There is a way to smile through your eyes: to see the beauty behind the appearance of things. Imagine looking at a person who is forlorn and broken and has a bad self-image, and seeing the hidden beauty in that person. When you smile, that person sees their beauty through your eyes. Imagine the gift you are offering that person... A silent, gentle gift of love.
She is from God’s world -- a direct disciple, I think, sent down to brighten our lives and teach us of higher things. To me she is beauty itself—the word came after her presence. Each time she smiles, I can only cry, and I think of something I read about the sadness of beauty: just to find it is not hard, but to bear it, that is impossible. If she were totally aware of the beauty she was creating, she would stop in awe of herself. She somehow makes life so much more than it is.
The most wholesome beauty is virtue-beauty, the beauty of the soul-emergence into the whole of life, producing a whole person. Virtue-beauty is centered in mortal and immortal goodness shining forth upon the countenance, the movements of the body, and the expression of the individual. The deep, sweet memories of a beloved face, of a beloved deed, passed on from a pure soul, leave the underlying mark of good which all yearn and hope for.
The lamp of grace keeps alive virtue-beauty.
~ from GALAXY GATE: the Holy Universe by Colton and Murro
Hope may be the “forgotten” virtue set between faith and love, but it is the essential link between them that enables them both to work at top efficiency.
Hope allows the energy of divine love to drive deep into the human condition—the theological condition usually referred to as “grace.” And at the same time, it allows the yearning, outstretched hands of creation to pierce the heart of God and call forth what can only be expressed in the dimension of the sensible. It is the root oneness and interconnectedness of all things in what Kabir Helminski calls “the electro-magnetic field of love.” And because this field does empirically exist, all those who have deeply loved—”to the root&rdq
~ from LOVE IS STRONGER THAN DEATH by Cynthia Bourgeault
Hope is not something subjective due to an optimistic or sanguine temperament or a desire for compensation. It is a light-force which radiates objectively and which directs creative evolution towards the world’s future. It is the celestial and spiritual counterpart of the natural and terrestrial instinct of reproduction ... In other words, hope is that which moves and directs spiritual evolution in the world.
