Infinitum Advent Behold Beauty, Week 1Sample

When Jesus arrived in the world, God offered an invitation, “receive My embrace. Receive Me as your beloved, as your Father. Come into My arms, into My home, into My family. You are mine.” When we receive Jesus, we receive an embrace as a child of God. Like a new mother who holds her child on her chest for the first time, God wraps us into His loving arms and beholds us with wonder as His own. Beauty offers us a tangible expression of this experience. John O’Donohue puts it wonderfully, “The Beautiful…calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace.” We are called forth from aloneness…into an eternal embrace. When we experience beauty, we experience a taste of the consummation - union with God Himself. Beauty offers us an invitation into God’s embrace. And when we surrender and receive it, shame falls off, and we are liberated within His love. Beauty acts like the living empathy of God, entering into our despair, loneliness, fear, and anxiety, holding us there, and freeing us to become more fully ourselves. We pray that beauty will find you, break down that door, and liberate you with the presence of the beautiful One in your midst. This is our benediction—our prayer for you, for us. May you place yourself at the door of beauty and find yourself welcomed in. May her expansiveness widen you and may her richness deepen you. May her lavish love liberate you even as her glory pierces you. May she stir within you the power to love freely, to live generously, and to create abundantly. How can you get yourself on the path of beauty this week and receive it as an invitation to God’s embrace? Sit in front of a painting, watch a dance, or listen to a song and receive God’s embrace in the present moment. What do you feel? What do you see? Practice allowing yourself to be swept into beauty’s embrace through the song (on YouTube) “He Has Time” by Common Hymnal. Or relish one of your favorite Christmas songs that leads you into God’s presence.