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To Make Things Beautiful is to Make Yourself Human

To Make Things Beautiful is to Make Yourself Human

Last updated on: December 26, 2014 at 4:32 pm by Jennifer Fitz

To Make Things Beautiful is to Make Yourself Human 2014-12-26T16:32:30-05:00 Jennifer Fitz

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In time for the Advent Wreath link-up at CatholicMom.com, my daughter put together this for us:

She had to use boiling water to clean out the votive holders of the old crusted-on wax, left over after salvaging the burned-out candles and melting them down with a splash of vanilla extract to make herself a scented candle.

Then she painted the inside bottom of each newly-cleaned votive glass either purple or pink, and put in a tea light. She found a copper plate from my parents’ circa-1970 fondue set, and I volunteered the stainless steel platter underneath, because the glass turntable from our now-deceased microwave was a little more utilitarian than Advent requires.

–> Note that she did all this work without being asked. She wanted it, she made it. More below about that impulse.

The One Good Use for Elf on a Shelf

I thought that the obnoxiousness of the EoaS was too intense for me to ever print or freely choose to read the words. But it turns out that Elf on a Shelf in Haiti is the one good thing you can do with the creature.

Look here for a picture and explanation of what the elf was doing on the 1st Sunday of Advent. (Hint: He’s not eating. You probably wouldn’t either, until he’s done with the chore he’s set himself to.) Some of the other elf-sightings are pretty good, too.

Everyone Wants Beauty

On that same note, here’s Leslie Rollings writing about what Haitians have to say about putting up Christmas decorations. A snippet:

Yonese continued to tell me that if you go out at night during the Christmas season, especially in the larger areas, you can tell who has a generator or solar power because they DO have lights and decor. They want those things, and if they can do them, they do. People think it’s beautiful and they appreciate it. If people have radios and a means to power them, they turn up the volume so their friends and neighbors can listen too. If you have lights and a means to power them, you put them outside so that everyone can see them and enjoy them.

“No, no one would think this is a waste, they would think it was beautiful and appreciate it.”

Beauty and awe and wonder aren’t just for the rich. It’s not the thing you do after all your base physical wants have been utterly satiated. To want to make things beautiful is to be human.

Here’s Margaret Rose Realy on the bit of beauty that lit up her often distressing childhood.
Here’s Fr. Longenecker on what’s wrong with ugly churches, and what he’s doing to rectify the situation.

When you read The Hiding Place, which you should read even if you read nothing else, take note of everything the two sisters do to make their cells in a German prison into something beautiful.

The real Laura didn’t go in for that 1970’s hippie-in-a-bonnet look.

When you read Little Town on the Prairie, note how a family of perpetually-roving subsistence farmers (that’s the Ingalls) consider impeccably tailored dresses and a shelf for knick-knacks to be all part of the normal course of living in a mice-haunted shack. There’s a debate among the ladies of the family over whether and how to wear one’s corset while doing farm chores in the middle of nowhere.

Beauty is not superfluous. It is for us, and we are for it.

Photo of Advent Wreath copyright Jennifer Fitz 2014 (but, um, why?)

Photo of Laura Ingalls: Public Domain, via Wikimedia

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December 5, 2014

From Butler's Lives: If the Lion Won't Behave, It Will Have to Live Elsewhere

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December 7, 2014 The Immaculate Conception: More Good News than Your Enemies Want to Admit

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