Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

Click to order from Amazon.com

Beauty: The Invis­i­ble Embrace, John O’Donohue, Harper Peren­nial, 2005

Beauty does not linger, it only visits.

Yet beauty’s vis­i­ta­tion affects us and invites us into its rhythm,

it calls us to feel, think, and act beau­ti­fully in the world:

to cre­ate and live a life that awak­ens the Beautiful.

Beauty is a gen­tle but urgent call to awaken. Best­selling author John O’Donohue opens our eyes, hearts, and minds to the won­der of our own rela­tion­ship with beauty by expos­ing the infin­ity and mys­tery of its breadth. His words return us to the dig­nity of silence, pro­fun­dity of still­ness, power of thought and per­cep­tion, and the eter­nal grace and gen­eros­ity of beauty’s pres­ence. In this mas­ter­ful and rev­e­la­tory work, O’Donohue encour­ages our greater inti­macy with beauty and cel­e­brates it for what it really is: a home­com­ing of the human spirit. As he focuses on the clas­si­cal, medieval, and Celtic tra­di­tions of art, music, lit­er­a­ture, nature, and lan­guage, O’Donohue reveals how beauty’s invis­i­ble embrace invites us toward new heights of pas­sion and cre­ativ­ity even in these uncer­tain times of global con­flict and crisis.

All the frailty and uncer­tainty was seen to be ulti­mately shel­tered by the eter­nal beauty which pre­sides over all the jour­neys between awak­en­ing and sur­ren­der, the vis­i­ble and the invis­i­ble, the light and the dark­ness. (2)

At first, it sounds com­pletely naive to sug­gest that now might be the time to invoke and awaken beauty. Yet this is exactly the claim that this book explores. Why? Because there is nowhere else to turn and we are des­per­ate; fur­ther­more, it is because we have so dis­as­trously neglected the Beau­ti­ful that we now find our­selves in such ter­ri­ble cri­sis. (3)

As Fred­er­ick Turner puts it, ‘Beauty … is the high­est inte­gra­tive level of under­stand­ing and the most com­pre­hen­sive capac­ity for effec­tive action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deep­est ten­dency or theme of the uni­verse.’ (7)

In con­trast, beauty offers us refresh­ment, ele­va­tion and remem­brance of our true ori­gin and real des­ti­na­tion. In this sense, the Beau­ti­ful is the true priest­ess of indi­vid­u­a­tion, invit­ing us to engage the infi­nite design that shapes our days and dreams. She does not force on us any man­u­fac­tured coher­ence towards which we must falsely strain; this is the dia­met­ri­cal oppo­site of all forms of fun­da­men­tal­ism. She invites us to sur­ren­der so that we can par­tic­i­pate in the form­ing of a new and vital coher­ence that is native to our desire. In such unshel­tered and uncer­tain times we yearn for this order and coher­ence, which brings the emerg­ing forms of our own growth into rhythm with the con­cealed order of cre­ation. (8)

The Beau­ti­ful stirs pas­sion and urgency in us and calls us forth from alone­ness into the warmth and won­der of an eter­nal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and for­got­ten grandeur of life. (13)

Book­mark It

This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 12:59 and is filed under Our Bookstore and tagged with aesthetics, Beauty, Celtic, John O'Donohue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.