We were created to enjoy beauty. We crave it and our souls remain famished without it. And like our need for food, we will settle for cheap imitations whenever true beauty is not available. In fact, many of our vices might point to this deprivation of beauty throughout our lives.
Beauty provides comfort and nourishment, inspiration, and pure delight. And we find it in the wonder of creation, architecture and the aesthetics of our home, music, film, and certainly through the awe of our very embodied selves, just to name a few.
On the one hand, beauty is all around. But we’ve not trained our eyes to see, cultivated our souls to receive, or given beauty an honored place in our society to be enjoyed freely.
As a result, most days we are deprived of genuine true and good beauty. And this leaves us settling for whatever we can get.
For instance, perhaps we drink or indulge in junk food a bit more than usual. Or maybe we find ourselves binging on television or just mindlessly scrolling online. Pornography and general lust might also become an issue.
Whatever it looks like, a deficiency of real beauty makes us more vulnerable to its shallow imitations. And the challenge is to recognize this so that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
All too often our quest for sobriety leaves us dry and depleted inside. While we rightly seek to eliminate the distortions of beauty, we’re only setting ourselves up for failure when we’re not also intentional about cultivating genuine beauty.
Giving up junk food doesn’t mean we stop eating. We must learn how to develop a healthy appetite. And the same is true when it comes to beauty.
And the more we allow our deprivation to continue, the more likely we are to continue settling for the cheap and ultimately unsatisfying forms of beauty.
In the end, a soul deprived of beauty becomes desperate and dark. Intentionally cultivate more beauty throughout your life to allow your soul to thrive.
