond your earthly imagination…
Only our spirits can understand beauty, or live and grow with it. It puzzles our minds; we are unable to describe it in words; it is a sensation that our eyes cannot see, derived from both the one who observes and the one who is looked upon. Real beauty is a ray which emanates from the holy of holies of the spirit, and illuniates the body, as life comes from the depths of the earth and gives color and scent to a flower.
Beauty is that harmony between joy and sorrow which begins in our holy of holies and ends beyond the scope of our imagination.
Beauty is not in the face; Beauty is a light in the heart.
-Khalil Gibran
