beauty on Ash Wednesday

Leader: Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, People: As a father shows compassion to his children, s...

Lifeless are our prayers. Dry and brittle are our spirits. Like Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, we are a people without the sinews of goodness, the flesh of holiness, and the breath of righteousness. W...

Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: Come let us adore him.

Leader: The mighty one, God the Lord, speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting. People: Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth. Leader: Our God comes...

A hunger for beauty is at its heart a hunger for God.

In his book, Blue Like Jazz , Don Miller tells the story of his time as an evangelical Christian at the extremely liberal Reed College in Portland, Oregon. A part of the underlying theme of the boo...

Alexander Schmemann, the late priest who led a reform movement in Russian Orthodoxy, tells of a time when he was traveling on the subway in Paris, France, with his fiancée. At one stop an old and ugly...

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

Every cross adorning a church is in itself a sermon—a sermon proclaiming that if Christ can transform the Roman instrument of execution into a thing of beauty, there is hope that in Christ all things ...

Over the triple doorways of the Cathedral of Milan, there are carvings. One features a beautiful wreath of roses, accompanied by the inscription: “All that pleases is but for a moment.” Another displa...

God of the heavens and the earth, Giver of sun and showers, wind and calm: We praise You for Your grace and power, Your beauty, grace and care. You sustain us daily, and encourage us constantly. Than...

O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth stand in awe of him.

How great and glorious You are, O God. There is no one like You. You transform our weakness into strength. You forgive our stubbornness and arrogance, and fill us with Your generous wisdom. You turn o...

In their excellent book on reconciliation, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice share a story about how small acts of beauty, done well, can lead to reconciliation: A friend told us of visiting a very l...

Beauty, then, is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation. These considerations should make us realize ...

Our godlike beauty is hidden beneath curtains of shame.

All: Oh Lord, my Light, my Life, my Joy, my Peace—with you I find refuge from danger, shelter from the storms in my life. You are good and you do good. You are the Strength of my life, and I look to y...

Lord God, we come to adore you. You are the ground of all that is. You hold us in being, and without you we could not be. Before we were born, before time began, before the universe came into being, ...

Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lov...

Lord God, You have created us all in Your image and have loved your creation with an everlasting and costly love. But all too often we are blind and fail to see Your image in others. We exclude those ...

Leader: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? People: One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after...

Glory be to God for dappled things.

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes - The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

It is not your outward appearance that you should beautify, but your soul, adorning it with good works.

Leader: May the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ give you the one great thing that you seek: that you may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of your lives, and that you may gaze upon H...

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body ...

I am abashed, solitary, helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me. But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pur...

Our task is not to protest the world into a certain moral conformity, but to attract the world to the saving beauty of Christ.

Gracious God, for the goodness and beauty of creation we thank you. For the way your creation nurtures and inspires us, we are grateful. Yet, the more we pay attention to the world, the more we see i...