beauty on Eternal Life

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...

How beautiful you appear to the angels, Lord Jesus, in the form of God, eternal, begotten before the daystar amid the splendors of heaven, “the radiant light of God’s glory and the perfect copy of his...

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, ...

We have been created and redeemed for the eternal ecstasy of an interpersonal immersion in the triune God, seeing infinite Beauty face to face.

One day when George MacDonald, the great Scottish preacher and writer, was talking with his son, the conversation turned to heaven and the prophets’ version of the end of all things. “It seems too goo...

In the epic conclusion to the Narnia Chronicles, C.S. Lewis attempts to express the absolute joy that will come as our earthly lives come to an end and we are reunited with our God for all of eternity...

The mystery of perfection as an aspect of beauty is its transcendence. It points to a glory beyond itself. I knew that when I held my children, I didn’t simply cradle flesh and blood. I held a living ...

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...

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...

Christ knew that by bread alone you cannot animate man. If there were no spiritual life, no ideal of beauty, man would waste away, die, go mad, kill himself or give himself to pagan fantasies. And as ...

If your salvation does not include living with God in beauty, truth, and goodness, it’s going to be a very dry haul. And so much of our difficulty today for Christians in this world, and for the world...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

"God's joy," said by the Persian mystic Rumi, "moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rain water down into flower bed. As roses up from ground. Now it looks ...

“When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman” (Gen 12:14). What is considered beautiful is one of those things that often goes without being said. Sarah was about...

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

​If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be o...

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

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 ...

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to r...

The closer you get to the truth, the clearer becomes the beauty, and the more you will find worship welling up within you. That's why theology and worship belong together.

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...

O God, whose reason rules the world, who formed the starry heights above, timeless, time’s chain far forth you hurled, unmoved, gave all things power to move. Prevailed on by no outside cause to fashi...

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...

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...

Recently, when I was in London, I went to the National Gallery. It was a weekday, but it was still crowded with people wearing headsets, staring at famous paintings, listening to a narrator explain th...