Both Ben and Shawn Anthony from Lo-Fi Tribe seem to think what I said was worth something, and Ben emailed me to encourage my participation in this month’s ping homily.

After a few emails back and forth (where the conversation devolved into 9rules and whether anyone’s heard if they’re in yet), I thought that maybe I should jump in, and talk about what it means to me. After all, I have been looking for quality topics to write about.

But, first, the qualifiers.

When I first started reading 9rules and the related blogs (and damn do they have a lot), I tended to skip over the religion community, because I am not very religious at all. I wasn’t brought up into any religion at all; my mum abandoned Catholicism, and my Dad “grew out of” being Lutheran. When I attended church when I was little, it was always a Lutheran church, unless my grandparents were visiting from New Jersey.¹

My parents decided that religion and God was something each of had to find for ourselves, and other than “Bible School” before age seven (and still, my mum only sent us there so she could have an afternoon for herself), they did not help nor hinder our spiritual discoveries. For me, this lead to wild ideas² about what God and heaven were all about, and for my siblings, it’s turned them into atheists.

I’m much more stable than I used to be in my beliefs³, and I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t believe in any specific religion. I’ve only got my ideas, and ideas influenced by what I’ve seen and read and experienced.⁴. So, in religious terms, I am Agnostic, believing that there is a god, but the rest of my beliefs skew the spectrum, as everything is hobbled together in my head.

What does this have to do with participation in the ping homily? A lot, really. Because of my beliefs, I didn’t think I would fit in with the religious community at 9rules, and figured that they wouldn’t find value in what they said. I’m too used to people who preach at me, trying to explain why I’m wrong and their right, and I don’t have the time or the patience to deal with that. Especially since I’m not out to convert people to my way of thinking. I don’t particularly care what other people believe, as long as their beliefs do not harm me.

However, after the encouragement from Ben, I went and looked what the requirements and purpose of the ping homily was, and realized that I too can fit in with them.

I think Shawn Anthony was right on when he said:

It’s about your meditation upon serious religious and spiritual themes and issues. It is all about your own expression, writing, and spiritual belief.

And how could I not fit in to that? So, with reassurances all around, I feel comfortable enough to participate in this month’s ping homily.

A Brief Homily Re: Beauty

What is beauty, really? I think everyone has heard the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but hardly anyone ever really thinks about what it really means. I find beauty in a myriad of things. In nature (trees especially), in words, in actions, in personality. A building is more beautiful if there is a tree obscuring it. A poem is beautiful. Even a terrible horror story such as Frankenstein is beautiful. And people are beautiful too.

However, no two people find the same thing beautiful in the same way. Both my dad and Dustin think I’m beautiful. I don’t know what they’re talking about, but they keep insisting it’s true. I have a hard time believing both of them, but my dad more so, because he’s been telling me for so long. I used to think that parents had to say that kind of thing about their kids.

But, because they both love me in different ways, they see me in different ways, and so the beauty that each of them sees is unique to them. I can only conjecture, but my dad sees the beauty in the way I grew up to be like him, to be responsible, the sarcastic wit, and knowledge that he helped create me, and even though I don’t need him like I used to, I do still need him. Dustin, on the other hand, sees the beauty in my sarcastic wit, my insecurities, my passion for geeky things, and the way I unconditionally love him (also, all conjecture).

These traits don’t seem like beauty, do they? They don’t mention the color of my eyes, the length of my hair, the size of my chest, the cut of my clothes, or my body shape at all. But that’s the thing about beauty that people seem to forget: what’s beautiful on the inside is what makes what’s on the outside beautiful.

The empty shell, the shallow pond, is only as beautiful as what fills it up. After all, an M&M filled with chocolate and an M&M filled with crap would look the same from the outside, but it’s the inside that counts.

My beauty isn’t something I can see, because I can’t experience it. The only time I see me is when I write. When I let out what’s been bottled in my head, so that I can see it and understand it. I very rarely think to myself “damn, I look hot today,” and even then, it’s because of how I feel, not how I look.

Society as a mass completely avoid the issue of the inside. People everywhere write about how beautiful Lindsay Lohan is, but how many of those people know her? Really know her enough to decide whether she is beautiful or not?

I tend to laugh when I see girls on campus ogling over a “hottie” who’s just walked by. I don’t think I’ve ever been attracted to any guy in that way. I never had teen idols on my walls, I never pretended to want to marry some famous hottie (except Prince William, but that was always contingent on getting to know him first). Romance novels almost always get it wrong, because the heroine is always falling for the hunk before she even knows who he is.

Someone can be attractive if you don’t know them. But, since beauty is on the inside, you have to get to know the person to really determine if they are beautiful.

Ahem. I didn’t really mean to go on that long. I’ll leave you know with a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.⁵ He was a converted Jesuit priest, which didn’t go over to well with his parents, as he was raised in the Church of England. Always a poet, when he entered the Jesuit church, he burned all his early poems, and took a seven year sabbatical from writing poems. It is believed he intended to give up poetry entirely, but he couldn’t suppress it forever. Most, if not all, of his later work was religious in nature.

This poem was published after his death in 1918, and so his work often gets lumped in with the modern poets, although he firmly belongs to the Victorians. Pied Beauty is a homily its self, expressing joy in all of God’s creations, and how beauty can be found in everything, if you just look for it.

Pied Beauty – Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things-
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough,
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
(audio reading available at the Victorian Web)

There you go, a 1000+ word post, longer than any I’ve ever done before. Who knew I had that much to say about it?

1. Actually, I still attend church with my grandpa when he comes out. I secretly like the pageantry involved in being Catholic, and if I had had to choose a religion when I was little, I would have totally picked it.
2. When I was little, I used to believe that we were all in a collective dream, and our deaths really meant that we were woken up in heaven. So, babies deaths were just people who were light sleepers and woke up real easy.
3. Aside from the “dream” belief, I ran through quite a few others. Our lives as lived inside God’s tummy, anyone? But now, pretty normal, I think.
4. Which caused me to curse God on numerous occasions, because I fully believe he isn’t listening.
5. Information based on memory from class, and the Victorian Web.

I of course entered, but it made me wonder, a bit, at the variety of answers that popped into my mind. I suppose I had never really given it much thought before, but the things that leave me breathless are as different from each other as a flower is from a computer. (Please forgive the analogy, I’m still a bit under the weather.) The definition I’m using for the word breathless would be something that incites a strong, pleasurable, emotional response. And yes, that is my definition, so it won’t be found in any dictionary anywhere.

The thing that leaves me most breathless would be Fall Out Boy. Or, more precisely, it’s standing in crowd of 1000+ people when FOB plays the first notes of “Sophomore Slump or Comeback of the Year.” Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps. There is something magical about listening to your favorite song live, while being crushed by strangers all singing the same song, knowing that a few of them feel the same way about it that you do. If you’ve never had that experience, I highly recommend it. It will be something you never forget.

I’ve heard FOB play “Sophomore Slump” live twice now, and the second time was that much sweeter, because I had traveled the length of the state (yay San Diego!) to see them, and particularly just to hear that song. If it had been the only song they played, it would have been worth it. It makes hearing it on the stereo that much more meaningful, because each time I am pulled back into the crush of people singing my favorite song at the top of their lungs along with me.

These aren’t the only things that leave me breathless, but they are the first that come to mind. Maybe they aren’t the most awesome, but they are the things that I will look back on and say “thank god for that.” I can’t imagine a world where I’m not left breathless regularly.

So, while I’m not running a nifty contest like Paperback Writer, I’m interested too…. What leaves you breathless?

—”Beautiful Disaster,” 311: 311