Poverty is being deprived of basic goods that human bodies and minds need to thrive. Lacking a beach front house may not be a form of oppression, but the absence of beauty is a socially produced impoverishment of the spirit.

Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century anchoress who lived during one of the worst centuries in human history. The black death wiped out more than half of the population of Norwich. Famines and floods were worse than anything in memory. Wars ravaged the land, and wandering mercenaries ravaged its people. The church was roiled by corruption. The

Meditation and contemplation do not leave us unchanged. They force us to encounter things that might be painful. We learn more about ourselves. The blinders we have been wearing to the suffering of the world will begin to come off. It is as if our own minds and the world around us are being unwrapped from the gauzy covering we placed over them

Contemplation is distinctive because it shows us that we are not only in a subject-object relationship with God—parent to child, king to servant—but we are also in the process of reuniting our being with the divine reality. We are light. The “flowing light of the God-head” circulates from Love to each of us and through us to one another.15 As Jesus

But whoever we are, we are made for the Beloved and made to share the Beloved’s delight in and care for the world. The responsibilities of ordinary life do not alienate us from our nature. They are the environment in which we encounter it.

We often dull down our capacity for beauty because we cannot bear to stay awake for the atrocities that we encounter when we love fragile creatures. It requires so much courage and strength to endure love for the beauty of the world. As Galway Kinnell points out, love requires courage: “perhaps it is courage, and even perhaps only courage.”5

Julian of Norwich offers an extended discussion of the relationship between our “sensuality” and our “substance,” that is, our lived experience in the world and our eternal union with the divine. Mother Christ, Holy Wisdom “wishes us to be aware that humanity’s dearworthy soul was preciously knit to Him in the creation and this knot is subtle and

Pseudo-Dionysius described God as “beguiled by beauty.”19 Divine goodness fell in love with creation and so was compelled to bring it into being. The zeal and eros of God for creation is manifest in the beauty of beings, which are themselves expressions of the divine beauty. Beauty, sadly overlooked in our modern times, is a link between the human

We are creatures of spirit and made for the Beloved, for the ultimate mystery that has no name. As creatures of spirit, our longing for the sacred is not only a private relationship with the holy other. It is a call to honor the sacred worth of every creature.