Order and Beauty

Last updated on: December 12, 2014 at 8:39 am by Anne Kennedy

Order and Beauty 2014-12-12T08:39:50-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I'm essiantially a gnostic, at heart, no matter what I profess with my lips. I basically carry on thinking that the body and the spirit go together, that matter is not evil–am I identifying the right heresy?–but when it comes down to my actual frame of mind and actual living in the world, I keep banging into the fact that I have The Wrong Idea, that I either value matter and stuff and my own body either too little or too much. I swing wildly back and forth all day long.

I've tried to balance my wild swinging by muttering to myself as I carry on with my life in my own body in my own house, “Order and Beauty.” If all the matter could be beautiful and ordered, maybe all the matter would be ok. Mostly I'm looking out at the vast wreckage that six children can accomplish in the course of a single homeschool day and there is neither order nor beauty. There is chaos and ugliness. I sift through the piles of papers and broken crayons and look for anything of beauty. Sometimes a child's picture, sometimes the view out the window, sometimes the fact that a sentence was written with actual punctuation. On the days when I come up empty I let my supposed need spill over into shouting at the children to Clean Up, for heaven's sake.

And then it carries over into my own flesh. I look at myself in the mirror and say awful things about myself to myself. And when my husband says nice things, I accuse him of lying. And when I'm faced with a bowl of steaming rice, at the end of the long day, I stand there furtively, eating it and hating myself. There might be glimpses of beauty, but I myself obscure and marr them, trying to convince myself that I'm wrong to care. My little mantra, Order and Beauty, doesn't work, it only further illuminates the battle of holding onto the material so tightly and then pushing it away in anger.

Anyway, we were reading The Little Prince, in English, don't imagine my children have actually learned French, because I was in need of a little depression, don't you know, and then I came into the way of having this beautiful purse.

Look at it, sitting there, glowing in a pile of office wreckage. I say, came into the way of having, and by that I mean that a friend, who I don't deserve to have either, gave it to me. The friend and the purse are both far and away better than me. I've tried to even things up in my mind. Maybe I could give her something? But frankly, I have nothing to give. I've looked over the contents of my house and been angry at God for such a free beautiful object for which I can do nothing in return.

I take this purse with me now, out and about on the town, to do ordinary ugly activities like wandering around Walmart looking for “a Play Flower”, or buying ten pounds of dubious ground beef from Price Right. The purse sits in my cart along with bright garish packaging, or is slung over my shoulder the way I muscle around a baby, affectionately, not very gently, and I feel like I have the Little Prince's awful flower living in my soul, chiding me and berating me and making me feel bad.

Anyway, the outside is beauty, and the inside is order.

There's no jumble. Everything sits in its own place without jostling and jumbling. Everything looks well against the high end gorgeously sown lining. In my wild swinging, I feel I ought to eschew such worldly pleasures. It shouldn't matter what the purse is, or how the shoes feel or if the paint slings too far a field. Then I swing back. It does matter! It all matters! I can't just go with it! Every Thing must be perfect! Back and forth. Back and forth. As swing I try to fix my eyes on the cross. An actual body, hanging there in shame and humiliation, while I cling onto whatever it is I can find of order and beauty. But the cross is both. The chaos of the world falling into perfect order. The ugliness of the world's sin washed away. The stuff of the world redeemed and made worthy. The bodies of people like me given grace.

And that's all have to say about that. Have a lovely weekend!

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