Eating Beauty?

How we become beautiful is really all about what we eat.

Have you ever experienced something so beautiful that you just wanted to become a part of it? Just listening or looking wasn’t enough- you had to have some part in that beauty. For example, there was one time when I heard a choir practicing a hymn. The harmonies were so beautiful that I wanted to be part of the music. Just hearing wasn’t enough. I had to be a part of it somehow. C.S. Lewis puts better words to my experience in his essay, The Weight of Glory, when he says, “We don’t merely want to see beauty, though, God knows, 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 receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

We long to be united with the beauty we experience in this world because we were made to be united with it. We were created to be united to the Source of all beauty, the All- Beautiful One who made everything. This is a high and great destiny, but how? How do we unite ourselves with this Beauty? We already know that our usual ways of taking in beauty (seeing and hearing) are somehow inadequate. They do not provide the communion we long for. We are not one with the music by hearing it or one with the painting by looking at it. However, there is one bodily process that does actually make us one with what we consume, and that is eating. When we eat, we make what we eat part of ourselves (thus the old adage, “You are what you eat”). But how does one eat Beauty? And not only that, eating itself is not a beautiful process, so how is eating Beauty (which has a connotation of destruction) itself beautiful?

Eating beauty is beautiful because of the One we consume. The act of eating brings about a deeper communion with God, the Source of Beauty because in the Eucharist, it is Him whom we eat. This eating unites us to God and makes us beautiful because it is not just about us becoming what we eat as if it was all done by our own effort. Eating Beauty requires that we allow ourselves to be eaten in return. We must surrender ourselves to God and be united to Him as He has united Himself to us. As He has humbled Himself to become our bread, so we must also humble ourselves and give ourselves to Him. This is not an easy process by any stretch of the imagination. We must continue to unite ourselves to Him if we are to be one with Him. It is the hard process of growing in holiness that is meant by eating beauty.

The saints show us exactly what this looks like practically lived out. St. Francis shows us that like Christ, to become beautiful we must empty ourselves of all that is not God and conform our lives to Christ’s. St. Bernard of Clairvaux shows us that we must, like Christ, empty ourselves and become humble, letting the Lord work in us. St. Catherine of Siena shows us that we must share what we receive, thus using it wisely in order for the beauty we eat to make us beautiful. St. Ignatius of Loyola shows us that it is in obedience that we conform ourselves to the beauty of God’s will, thus creating a beautiful life. Each saint shows us their unique path to a beautiful life and shows us that we, too, are called to craft lives that are beautiful, modeled after their lives, which were modeled on the life of Christ, modeled on His gift of Himself in the Eucharist. It is hard but not impossible. We have the saints to show us that this Eucharistic form of life is not only beautiful, but also possible for each and every one of us.

So, how then do we inspire people to live a beautiful life? Telling the stories of the saints is one very important way because their lives, as mentioned above are powerful witnesses. We also must facilitate an encounter with Jesus who did it all first. The saints did not craft these beautiful lives on their own. They first learned at the feet of the Master and continued to return Him to learn each and every day in prayer and by receiving Him, the Source of Beauty in the Eucharist. We must call people to unite themselves with Christ if they desire to become beautiful and so we must speak of Jesus in a beautiful way. The Pange Lingua, St. Thomas Aquinas’ great hymn for the feast of Corpus Christi, does just this. St. Thomas speaks of the humility of Christ, “Of the glorious Body telling, o my tongue, its mysteries sing, and the Blood, all price excelling, which the world’s eternal King, in a noble womb once dwelling shed for the world’s ransoming.” He speaks of God coming to dwell among us, taking on Flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and giving Himself to us in the Eucharist and on the Cross, “Given for us, descending, of a Virgin to proceed, man with man in converse blending, scattered he the Gospel seed, till his sojourn drew to ending, which he closed with wondrous deed.”

St. Thomas speaks of Christ’s humility in making Himself food for us, giving us Himself, “At the last great Supper lying circled by his brethren’s band, meekly with the law complying, first he finished its command then, immortal food supplying, gave himself with his own hand. Word made Flesh, by word he maketh very bread his Flesh to be; man in wine Christ’s Blood partaketh: and if senses fail to see, faith alone the true heart waketh to behold the mystery.” Through this beautiful hymn St. Thomas opens us to the grand mystery that is Jesus Christ. He shows us just how radical and beautiful a gift the Eucharist really is.

The way of this gift is what we are called to conform our lives to. To commune with beauty, we must receive Christ crucified and risen, His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Eucharist. Like the saints, we must model our lives on His, emptying ourselves completely, becoming humble, weak, poor, empty, and obedient, but it is this empty space that God Himself, who is majesty and beauty fills and makes us like Himself, beautiful, glorious, exactly what we desire so greatly to be.