I studied her minutely: droopy wrinkly eyelids, sagging sallow skin, deep cut lines into her lips, a fairly large mole + hair, cracked dry lips, thinning hair, shiny scalp seen through it under the lights. Crepe neck wattles.
She was so beautiful.
I didn't mean I knew the woman and thought she was a beautiful person inside or any of that. I mean looking at her was a great pleasure to me because I experienced her as beautiful. No perfect blooming rose, or sunset or anything ever was more beautiful to me than this woman I barely knew. She didn't look like that the next time I saw her, either.
The Nature of Miracles
I put my healing and my "3-D Transport Object Through Time and Space" miracles in here first because they are the kinds of things people expect miracles to be.
Oddly, as much as we have to accept the negation of Newtonian or even Einsteinian physics, they are easier to accept as miracles because they are so obviously supernatural in origin. Something material changed. Something inside my body reformed and became healthy tissue properly functioning. Some empty space was filled by a metal object without any human action except prayer. Those are miracles.
But beauty? All that subjective perception? Anyone can just imagine that, right? What's the big deal?
The big deal to me is that those physics-defying miracles are the results of a Divine action: cool, meaningful, and wondrous. But this was the presence of God, this was "being oned with God," a moment to see as He sees, the creation we perceive as flawed and ugly, as a thing of perfect beauty.
I hate it here. I started out by saying I am not a very enlightened person and I'm not. I often look at the world and want to break into weeping, overwhelmed not just by massive evil, but by the casual callousness of humankind. The ease with which they will inflict pain on people they purport to love as well as strangers. I seem so often to teeter on the edge of despair.
But you see, the world is beautiful. And it doesn't matter how I feel at some stray moment. I do not see God, but I don't have faith in Him, I know He is there and loves me. I can't see eternity, but I know for a fact it is there, and someday, I'll be there, too. The world is beautiful, and I cannot see it so many times.
But it's true. I know.
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